In 2006, Amy and I were headed off to Europe with our (at the time only) son Jake, but we had to decide what to do with Leo, our dog. Amy's parents live in Wadsworth, 40 miles south of Cleveland, and they kindly offered to look after Leo. So we decided to drive to Cleveland and then fly to London from there. But then I discovered the Cleveland marathon was the weekend before we were due to fly out. So I ran that.

In subsequent years, I've run it because it's a well organized race, popular but not too crowded, the timing is convenient for our schedule, it's a mostly flat and fast course, and the weather conditions are good. However my times have been variable - 3:45 in 2006, 3:41 in 2007, but a poor 4:09 with inadequate training in 2008. This year, I was determined to run 3:45 to qualify again for Boston, but I was not at all sure I could achieve that.

I started building up the mileage in January and by mid-February was running one long run each week in the 12-18 mile range. I ran the Coach Bubba race in February, the first time I have done that race, and felt reasonably satisfied with my time (91:50, a 7:24 pace), though I was slowing down a lot towards the end. I missed the Hard Climb Hill race which I usually do, but a week later (March 21) made up for this on another visit to London, where I ran a 10-mile cross-country race with my old club, Thames Hare and Hounds. Then it all fell apart: the week after getting back, I pulled a muscle on a routine 7-mile run in Duke Forest. It took me a month to recover from that to the point where I could again try for a long run, and I was considering looking for another race to run later in the year. But after completing three 15-mile runs in late April and early May, I decided to give it a shot.

Race day the weather was cool (47 degrees at the start), which was a relief because it had been in the seventies in the Cleveland area all week. The course was different this year - whereas in previous years we had had to run westwards (into the wind) along the lake shore, this year the course was rearranged so that we would be runing eastwards in those sections. It wasn't clear to me that this would help - in Cleveland, the wind seems to swirl around in all directions at once - but probably it did make the course slightly faster overall.

I intended to run 8-minute miles for the first 15 miles and indeed went through that distance exactly on schedule - 1:59:49 to be exact. The critical part of the race, as I saw it, would be how well I could maintain that pace through the next 5 miles. Fortunately I passed through 20 miles in 2:41:07 (8:16 pace for miles 15-20) - at this point, 10-minute miles the rest of the way would see me home. Although I was slowing down in the last 6 miles, I was always within the pace I needed.

With 100 yards to go, I veered over to the left-hand side of the course, where the prearranged plan was to meet Amy's mom with Jake and our second son Dan, and carry Dan on my shoulders over the finish line, while Amy would be standing at the finish line snapping pictures. Last year, I did exactly that with Jake, and our picture appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. But they were nowhere to be seen!

I had told them to be there by the 3:30 point of the race, in case I ran quicker than expected. But I had also signed Amy up to receive my split times by cellphone, and that's where things went wrong. According to Amy's splits, I had run the first 10K in 65 minutes (far slower than I have ever run for the first 10K of any race) and was heading for the finish in 3:55. Amy simply assumed that she had more time in hand before I would appear.

My first reaction was that maybe they had confused me with the other Richard Smith. Yes, there was another in the race - but it turned out he never started! Eventually we figured it out - all my split times were exactly 16 minutes slower than I had actually run. And then I realized - 16 minutes was about the time before the start of the race when I first went into the start area. Although I do not remember specifically crossing the start line, I must have done so and triggered the timing mechanism with the chip on my shoe!

When the results were posted, my chip time showed as 3:38:03 - a minute faster than I had actually run. A day later, this had been corrected to 3:39:02, consistent with the time on my own watch. By the way, I noticed that quite a few of the other runners' times had been "adjusted" during that 24-hour period.

So all's well that ends well. And by the way, I do intend to run Boston next year.

Jake holds up the "Run Daddy Run" sign that Amy had made for him (see also the logo on his hat).

The photo we originally intended to take at the finish line! Dan also has a "Run Daddy Run" t-shirt, though the slogan is obscured by my head. By the way, this is the last photo taken of Dan with his virgin hair - next day, Amy took both boys to the hairdresser!

For the more mathematically inclined, here's a chart that shows my pace: The red curve labelled "Target" is my target pace that I needed to beat 3:45:59, as it varied through the race. So for example, at the beginning I needed an average 8 minutes 37 seconds per mile, but by the time I reached 20 miles in 2:41:07, my target pace for the remainder of the race was 10 minutes 27 seconds per mile. Of course I didn't work it out that precisely in my head, but at that point I knew that 10-minute miles would suffice, and that was a big help as it told me how much I could afford to slow down and still keep on target. My slowest miles were the 24th and 25th (9:38 and 9:41), but by then I was sufficiently close to the finish that I only had to keep going to qualify.