My first marathon

My Nike "medal" -- a necklace designed by Tiffany & Co.

With just a few days to go before the Oakland Marathon, I was reminiscing about my first marathon, the 2008 Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco, which I ran with Team in Training. I was excited and felt well-prepared going into it. The thing about Nike, though, is that there’s a cutoff 30K into it. If you don’t reach the 30K mat on time, you get turned around and you don’t get to finish the race.

Thirty kilometers is about 18.5 miles. So think about that. You run 18.5 miles, but you don’t do it fast enough, and you get turned around and aren’t allowed to finish. That would be a pretty horrible feeling.

As I’ve said before, I’m a pretty slow runner, and back in 2008 I was even slower than I am now. But after seeing the times for all my training runs, I didn’t think it was going to be a problem getting to the 30K mat on time. I thought I might even have 10 or 15 minutes to spare. I didn’t bother signing up for the early start option.

The race started in downtown San Francisco, and I was feeling great for the first six miles or so. The views were beautiful running along the Embarcadero and Marina Boulevard. I reached the big hill at mile six in the Presidio, and I was passing people while going up. I wasn’t running particularly fast. I was pacing myself pretty well. And still I managed to pass people on that hill.

When I reached Sea Cliff, I was feeling even better. We’d had a 20-mile training run four weeks earlier when we actually did a preview of the Nike course from the Sea Cliff area on. So when I got to Sea Cliff, things were familiar for the first time in the race. I was about 8.5 miles in, which meant I had almost 18 miles to go. A little bit of familiarity went a long way toward making me feel like I was going to make it to the end.

As I ran down the hill past the Cliff House, I looked at my Garmin to see how I was doing on time, and things seemed OK. I was confident I would make it to the 30K mat on time. At about 11 miles, I made the turn into Golden Gate Park, and that’s where things began to fall apart.

The whole way into the park is a slight uphill, and that made me slow down a bit. Maybe more than a bit. Things just seemed hard all of a sudden. And a weird thing happened: My arms went numb for a while. I still don’t know why. Maybe it was because they were bare and it was pretty chilly out. I was keeping warm by running, but maybe it just wasn’t enough for my arms. The numbness didn’t last long, but it was enough to get me worried.

And the difficulty I was having getting to the turnaround point in the park kept me worrying. I was losing time, and I was starting to wonder whether I was going to make it. I’d heard about people “hitting the wall” 22 miles or so into a marathon, but I was still only about halfway to the end. I couldn’t be at the wall already, could I?

I finally reached the turnaround. After about a mile, I was going downhill again, a nice slight downhill that allowed me to quicken my pace without having a lot of extra pounding on my legs. I was really worried at that point. I reached the 25K mat, and I only had about 38 minutes to go before the cutoff. Thirty-eight minutes! That may seem like plenty of time to run a 5K, about 3.1 miles, but here’s the thing: At the time I ran this marathon, my normal 5K time was around 36 to 38 minutes. By “normal,” I mean my time for running just a 5K, not a 5K after already having run 15.5 miles.

How was I going to do it?

Then I came across one of my Team in Training coaches while running along the Great Highway. Coach Marcie. She saw me in my purple Team in Training singlet and came over to see how I was doing. I told her I was rushing to get to the 30K mat, and she said I’d need to really push it to get there on time. She was running alongside me and talking to me, picking up the pace. I was just focusing on keeping up with her. She told me she’d run with me all the way to 30K.

Coach Marcie and me at the Victory Celebration after the 2008 Nike Women's Marathon. I would not have been able to finish the marathon without Marcie's help getting me to the 30K mat on time.

We passed by a water stop, and she told me to keep running and that she’d grab me something to drink. She caught back up and handed the cups to me. She kept talking to me and keeping the pace up. At that point, all I could think about was the pain I was feeling. Not pain like I was hurt, it wasn’t that. It was just pain from all the pounding and moving in the same restricted way. I was tired and hurting, and there was nothing on my mind but that.

Marcie was talking to me and asking me how I was doing, and I couldn’t really respond. I couldn’t think straight. All I could do was try to keep up with Marcie, try not to let her get ahead of me. The 30K mat was finally in sight, and there was about a minute left on the clock. I ran as fast as I could to the cross the mat. Marcie told me to walk for a little while and take it easy because I couldn’t get turned around now. She left me so she could go find some other runners to help, and I started walking toward Lake Merced.

I remember Lake Merced being the most difficult part of the 20-mile preview run. It’s about 4.5 miles to get around it, and it just seems to take forever. And it’s so lonely at that point. That far into the race, people are really spread out. All the small pace differences among the runners add up over the first 19 miles to make a big difference. I walked for a mile or two before I was able to start running again.

I finally reached the far end of the lake, and I knew I was heading back toward the finish. Now, after raising money to fight blood cancers and meeting our team honorees and knowing so many people affected by these diseases, one might expect me to be thinking about how all the pain and difficulty I was facing were nothing compared with what cancer patients go through.

That’s not what I was thinking about. Around mile 23 or so, I was fighting back tears thinking there weren’t going to be any Tiffany & Co. necklaces left when I reached the finish line. I was thinking that everyone would have packed up and gone home. But mostly I was thinking about the necklaces and how much I wanted one after going through this experience. I was crying over a necklace.

Maybe I was crying over the 24 miles of pain I’d just endured. Maybe I was crying knowing that I still had 2.2 miles left to run. I passed 40K, but the mat wasn’t even set up anymore. Things were being put away. Maybe I was crying because of that.

There were still Team in Training cheering groups out, though. They weren’t giving up on me. They’d been there throughout the race, and now, after 6.5 hours, they were still out cheering for me, telling me I could make it. I wish I could have waved or smiled at them, but all I could do was push myself forward one step at a time. All I could do was … well, I’m not sure, my memory of that run along the Great Highway is kind of blurry.

I did reach the end. I crossed the finish line and tried to smile for the camera. It wasn’t much of a smile. As soon as I was past the finish line, I burst out in tears. I saw my boyfriend off to the side, and I went over to him and hugged him and was crying so uncontrollably that he thought something was wrong. He kept asking me what was wrong, and I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t talk. All I could do was cry.

I remember talking to a man during my 18-mile training run that season. He was very tall and was training to walk the marathon, and I was running so slowly I could barely keep up with his walk. Really, I’m not kidding. He was telling me about why he liked marathons. He said that at the end of a marathon, you get to see the full range of human emotions from joy to disappointment to anger to devastation.

I always think about that when I tell people the story of my first marathon. I get to the end of the story, the part when I’m crying, and I think about what that man had to say. The end of the marathon was such an explosion of emotion that I don’t remember feeling anything quite like it before.

I’m interested in seeing how I react to finishing Oakland this weekend.