As with my First half marathon in San Francisco on Feb 1st, I decided to run my 2nd half marathon also in San Francisco on July 26th. The worst part of running a marathon/half marathon is you have to get too early in the morning to make to the start line in time. However, once you reach the start line you tend to forget the pain of getting up so early.
I got up at 3:00 AM and then after getting ready quickly went to Shiva’s house where I picked up my bib and then went to San Francisco along with Rajesh, Rajeev and Murali in Rajesh’s car. Thank you Rajesh for driving us to SFO and saving a few bucks for us in the process. I intend to return this gesture the next time.
After some customary Potta Potty line, I started in Wave 6 at 6:18 AM along with Siva.
Mile 0-5 : It was a breeze. No trouble and lots of energy. I was running very comfortably and was clocking around less than 12 minutes pace as I decided to drop my pace a little bit to finish strong. I lost some time as well while trying to call up Simmi in India and tell her that I was running this half marathon. Because of my sweat, I kept on pressing the wrong numbers for Simmi on the iPhone. I think it costed me around 7-8 minutes of my final time. But I was not worried as I was not in the competition to finish fast
Mile 5-10 : This part of the race was mostly on Golden Gate bridge and I was so excited to run on this historic bridge. You cannot run on this bridge except for this day of the year. However, I later realized that running on this bridge is not at all easy as the shape of the bridge is convex. You keep running uphill till almost 2/3rd of the bridge and that is quite hard. The weather was at its best. There were a few drops of rain or may be I will say the wetness from the overhead fog that made running a little easier. But the organizers must cover some of the iron plates which got wet because of the fog and were extremely slippery when you need to run through them. They could have just covered them with a rubber sheet. Anyways, while coming back after the half mile on the bridge my right feet near the arch started acting up. Not sure what wrong did I do the last Thursday before this run for a 2 mile run on the treadmill in the gym. The feet started to hurt but I ignored and pressed to keep moving.
Mile 10-13.1 : Shortly after leaving the Golden Gate bridge, I saw the 10 mile marker. That gave me some relief that the end is not far but by then my right feet was really hurting. I don’t know but your feet swells after running some miles and may be you need to tie you laces a bit easy. However, this goes against the conventional wisdom of tying your laces hard near your arch and the shoe will take care of any expansion of the feet. Reaching Mile 11 was difficult because of the pain in the right feet and I was wondering that where did all my training go. I trained so well that I was absolutely convinced that I will end this race strong. Mile 10 onwards was also quite brutal in terms of rolling hills. The last 3 miles I saw many runners struggling because of the rolling hills including myself. By the time I finished the race I was exhausted and in some pain that I knew was not a muscular pain. This was anti-climax to my original thought of finishing the race strong. Still no one can take my effort in finishing the race and completing my 2nd half marathon on a difficult course. My final time was 2:41:37 though I am convinced that I could have done this in less than 2:30:00 except for fumbling with my call during mile 5 and the stupid pain in my right feet.
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