Kaiser Permanente 1/2 marathon

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to join a bunch of runners at the Kaiser Permanente half marathon. Rujeko and I decided to run this together as a preparation for the upcoming Oakland Marathon which we also are going to run together. I am going to pace her, hopefully, to a Boston marathon qualifying time.

We woke up pretty early as we needed to drive all the way to the Golden Gate Park. After scrambling to get my stuff together we started the drive. It was uneventful until we got to the area where the finish line was supposed to be. Apparently everybody else thought to get there on time as well, and by the time we got there, not only there wasn’t any parking nearby, but the amount of cars in the road was amazing. Little by little we made it out of there and decided to park at close to the starting line. And again, I think everybody thought the same thing as the amount of cars circulating the starting line was just as crazy as the finish line. Somehow, we made it into the Golden Gate Park parking lot, expensive, but we had little to spare. We got into the parking lot, changed into our running clothes and made to the start.

We made it to the starting line and after a quick visit to “the bushes” for me and the porta-potty for Rujeko; we were in among 10,000 runners ready to start the run.

The weather was wonderful, not too cold or hot, perfect running conditions. Now, bear in mind that I have been experiencing some plantar fasciitis issues, so I didn’t know if was going to be able to run the whole thing yet alone pace Rujeko to a decent finish time. Thank God I was able to run the whole thing and did not have to stop at all.

We clocked our first mile in 9:13 minutes, not too shabby, but taking in consideration we were navigating lots and lots of slow people… second mile was 8:13… now we were talking… That was a more decent pace… We kept a good pace until about mile 9 or 10. At that time we slowed down considerably, it got hotter and Rujeko wasn’t feeling good. We ran well when we felt good, and slowed down during the rest stations. Our nutrition strategy worked well, and drinking patterns was awesome. Not issues with nutrition, we just need to do a bit more speed work. At the end we ended up finishing in 1:52:35 which is a decent 8:35 minute per mile average. Taking in consideration that our first mile was pretty slow, we actually ran faster than 8:35 mpm after mile 1. Not bad really…

All in all, this was a great experience and looking forward to run the Oakland marathon together too... woohoo!!

Unfortunately at the end, we learned that a fellow runner died on the course that day.That is pretty sad and I wonder why? Apparentely there was a slow response from the emergency team. It took 22 minutes from the time they were notified to the time they actually arrived on the scene. That seems a lot... don't you think?

Pictures? Damn it.. We forgot our camera!!