THE San Francisco Marathon

I just finished my tenth marathon! I absolutely loved the San Francisco Marathon! It far exceeded my expectations!

I must admit that I was apprehensive about the terrain (hills) of this marathon course and therefore insecure about my ability to run less than a 10-minute pace, but to me, it was in no way as difficult as I had heard about or read about. I was also worried about suffering on the course because two weeks prior when I had done my last long training run of 20 miles, I felt horrible, couldn't hold my usual marathon pace, and was almost sick to my stomach.

My strategy was to go slow, slow, slow and ENJOY the course because many of the marathons I have run have been spent pushing myself to qualify for Boston and not very enjoyable. So what a concept! Run a marathon for fun!

I started off slow, about a 9:30 pace, running along the Embarcadero at 6:30 in the morning when there were no tourists. At the end of the Embarcardero, we ran along a bike/walking trail that went through an army base and led up to the Golden Gate Bridge. As we passed along a small beach, there was a guy swimming in the water who was yelling at a seal to go away. It was pretty funny. The guy was trying to swim, but the seal wanted to play.

Running across the Golden Gate Bridge was so cool! It wasn't very foggy, so I had a great view of the bridge and the city. It was difficult to run fast on the bridge because it was very crowded with runners in both directions, and I think that was a good thing for me because it made me keep a slow pace. Running on the incline of the bridge wasn't too bad, but the hill leading up to the bridge was pretty long and steep.

Running through Golden Gate Park was also awesome! I could run through there every day! It was so peaceful and pretty. As the first half of the marathon came to an end, the course really thinned out, and the full marathoners had a lot of space to run. I was still feeling really good at this point, so when the second half of the marathon began, I just let myself get sucked up into the huge crowd of second half marathoners who were going pretty quick. I know I ran about an 8:30 pace for quite a few miles.

At mile 19 after exiting the park and heading through Haight-Ashbury, I was still feeling great. Ted and Tony were going to go to mile 19 and look for me, and I missed them! Ted was getting text updates of my location on the course, and since I was going faster than I told him I would be going, they had to rush to get there, but when they got there, I had already hit mile 20, so they had to hurry to get back to the finish.

I kept a quicker pace all the way to mile 23, and then I laughed to myself as I felt the sluggishness come on! So I just slowed back down to about a 9:30 pace. Mile 25 was cool because we ran around AT &T park, and then on to the finish. As I came through the finish shoot, got my medal, Ted and Tony were waiting for me at the exit. That was the first time I crossed a marathon finish line smiling and happy and not crying! I couldn't believe how good I felt! I was expecting a time of 4:30 and instead finished in 4:06! I also had a 2 and a half minute negative split...whoa!

I highly recommend this great course!

Official results just in. I came in 12 in my age group out of 101.