Nike Half Marathon

Since mid-August, I have been training for the San Francisco Nike Women's Half Marathon.  Back in 2005, I ran the full marathon but that . . . will . . . never . . . happen . . . again!  (Too much training and wear and tear on my body.)  Halves are more my style.  Totally trainable and attainable.  Ooh.  That rhymes!  This year I set my sights much lower (but more mentally soundly) on running the half marathon.  I have done several halves over the years and know what I need to do in terms of training to complete them.  This SF Nike course is ridiculous.  There are so many hills and it is really a challenge.  You don't want to run this one to try and get a personal best.  Instead, my outlook was to do the best I could while having fun and enjoying the sights and energy that run though the veins of this course! 

That was until I thought I was 20 years old again.  See, I am hard headed when it comes to thinking logically about my body.  I know it can persevere through almost everything but apparently this whole 'getting older' thing is changing that.  So, smarty pants over here ran an eight mile run on Saturday morning and thought that it would be a good idea to play in her soccer game on Sunday morning.  Despite the tightness in my hamstrings that was practically screaming at me, I played.  (Did I mention that I didn't stretch much, either?  Just have to get this off my chest.)  The first half of the game I was super careful not to go too hard and hurt myself but the 20 year old Lisa came back second half and tried to run full speed for a ball flying down the right sideline.  POP!  Yes, I felt my hamstring pop and no sooner did I hear it pop did I taste the dirt that my face was suddenly planted in.  Dumb, dumb, dumb.  Smarty pants pulled a hamstring.

What did that mean?  No training, no running.  Lots of icing and hamstring massages.  Lots of moments cursing myself for pushing it too hard.  Despite all of my training efforts- I was forced to stop completely.  While I hoped and prayed that my leg would heal, the days leading up to the race were dwindling.  Should I pull out of the race?  I couldn't!  I wouldn't!  I could make this happen!  I signed up to race with a lot of my friends from St. Christophers.  I also signed up to run it with my sister, Gina!  I made the (stupid) decision to run it no matter what and hoped things would get better.

Race day came quickly.  The weekend was absolutely crazy!  My sister Gina flew down on late Thursday night and we were headed to San Francisco on Saturday afternoon to attend the race Expo and get our race bibs and timing chips.  It would be good for me to interject here that Gina (due to surgery and limited mobility) hadn't run more than three miles in the prior two months.  I hadn't really run for about five weeks so add those together and you get some insane 'we have no business running' answer.  We knew we were pushing it and that it was going to be hard but for some reason we thought it was funny.  When the friends we met up with at the Expo asked us how training went and we told them- they were shocked.  And to think we thought they were crazy to think that!

The Expo was great!  We met up with our big group and had a fun time looking through all of the vendor's products and enjoying the beautiful day San Francisco gave to us!  We headed over to the Nike Store where they had a mural with every racer's name on it.  It was really cool to see your name up there among the 12,000 racers.  We were supposed to meet up for dinner with a big group of ladies at a good Italian restaurant but the problem was, we didn't know exactly where it was!  Most of the ladies were going to walk there from the Expo so we thought we would, too.  Things were going well until my iPhone decided not to let the map function work.  Gina's phone had the directions until the battery died.  Awesome!  The two of us did the best we could to get there but we took the long way there which included some of the steepest hills you could imagine (which are no fun for someone with a hurt hamstring).  Oh well, it provided more than a few laughs for the both of us.

We spent the night at a hotel with our friend Lorraine and woke up early and reality had surely sunk in.  Ya, Gina and I didn't feel so confident anymore.  We had to run 13.1 miles with little training.  But the show must go on!  The mile walk to the start line was in the pitch black hours of the morning.  When we arrived to the starting area, music pumped and masses of runners (mostly women) swarmed around us.  It was so ridiculously exciting!  Before we knew it, we were off!  No turning back now.  The run was good but in unusual fashion, we didn't talk much to each other.  After the race we both confided to each other that we were freaked out.  It was cold that morning and the first two miles were tough to get through.  Soon enough, we loosened up and kept going.  We ran the first six miles no problem and then Gina's calf seized.  We had to stop and stretch it.  She was in total pain and I was worried we would have to pull out.  If you know Gina, she is not a wuss.  On she went as best she could.  We walked all the hills because that kind of calf injury makes it impossible to run uphill.  It just so happened that miles 6-9 were the hilly miles.  I believe this was when Gina made the hilarious comment, "Where the hell do you train for hills like this?  The Sierras?"  We took it easy and decided to not worry about our time (finishing time).  We just wanted to finish as healthy as possible.

I am speaking from the heart when I say that we both couldn't have finished the race without one another.  Gina certainly needed me to get her though the race but what she didn't realize was that she was distracting me from my own pain.  I played the roll that my sister Jill played for me back in 2005 when we ran the Nike marathon together.  I would not have been able to finish if it weren't for Jill's support.  Gina and I ran and ran and before we knew it, we were rounding the corner to the finish line.  The song "Dynamite" was blasting along Ocean Beach (just as it had at the start line).  Gina and I followed the lyrics and cast our fists up in the air singing,  I throw my hands up in air sometimes, Saying ay-oh, gotta let go.  I wanna celebrate and live my life.  Saying ay-oh, baby let's go.  This race went on and on and on and it went on and on and on!  But we finished and that was all that mattered.  I turned to Gina after we crossed the finish line and we both fell over onto one another in pure exhaustion both physically and mentally.  We did it.  Was it a smart thing to do?  Probably not.  Strike that.  NO, it wasn't!  But we found the strength within and did it.  We collected our awesome shirts and our Tiffany's necklace (every finisher gets handed a Tiffany's box by a firefighter in a tuxedo) and we made our way back to the hotel and got ready to drive home. 

What a day, what an accomplishment.  We won't forget this one anytime soon.  The theme for the Nike race this year was, I Run To Be.  I can think of a few things for which I do run to be.  I run to feel empowered.  I run to be in shape.  I run to be on my own for some good focused thinking.  I run to be strong.  I run because I can.  I run to breathe in the fresh outdoor air.  I run to feel bada*s (what?  sometimes I do!). I run to challenge myself and test my limits.  I run to be a role model for my children. I run to be what I want to be . . . an active, strong woman.  I hope I continue to run for years and years to come.  Maybe I'll just be smarter about it in the future.  Or maybe not!  I like to keep it interesting.