Barcelona Marathon 2010: my second marathon and a 40-minute improvement

On 7 March 2010 I ran the Barcelona Marathon, my second. My race-week diary records my finish as about 3 hours 45 minutes, with my friend, running his first marathon, about four minutes behind. Five months earlier I had run Chicago in 4:25:55. The time is self-reported from that diary; I have not found an official results row for it, so treat it as my contemporaneous record rather than a verified result.

This page retells that race from the blog I kept that week, and puts it next to Chicago to show what a second marathon can teach that a first cannot.

Race morning

The diary opens with preparation, written in the third person as I did then. We had bought caffeine gels at the expo and crammed them into pockets. There was lubricant, plasters, bandages and a spray of Deep Heat. "Even after all that," I wrote, "the two looked like a pair of jokers who just turned up to trot along the course."

It is a small detail, but it is the first sign of something that had changed since Chicago: we had a plan for fuel. In 2009 I had grabbed sports drink on the move and worn half of it.

How the race unfolded

The first half: steady, side by side

For the first 15 to 20 kilometres it was "plain sailing". We ran more or less together. The one recurring problem was nerves: I recorded an embarrassing number of toilet stops early on.

21km: the downhill

Around halfway the course had a long, gentle downhill section. I let gravity do the work and pulled away. In hindsight this is the most interesting moment in the diary, because it is exactly the kind of surge that cost me in Chicago. This time it did not unravel the race, possibly because it came later and on a slope rather than from chasing other runners from the gun.

28km: heavy legs

Then the familiar part. At around 28km, by my account, "the mental battle ensued. Legs start to get heavy, you start to slow down, and slowly all the runners around you start to speed up." My friend reached the same point a few kilometres earlier. The aid stations offered drinks, water, sponges, bananas and nuts; I used the sponges to cool down rather than soaking myself.

The finish

I came in at about 3:45 and my friend at about 3:49. I noted that I was walking fairly comfortably afterwards and felt much closer to recovered two days later than I had after Chicago.

Chicago versus Barcelona

Roughly forty minutes faster, five months later. I would not claim to know exactly how much each change contributed. What I can say from the two diaries is that the second race had planned fuel, company in the early kilometres and a better-paced first half, and that the hard patch still arrived in the high twenties of kilometres.

What I wrote about my own training

The closing post is more self-critical than the race report. It says we had worked up to the race "through their series of runs, swims and discussion about diet, but general lack of discipline with the distances they ran, or any structure to their activity". That sentence is the reason I eventually hired a running coach, many years later than I should have.

The same post records a bet: if we both ran under 3:50, we would run four marathons in four weeks before the end of 2010. That was a plan written in an airport, not proof of anything. The later story of running four marathons in four weeks is told separately on its own page.

Lessons from a second marathon

• Your first marathon is data. Barcelona was faster largely because Chicago showed me what not to do.
• Use the terrain, but carefully. A downhill is a gift if your legs can afford it.
• The hard patch is still coming. Preparing for it mentally helped more than hoping it would not happen.
• Structure matters. My own diary says the training lacked it.

Questions readers ask

What was your Barcelona Marathon 2010 time?

About 3 hours 45 minutes, as I recorded in my race-week blog on 11 March 2010. It is self-reported; I have not linked an official results entry.

How much faster was it than your first marathon?

About forty minutes faster than my 4:25:55 net time in Chicago on 11 October 2009.

Did you run four marathons in four weeks after Barcelona?

The Barcelona diary records that as a plan. The separate four-marathons story covers what actually happened.

Sources and notes

• The Barcelona Marathon (Day 4), my 2010 blog
• The end, my 2010 blog

Times for Barcelona are self-reported in the 2010 diary. Chicago figures come from the official table I published in 2009.

Written in October 2026 from my own contemporaneous records.