2010 Nike Women's Marathon

Today was race day, and my performance for my first 26.2 mi. marathon was less than stellar. I made several mistakes that I suspected would come back and haunt me. 1) Didn't do enough hill training--in the South Bay, there's few areas to find good hills to train on 2) Didn't account for the unpredictable San Francisco weather 3) Didn't practice my running on cement, but instead did mostly soft trail running.

The challenges that I found out while running was that there were 5 massively steep hills, it started raining 1/3rd of the way through the race, most of the race was on cement and had urban objects like metal manholes, gratings that were easy to stumble/slip on, and the event was massively, massively crowded.

The Nike Women's Marathon wasn't as well organized as the Silicon Valley Marathon (where I ran the half)--we didn't start at 7:00 am, though there was about 20k women there, people weren't really lined up in their right pacing corrals, and the participants were required to pay for a bus back to Union Square (SVM did that for free). Also, though there were some entertaining events such as parkour, Japanese drumming, and random bands playing--I found the blasting speakers at every milestone mark obnoxious since it was too loud. Also, many parts of the marathon were a bit overly-commercialized--including the Expotique. Don't ask about my finishing time--it was pretty crappy due to twisting my ankle from slipping in the rain halfway through and hobbling/running to the 26.2 mi. marathon finish. I'll do better next time.


I did really like the design of the 2010 Tiffany's sterling silver necklace though. The prior year versions weren't very stylish, imho. But despite the corny phrase on the bar, it's elegant enough to go with many tops.