I’m finally getting my recap of August’s Reykjavik Marathon— my first international race!! — up on the blog! (If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you’ve probably already read all of this!)

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t feel super confident going into this marathon. As I’d shared before, I struggled on my long runs the last few weeks leading up to the race and was feeling the burnout of being in a constant marathon training cycle since January (really, since last December, since I was also training for the Algonquin 50K in February that I ended up not doing.) I thought the great weather would save me. Well, then the forecast turned, as it does in Iceland, and race day served up our worst weather of the week-long trip ☔️ 💨 😭

But you can’t control the weather, as we all know! I was determined to give it my best shot. My initial plan was to go out with the 3:30 pacer, but when I lined up in my corral, I saw there were only half marathon pacers. The race website definitely said there were supposed to be marathon pacers, so idk what happened. I lined up a bit behind the 1:40 half guy (roughly 3:25 marathon pace) and then we were off.

The first half of this marathon, which started at the University of Iceland, is gorgeous! The first few miles were along the water, then we went into downtown Reykjavik. Despite the weather, there were a lot of people out on the course and lots of live music! The race is held the same day as Culture Night, an annual celebration of Icelandic art, music and history, so the city was quite busy.

I was running 7:50-7:55 pace through the first half and feeling pretty good. The wind was much more annoying than the rain, but I was doing my best to tuck in and draft off taller runners.

The marathon split off from the half marathon around the 11 mile mark, and at that point the course thinned out a lot— both in terms of the number of runners and the width of the road. Much of the back half was on bike paths and streets outside the downtown area. It was pretty, but there were certain points where we were running on sidewalks and uneven surfaces and I had to be careful not to trip and fall. The wind was really starting to pick up at this point. Have I mentioned how much I hate wind? It wasn’t a constant headwind like last year’s Atlantic City Marathon, just a lot of regular heavy gusts. And then it continued to rain off and on. There were a few sneaky inclines, too!

Around mile 20-21, I started to slow down a bit, but it looked like I could still squeak under 3:30 if I pushed. And I thought I was going to do it until I hit mile 24ish and we turned around to head back to downtown Reykjavík. The wind whipping off the water was blowing me backwards and sideways and I was just over it. Also, the last half mile of this race is such a mindf*ck! You turn by the Harpa Concert Hall and can see and hear the finish line, but you have to loop around the dock on the water and it felt like forever until I turned the last corner and finally saw the finish. I crossed just as the rain was really starting to come down with an official time of 3:33:49. Nowhere near my PR, but a BQ time by just over 11 minutes. As always, getting older is a privilege for many reasons, including BQ standards!

I’m happy I ran the Reykjavik Marathon as my first international marathon and I loved visiting Iceland. It’s a beautiful country, and Reykjavik is very easy to navigate!