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Nike Marathon

What's the Nike Women marathon in SF ? A very impressive organization - check out their web site http://www.nike.com/nikemarathon/. It sells out very quickly, months before the event.

How do I get into that? Well, have you seen "The Bachelor" ? Inspired by the movie, I finally had my wet dream come true - to run in San Francisco with thousands of women running after me :-) The full marathon had about 240 men, 3,700 women. Overall there were about 15,000 runners in the Nike event, perhaps half are Team and Training (!). TnT secured a huge chunk of the registrations - hence why the event is sold out so early (in May).

It's a very nice course, starting from Union Sqr, down to Embarcadero, all the way to Presidio, keeping the coastal road past Legion of Honors to the Great Hwy, into the GG park - touring most of it, then back on the Great Hwy, going south past the zoo, around Merced lake and a nice golf course, and finally heading north back to GG park and the finish line. I like it better than the San Francisco Marathon course, except that it misses the GG bridge.

Until mile 20 I was just a minute behind my 3:30 target time, with a 1:45:05 split at the first half and already having all the hills behind. A bit tired, I must say, but happy and energized. Nike have a very nice pace calculator on the web site, with splits adjusted to mile's difficulty - and I was following it very closely. It works great. I took one e-cap and one s-cap capsole every hour, water at every other aid station, and a Gu every 5-6 miles. However at mile mark 20, Lake Merced, my left foot toes suddenly cramped - they instantly curled under my foot. I was literally stepping over my own toes... hhmm, I almost tripped over, right on the "Mile 20" mark, in fron of a few surprised spectators. It felt somewhat like a race car crashing into the barriers and flipping over. I had to take off my shoe and sock to stretch and massage my toes and take a couple more e-caps. It only took a few minutes, but I could no longer make a 3:30 ... that's left for the next time.

There are lots of goodies along the way - chocolate, foot massage (?) and even free pairs of shoes... I skipped them all. The right way to enjoy this marathon is to stop at all these stations. Just don't try to make it your new PR.

I finished in 3:39:39 - knocking about 3 minutes off my previous PR !! I placed 175 overall, 15 in men and 5th in my age group. It felt great. The cramps were over and I just received the finisher's Tiffany neckless from a guy in tuxedo and the "Run like a girl" tech-shirt :-)

And what about all the women behind ? well, hhm, some of them were actually ahead of me. The bechelor must have ran faster to leave them all behind. I did not look back very often, but one difference I able to notice - they had very different outfit than in the picture :-)

Arnon

posted by Arnon @ 1:37 PM