I can’t believe the San Francisco Marathon is already over.  It seems like just yesterday that I signed on to be a pacer for the San Francisco Marathon training program.  At that time we had just started planning our wedding and I was nervous to volunteer because I knew I would have to miss at least 2, possibly 3, of the long runs for the wedding and the honeymoon.  Luckily, the ones that I missed were pretty close to the beginning of the program so I didn’t fall behind on my mileage.  And the other pacers in the program were awesome and covered for me while I was out.

Anyhow, back to the race.  After carbing it up last night and trying to go to bed early, I dreamed of running a marathon.  I’m not kidding. In my dream, I had to run a marathon around a track.  Each lap around the track was 1 mile (and thus I had to run it 26.2 times).  I finished, feeling great, and achieved a PR!  Then I left.  A few hours later, I realized that in fact I had only run around the track 24 times, not the mandatory 26 times, and thus got disqualified.

What a nightmare!!!

Our alarm clock went off at 3:15am.  (No – that is not a typo.)  I got up, got prepped, had 1/2 a cup of coffee.  I can’t go without my coffee… but didn’t want to make more visits to the race porta-potties than was necessary!  At 4:10 we were out the door.

One hour later we arrived at San Francisco.  S was able to drop me off just a block from the starting line.  I beelined straight for the San Francisco Marathon Training tent, which was right at the starting line.

Being able to chill in this tent before the race started was awesome.  First of all, it was warm in the tent while it quite cold outside in pre-dawn San Francisco.  Second, there was food, water and coffee for us while we were waiting.  Third, and perhaps best of all, we had our own porta-potty for the tent!  So we didn’t have to wait in the mile-long lines with everyone else.  Score! 

It was pretty cool waiting in the dark for the race to start.  This is a blurry shot of the starting line right by the Ferry Building.

Getting closer..

I was able to start together with some of my pacer friends, which was awesome.

We were in Wave 4.  So at 5:52am exactly – we were off!  But we quickly spread out and separated.

The first part of the race was relatively flat.  It was along the Embarcadero and up past the Marina Green.  Then came the first big hill climb up to the Golden Gate Bridge.  Before I knew it, we were on the bridge!

This was a much better experience running across the bridge than my previous experience. I had to be careful though – they had the two righthand lanes closed off for the runners, and had car traffic in the two lefthand lanes.  And since the runners were going out and back, each direction had one lane.  It was fairly congested and I had to pay close attention not to run into anyone or trip.  So I didn’t get to admire the view much.  But I still enjoyed it!

After the bridge was really when the hills started.  And from then on out it was up and down the whole rest of the way.  I felt pretty good until around mile 18 when all of a sudden fatigue started to set in in my legs.  I ran through it and waited for it to go away but… it didn’t.  Each mile got progressively harder.  Never in my previous marathons did my muscles get fatigued so early.  The funny thing was that I still had endurance and didn’t feel exhausted, it was just my legs that were tired.  And usually it’s the other way around!  I think I went out a little too fast in the beginning and the hills just did me in.

I was determined to keep running for as long as I could.  As I passed mile 20 and 21, I thought that I would soon have to stop and walk.  The downhills were especially killer, the pounding HURT so bad in my legs.  But I just kept trucking.

Going into this race, I had the following goals:

1. First goal – beat my time from my last marathon (4 hours and 15 minutes)
2. Stretch goal – break 4 hours

Somehow, I was able to keep running.  When I hit mile 24, that was when I decided that I was going to run it all.  At that point in time I was at 3 hours and 35 minutes and I knew if I kept running I could break 4 hours.  So I gave it all that I had.

My final time was 3 hours, 56 minutes.  Getting that time took everything that I had – I was exhausted at the end.  But I am so proud of shaving almost 20 minutes off of my last race time!  Especially on a hilly course.

Although I felt like I was dragging at the end, my splits were actually pretty consistent throughout the entire race:

Mile 1:  8:36
Mile 2:  8:34
Mile 3:  8:38
Mile 4:  8:21
Mile 5:  8:44
Mile 6:  9:21
Mile 7:  8:45
Mile 8:  8:36
Mile 9:  8:47
Mile 10:  8:49
Mile 11:  8:35
Mile 12:  9:10
Mile 13:  9:10
Mile 14:  8:38
Mile 15:  9:04
Mile 16:  9:01
Mile 17:  9:22
Mile 18:  8:55
Mile 19:  9:15
Mile 20:  9:04
Mile 21:  8:56
Mile 22:  8:52
Mile 23:  9:33
Mile 24:  8:59
Mile 25:  9:05
Mile 26:  8:47
Mile .2:  8:24

And what did I get for all of my trouble?  Why this beautiful, HUGE coaster medal!

It’s really a coaster!

That was worth the hurt, right? 

A special thank you to my SF Marathon Training program pacer team who provided a few of the pics and who helped to make this race awesome.

Also – I wanted to mention one cool thing that S and I did was use an app called “Where’s My Droid” so that he could track my location throughout the race.  The SF marathon did have their own app, but you had to pay in order to use it and we were able to use the “Where’s My Droid” app for free.   Basically, S set it up so that when he texted me a specific word of our choice (we made it “SFrun” for this race) it would text message him back my specific location.  So he tracked me all along the race route!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to feed my raging post-marathon appetite.  It’s already the next day and I’m still starving!