San Francisco Marathon
What's the difference between heat and humidity and cool and fog? About 28 minutes.
Old PR - 4:41:56
New PR - 4:13:08
Overall 1913/5043
Male 1489/3334
Age Group 247/530
Splits: 9:09, 9:03, 8:57, 8:58, 9:18, 10:02 (up to the bridge), 9:07, 9:01, 9:03, 9:08, 8:09 (down from the bridge), 9:25, 9:12, 8:34, 9:12, 9:03, 9:19, 8:50, 9:25, 9:33, 9:17, 9:40, 10:45, 11:00, 10:38, 11:46, 7:24 (.72)
First I must say the weather was near perfect, it only started heating up in the last 30 min or so as I was finishing up. The rest of the morning was cold, misty, and just about perfect for running. Second thing to mention is I'm actually now a pretty big fan of courses with terrain. Instead of 26 flat boring miles, there were plenty of "undulations" to distract me in SF. I learned to hate the short steep downhills especially late in the race, but they as well as the uphills really broke up the race and the monotony into manageable blocks. Third important thing is I basically ran the whole race, finally. I started to cramp a bit during mile 23 and walked about 100 yards, walked through some of the aid stations, and in the last few miles had to throw in a total of <5 walking intervals just to keep moving forward, but I managed to at least jog >95% of the course which was one of the things I was focusing on this time around. And running across the Golden Gate bridge and back was simply fantastic in the morning fog. Although I'm sad to dethrone Disney, this was my favorite marathon course to date. Instead of 6 miles of good times and 20 miles of boring roads, this one was 20 miles of good times and about 6 that were boring and included fisherman's wharf, ghirardelli square, the golden gate bridge, golden gate park, at&t park, and a finish right underneath the gate bridge. Highly recommended to everyone.
Although as usual the wheels fell off a bit after mile 20, even with a net downhill rest of the race, and I'm actually significantly more sore today than after the last few, I'm very satisfied with how it went. Although I came through the half in 2:00 and had delusions of a sub 4:00 finish, even though I felt like I dropped waaaay off in the 2nd half I only plunged to 2:13. Cutting off 28 minutes off my PR is more than a minute per mile in 6 months since Houston. I am extremely sore today and sitting down in this chair was pretty challenging, so I'm a bit apprehensive about how I'll feel after a recovery week and if I'll be able to launch right into IM training since that is looming in 6 weeks and I'm way behind in the bike and the swim.
I also REALLY need to plug the marathon finish of Elke my best man's wife (5:27:14, her first), and the half marathon finishes of Dave my sister's BF (2:29:53), Josh my best man (2:35:08, his first), Steve my father (2:35:28 at age 58), Luke my brother (2:50:09, his first), Diana my sister in law (2:50:08), Cheryl my DW (2:50:08 the 3 of them finished together), and Sara my sister (2:58:14). 9 total finishes somehow related to my family, all because this whole running thing is a bit infectious.
GO! WISH Team GO! 
