I thought I'd share our experience with the letsrun community. Here is a little background. I'm a long time runner and recently decided to try to run Boston. So this spring I ran a marathon and qualified for 2019. My wife who has always been an athlete but never a runner got more serious about running in the last couple of years. She Ran her first half marathon a year ago, 1:37 on a very hard course. After I BQ'd she decided she wanted to try to get to Boston also.
We were crunched for time so looked at marathons that were as close as possible to the Boston Registration date and within driving distance of our home. We found the Revel Big Cottonwood Marathon. This race being a downhill race had no bearing on our decision. We had a good training plan and everything went very well leading up to the marathon. I thought it would be a piece of cake for her to qualify. Our goal was 3:30:00.
Cottonwood is strait downhill for 18 miles then starts rolling quite a bit for around 6 miles then finishes slightly downhill for the last couple miles. She was two and a half minutes ahead of our goal pace at the 18 mile mark then the rolling section absolutely killed us. We were back to even with 2 miles to go and ended up gutting it out.
We ended up finishing jut a little under our 3:30:00 goal and she got accepted to Boston. My honest opinion of this race is that it wont give you a huge PR. I think my wife ran very close to what she could have done on a flat course. I think if the entire thing was downhill we could have run around 3 minutes faster than we did but the 6 miles of rolling towards the end ate all that up plus some.