Howdy, readers. Kristina’s enabler husband here. She gave me a spare set of keys to the site while she’s on runabout and let me run on with my own thoughts about running for a post or two. I can’t promise stories of bears or triple-digit mileage, but I’ll do my best to give you something interesting to read until she gets back.

By Brian Sawyer

As recently as January, I made a big deal of running for its own sake and not requiring races for motivation, but as long as Kristina’s away, we might as well be completely honest with each other.

An unhappy finish

Though I meant what I said about intrinsic motivation and all that stuff, especially when it comes to shorter distances, I have to admit that I also just didn’t think I had the stuff for another marathon. You see, Kristina and I had run one together before (at least most of one), and it ended with me looking like this (see photo on right). If you manage to get past the time shown above my head (official chip time did actually beat 5:00 by 18 seconds), do you notice anything missing from this picture? Kristina was kind enough to stay with me until the last few miles, but I let her go on without me when I pretty much started crawling my way to the finish.

That was the first marathon for each of us, seven years ago in Richmond, VA. It was a different time, and we were different runners. Without speaking for Kristina, I can say I knew a lot less about how to train for a marathon then than I do now (after all, this blog didn’t exist then). And because I probably would have thought “IT band” meant the next big thing on MTV, I didn’t have a clue what was going wrong with my knees, especially when they completely blew out on me during a particularly hilly 30k race a couple weeks before the big day. I’d never even heard of a foam roller, so I just took it easy and limped around until the day of the race. And from the first few steps, it felt like someone was beating my kneecaps with a baseball bat every time either foot hit the pavement.

After five hours of this abuse, you can understand my look of agony at the finish line and why I might have felt that I’d gotten the whole marathon thing out of my system for good. But like at least one other item I’ve crossed off my bucket list and later broken my vow never to repeat (driving cross-country), I completely changed my mind in April. I guess all the marathon talk around the house finally got to me, and the third party in my marriage seduced me too. I got the seven-year itch and needed to rekindle my own fling with distance running.

Though I didn’t tell anyone of my plan, I’d made a tentative decision to run BayState in October, mainly because it’s in my own back yard and I couldn’t justify the expense of a more exotic “destination race.” But then I learned that the San Francisco Marathon was scheduled for July 26. I’d already planned to attend a professional conference in San Jose on July 24, so all I needed to do is take the train up the coast after fulfilling my work obligations for the week. When I realized I could expense the flights to take me to a marathon in a location a little more interesting than Lowell, I jumped at the chance and made my plans public.

But this time, I’d train smarter. With a great personal coach in my own house, I learned the value of ice baths, had the right shoes for my feet, knew how to hydrate properly, got a few good tech shirts to replace the old cotton tees, borrowed DFMC’s training schedule, and received an astute diagnosis for my previous knee problems (much more useful than my GP’s “overuse injury” assessment and “don’t run so much” treatment plan) that made the foam roller a regular part of my routine. In short, I did everything differently than I did it in 2002, which is to say I did it right, and made it to race day uninjured, which is to say I also got lucky.

Of course, having driven in San Francisco before, one challenge still worried me about this particular race: the Hills. Even a top-tier ultramarathoner warned me, “Make sure to train on hills. SF is a killer course.” Luckily, there’s no shortage of hills around where I live, so I did indeed incorporate some monster climbs into my program. Previously one of my two major running nemeses (the other being heat, which still bests me more often than not), I started taking fairly steep grades in stride. Still, leading up to the race, I had to wonder if my training would be enough to get me up to “Vista Point” and the rest of elevation gains in this “killer course.”

A happier finish

My next post here will be my actual race report (including more details on how I handled those hills), but to spare you all a little suspense, I’ll close with a photo to compare with the one at the beginning of this entry. Things went much better this time around (even if the result did cause a little temporary tension in the household), so much so that I might even consider running another marathon before letting another seven years go by.