Saturday, October 25, 2008

Not too shabby...

The Nike Women's Marathon was last Sunday, and I consider it a success. I flew in early Friday morning and met my friend Robin for a girl's weekend of sightseeing (and a long run thrown in).






This blog will detail the run, and tomorrow I'll put pictures of the sights.



So here I am on Friday, getting ready to pick up my running packet at Union Square. We stayed about a third of a mile from the starting line, which was perfect. San Francisco was basically turned into one huge Niketown for the weekend.






This is about 6:30 a.m. on Sunday. The race started at 7:00, so I am all nervous energy here in the hall outside our room. Ready to go!












There is the finish line. The fog hid it until I was right upon it... that was probably the most frustrating mile of my life!



Here I am 4 hours and 57 minutes after I started. No, not my fastest time, but it was definitely my best marathon. I never hit the wall; I never got angry; I was never absolutely discouraged (I've suffered all those things in every one of my other marathons).


My arms are full of goodies: a t-shirt, a Tiffany's necklace, granola, a smoothy... you name it, I was carrying it around in my happy stupor.


And here I am back in the hotel with my swag and and warm, dry fleece. I ended up coming in around 1,900 out of 20,000 runners, which I'm pretty pleased about. It says nothing for my time, really. I just means there were a whole bunch of women much slower than I was.





I wasn't sore afterward, and I didn't have any blisters. Just the usual chafing and overall fatigue.


While I enjoyed this marathon, I didn't have that relieved feeling afterward that I've had after all the others. I knew I would live through it, and I was pretty sure I would do okay. I'm ready for another challenge.


I'm thinking I need to either start running them faster, or I need to start looking in ultra-marathons. I could have done four more miles last Sunday. The shortest ultra-marathon is 30 miles. I'm thinking- if I can do 26.2, I can do 30. Does that sound crazy? Maybe just a little.








2 comments:

Cynthia said...

CONGRATS! 1,900 out of 20,000 sounds pretty impressive to me. Using your words, "Not too shabby!"

Beth said...

Top 10%...pretty darn good! Maybe you should try a triathalon next...I've hear those are pretty hard too ;)