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| The starting line.. it was insane.. |
The Nike’s Woman marathon is in the books…
On October 16. I
lined up with thousands of women and a few very secure men and ran the Nike’s women’s
marathon. Apparently you don’t need to
be a woman to participate in this event, but you have to prepare to be chicked
over and over during the entire marathon.
Here is my report…
A few weeks ago, Rujeko found out that she needed to be in
Napa the same afternoon as the marathon.
So it made sense to actually stay in the city the night before, run the marathon,
come back to the hotel, clean up and then she would be in her way to Napa. So we looked for hotels, and I guess
thousands of people had the same idea because it was tough to find a hotel. I
asked a good friend of ours if we could stay in her house, she agreed, but at
the very last minute we finally found a hotel which was very close to the
starting line. Great huh?
Well not quite…
The day before the marathon we had dinner close to home and
drove to the city to the hotel we had reserved. We got out of the car and walked into the
hotel, it looked decent… then I saw the signs everywhere about the rate for
bringing a guest into the hotel. So
this place can also be rented by the hour...
but we were going to be there just one night, how bad could it be? I
asked about our reservation, and the person behind the bullet proof window
tells us that our reservation had been cancelled because they overbooked... I am like, WTF? And nobody took the courtesy to call us to
tell us that? Long story short, I
raised hell there, they finally “found” us a room and gave us the key. Rujeko suggested going check the room prior
to bringing in our luggage. We did and
I won’t go into details here, but needless to say we got out of there really
fast. Told the front desk person that
we were not staying and left the hotel looking for a bottle of disinfectant or
rubbing alcohol. Now we had not place
to stay, we looked around but everything was booked, so we decided to drive
home and get up early for the race. So
we did, we left the hotel and drove all the way home to our clean and comfortable
bed.
The next day, woke up at around 4:30 am. Like I always do, I went to take a shower
and started my little race routine which includes; bathroom, shower, lube,
dressing for the race eat and getting my stuff together. Drove to the city and got there with plenty
of time to find a good parking spot, we got into the parking structure and
after finding a good spot, I started to get ready for the race. Rujeko needed to go to the bathroom and we
knew that the lines at the portapoties at the race were probably going to be
insane so we look for alternative bathroom facilities. We found one and after taking care of
business, we went to the starting line.. and MY GOD… I never been in a place with so much estrogen
in the air.. It was awesome..
It took a long time to cross the finish line and the thing
that annoyed me the most is that nobody respected the corrals; people just went
everywhere they wanted to be. People
that would be running 14 minute miles were in the 6:30 mpm corral, I mean… come
on!! So needless to say, when the
marathon started there was a lot of zigzagging to pass around people that were
walking at mile 1, not cool.
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| It was a sea of purple in this race.. Amazing.. |
We settled into a nice pace and started eating the miles
away… one by one.. until Rujeko started
to feel sick. We tried to maintain the
same pace, but she wasn’t feeling good so I forced her to take iboprufins. I am such a believer of those things, they
never disappoint me.. And after she took
them, they started to take effect… and she started to pick up the pace...
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| Blister happened... Despite the issues Rujeko did awesome. |
I had a long business trip thus I did not run as much as I wanted
to, my longest run before this marathon was the marathon at the end of the
ironman and that had been almost 1 ½ months, so I wasn’t in any shape to break any
records, but the whole idea was to run
it together. This is our second marathon
together and we are already talking of the next one, and next time we are going
to train to do great. I saw many people, obviously, running their first
marathon and it is always awesome to see the excitement in their faces. I love to see someone finish something
awesome for the first time. Around mile 20 or so my foot started hurting, my shoes
seemed to be too tight so I lose the shoelaces,
but still they felt tight. I don’t
know what was going on, but I knew that because of that some other part of my
body was going to start hurting because I knew I changed my stride to
compensate for the pain in the left foot.
And like I predicted, my hip started to get sore and by mile 24 I was in
real pain. I knew I had less than 2
miles to go and I did dig deep in order to move forward. When I finally saw the finish line, I was
too excited to feel any pain, so we bolted to get to the end. We crossed the finish line holding hands and
it was a great finish to a great day. I
couldn’t’ be happier. We picked our Tiffany
“medal” and started to make our way to the exit.
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| Overall it was a great race.. |
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| The views were freaking awesome |
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| San Carlos CrossFit endurance team representing.. :) |
After the marathon we took the bus back to the starting
line. This was more painful than the
actual marathon, the line to get to the
bus was like 3 miles long or so it seemed, and once we were in the bus, the
traffic was so bad that we were moving
very slow and I was getting annoyed by the person behind me talking about
herself all day long.. pfftt!!
All in all, it was a great day and most importantly it made
me feel blessed for just being able to do this.
Next race? TBD…
