Steamboat Marathon

Loved the race overall. Tough but beautiful course (see below). Pretty well organized. Aid station workers were super helpful and cheerful which was great for me. I carried a handheld water bottle which they filled for me twice (not sure if I'd expect this when in a crowd of people, I was mostly alone).

Just one major complaint: they had plastic cups at the aid stations, which are extremely hard to drink out of while running. If you're using the aid stations, I would walk for 10 seconds and just chug a cup or two. Learned that the hard way when I spilled the Honey Stinger drink all over myself at mile 3). But seriously, plastic cups???

I would only recommend this to people who live/train at altitude. I live in Colorado Springs which is 6,000' but this course goes 8,100' to 6,600'. I didn't notice the altitude too much but I would imagine the flatlanders feel it quite a bit, even with the net downhill.

The course itself is absolutely beautiful. So peaceful and serene. Enjoy the mountains, rolling hills, wildflowers, and a river running next to you for some of the race.

There course is made up of rolling hills, but I'd say there are 4 main uphills to keep in mind. The first one (mile 1-2) I didn't really notice too much - it's there, but it's early enough in the race that it's not too noticeable. The second one (mile 3-4) wasn't too bad but long enough to make me slow down a bit and give it the respect it deserved. The third one was somewhere in miles 15-16. And the most significant one was the 1.5 mile long hill at mile 21-22.5. Definitely be prepared for this one. I ran a huge PR of 3:12 but I figure I would have run 3:08 or 3:09 if this hill wouldn't have been there. I took several walk breaks here, as did other runners.

The downhill (miles 4-14ish) was nice. I felt my quads starting to take a beating and was nervous that would come back to bite me, but it never did. The "steep" part is not too steep - enough to propel me forward but not too much where it was uncomfortable for me.

My pace strategy was to intentionally positive split a little bit. I knew about the hill at mile 21, and planned for that to be slower (along with the natural slowdown of most marathoners in the last 4-5 miles). So I let the downhill do some of the work for me and went out a little bit faster than my goal. I think this was the way to go, I wouldn't have changed much about my race.

Weather was nice at the beginning (~50 degrees, cloudy), then the sun came out at mile 6 or 7 and started to warm things up. By mile 21 I was pretty hot (it was maybe 65 degrees at this point, but the sun was beating down and I was getting tired). Overall not much to complain about with the weather but just wish it would have been cloudy all day like the forecast predicted.

Parking is fairly easy downtown. I'd park near the finish and walk to the buses. There are plenty of them, and we had 30-40 minutes once we got to the start.

Lots of port-a-potties at the start. Also a few scattered every 3-4 miles, and then a bunch of them at the half marathon start that we run right by.

Stayed at the Sheraton which was a 5-10 minute drive from the bus pickup and finish. I'm sure you could find a closer place but it worked out great.