Most people say that you can't sleep the night before your first marathon, but I slept like a baby! I woke up on race day refreshed and ready to go. Sadly, we got to the starting line too early and stood outside for like 45 minutes waiting for the start. In the end it was fine because I basically conducted a photo shoot with my teammates while we waited. Our coaches got in on the action too! They hung out with us at the starting line and right before it was time to start they wished us luck and left. I’m not going to lie, I kinda felt like a child being dropped off at my first day of school. Quietly I was scared, the training wheels were off and we were really about to do this. I didn't really here the starting horn go off, but next thing I knew we were moving. My fear quickly turned to excitement, they don’t lie about that starting line adrenaline…I was out!
Right after the start we ran past the pointy building (or the TransAmerica building as it's officially know - not as fun) to Fisherman's Warf. We hit our first water station and I went into my run/walk intervals. The beginning of the race was actually pretty amazing, we started when it was dark out so we go to watch the sun rise as we ran the first couple of miles. The first five miles really weren’t that bad. Sure there were a few hills, but nothing unreasonable. I can’t reiterate enough how much I enjoyed the course, it was so beautiful! San Francisco is a pretty amazing city, the perfect mix of nature and concrete.
The first painful moment of the race came around mile 7. Let me take a step back and set the scene, there were literally tens of thousands of people running this race so it was just a sea of people everywhere you turned. I mentioned this because as I looked up right before we went into mile 7 and no lie in the distance it looked like ants climbing a mountain! The hill going into mile 7 was ridiculous! Every single person walked up that hill, I didn’t see one person running. At one point I thought, am I going for a hike or running a marathon? But the good news is that old saying what goes up, must come down and when I got to the top of the hill the views were insane and by the time I was on my way back down, I forgot about all huffing and puffing I did on the way up.
Around mile 8 or 9, someone had the genius idea to hand out orange slices. It was on a hill and of course after runners were done with the oranges slices they discarded the rinds on the course, which created a hot slippery mess! Sure I had an orange slice, but that’s not the point it was still a bad idea.
Going into mile 10 I was still feeling great! Before each mile marker there was a power song station playing music. The mile 10 song was Don’t Stop Believing by Journey (one of my favs). So I just sang my way into mile 10, it was starting to drizzle but I didn’t care I have to say I was truly enjoying the race at this point (because I had no idea of the torture that was to come). We were going downhill and headed towards the beach and everything seemed great.
This particular race was both a full and half marathon, both groups ran together for the majority of the first half. Remember how I mentioned that there were a sea of people running the race?...well the sea parted at the full / half split. Suddenly I felt very alone and very scared. Ironically it started raining a harder too. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to enter the dark side of this race
(proceed to Race Day: Part 2)
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