Martino Madness: San Francisco Marathon 2011

I ran the San Francisco Marathon with one of my very best friends on July 31, 2011. We trained separately for the 18 weeks prior… only she got to train in better weather conditions!

We have a history of running together. She’s my California running pal. We’ve run hundreds of miles together and have now run two marathons (San Francisco Marathon – July 2011, and the Nike Women’s San Francisco Marathon – October 2008) and two half marathons together (Los Gatos Jungle Run Half Marathon – July 2008, and the Santa Cruz Half Marathon - April 2009).

My training went really well, and qualifying for Boston was a serious goal of mine/ours. We need a time of 3:45 to qualify and it was definitely in the realm of possibilities with the training times I/we had been logging during our weekend long runs. Kathleen had actually qualified for Boston on the same course two years prior. I was pregnant at the time or I would have trained & run that with her. Unfortunately, it also happened to be 3 weeks after Matteo died. So, the timing would have been awful.

Unfortunately, Giuliana came down with an ear infection the weekend before the marathon. And, as luck would have it, two days later she came down with a virus that make her spike fevers of 103-104+ in the late afternoon and evening hours.

For all the obvious reasons, I have a really difficult time sleeping when my kids are sick. But, if anything brings out my PTSD, it’s having a child under the age of two fighting a fever that spikes above 104 every few hours throughout the night. It would be impossible to explain all the emotion, stress and worry that results and weighs on me in a situation like this. My adrenaline gets going and I find it incredibly difficult to sleep at night and I get very easily agitated during the day… because I can’t stop worrying/stressing about my sick baby with an unexplainable fever. Subsequently, it also exhausts me like nothing else.

Anyway, so for the 4 nights prior to the race I did not get more than two hours of sleep at a time. In addition to that, I still had to pack for 4 people, and finalize a lot of the details for our very first Matteo’s Dream Fund fund raiser and silent auction that we were planning to host in the Bay Area the following weekend.

We left for CA on a Friday afternoon. The drive started out really slow as we left later than we had hoped and battled awful rush hour traffic getting through WA. Then, around 1am, Giuliana spiked a 104.5 fever on the drive (1.5 hours after giving her acetaminophen). After paging our peds office and talking to a nurse, we ended up having to stop at the ER in Medford. We were hoping her ear infection was not responding to the meds. But, as it turns out, her body was just battling a virus and needed to keep fighting. Grrrrr…. This momma likes getting a diagnosis.

So, Dan & I basically drove through the night with one very sick baby. We arrived in San Francisco around 10:30am, went to get my race packet and then to the hotel. I was exhausted, but able to catch a one hour catnap at the hotel while Giuliana napped. Dan and the au pair took the kids over to Pier 29.

At this point, I knew I wasn’t going into this race as rested as I should have been or wanted to be. But, I still wanted to run it and was going to just try and do my very best, have fun with it… and qualifying for Boston was certainly still in the back of my mind.

Giuliana’s fever seemed to go away again that afternoon. She didn’t have a fever at all that night (thank God!). So, I got approx 6 hours of sleep the night of the race. It felt SO GOOD… it was more sleep than I had in days.

I woke up at 4:30 to prep for the race. I met Kathleen at 5:15 and the race officially started at 5:30am.

I am NOT a morning person. So, early morning races are really not my thing. But, since this race takes you over the Golden Gate Bridge, there is also a very early start time.

Surprisingly, I felt pretty good that morning. However, mentally, I clearly wasn’t where I usually am or should have been. I didn’t have the nerves that I normally get the night before the race. And, I definitely didn’t have the nerves or adrenaline rush that I normally get the morning of the race, especially when you arrive at the event and see all the other runners.

One thing that I was looking very forward to though, was seeing my cheer crew - the best cheer crew on the planet – at mile 1.5, 12.5, 17.5 and at the finish line. My cheer crew consisted of Dan, Gabby, Rocco, Giuliana, and our au pair Maria. They got up at 5am just to cheer us on … AND, they made special signs. LOVE them! My extended cheer crew consisted of Kathleen’s family, of course… Michael, Livi & Maddy. Seriously the best cheer crew on the planet!

We started out strong, getting splits of 8:15 and 8:20 for the first 4-5 miles. And, then the hills started hitting… and I started getting tired. I think we got a mile split of 7:45 when running back over the GG Bridge. And, I kept feeling more tired. Mentally, my mind wanted to stop running, find a spot alongside the road and go to sleep. Amazingly, I stayed on pace to qualify for Boston until approx. 14 miles into the race. But, at mile 11.5, I sort of waved goodbye to my running pal and encouraged her to keep going strong. I was TIRED. It took me about two miles to change my mental game from being a Boston qualifying time goal, to being a “just have fun and finish this race” goal.

Long story short (ok… this wasn’t so short!), I didn’t hit my goal time of 3:45. Nor did I get a new personal best for my marathon finishing time, which I WAS bummed about because I should have easily accomplished that! But, I finished with a pretty solid time, finishing in the top 18% of women in my age category. That’s not so bad.

Mentally – it was a good challenge for me to face. I trained hard, by myself and I really felt qualifying for Boston was within reach. So, when you work that hard and push yourself for 18 weeks… to give up on one goal and have to find another to pull you through to the finish is a bit of a set-back. A good life lesson... a lesson I feel like I learned and live with every day since Matteo died. You can plan how you want your life to be... but life is what it is, and so much of it ends up being how you respond to the unexpected changes in your plans.

However, it’s also definitely a sign that you could have, and probably should have, pushed yourself harder when your legs aren’t sore anymore 3 days post-race. Oh well. It was fun and I'm glad I did it.

I’m 99.9% sure that will be my last full marathon ever. Training for a marathon is SO time consuming! From now on, this lady will only be doing half-marathons only or less! I think I’ll have a lot more fun with that training, those fitness goals, and working on building more speed and the constant goal to hit new personal best times in the half. And, it will also allow me to spend time doing other things like pilates and yoga as well.

My overall race stats: