At the Starting Line: I left my quads in San Francisco

I left my quads in San Francisco.Yes I did.

The title for this piece came to me as I picked and swerved my way down the mountainside that is mile 19 of the San Francisco Marathon.

Near me, other runners had thrown on the brakes, twirled themselves around, and proceeded to negotiate the precipice by walking backwards, toe to heel. Me? I shrugged and continued doing what I’d been practicing for months now on the hills near home, gently slaloming, like I was skiing the steep parts of our blue square trails at Killington and Stratton.

I wondered as the road went on and on and on, who took the smarter route, me or the reverse runners. I beat them all to the bottom, but at a cost: my quads were quivering like jello. Only time will tell, I thought, and reminded myself of a great runner saying: “If you feel good now, don’t worry. That’ll change.” The saying works in reverse too because there are plenty of times during a marathon when you think nothing will feel right ever again, and then, lo and behold, suddenly you’re feeling like you could run forever.

Sure enough, the shakes were gone in a matter of minutes and I felt good for at least another ten, until the next downhill. It’s not just my heart I’ll be leaving behind here, I remember thinking, as my quads got weak and gooey all over again.

The San Francisco Marathon was easily my hilliest marathon to date, though I’ve covered plenty of other courses with some interesting elevations. The Derry, NH sixteen-miler is ridiculous. The race organizers advertise it as being “moderately challenging,” though the elevation map looks like an EKG readout. The Stu’s 30K course here in Massachusetts is known for being tough. If you can make it through Stu’s, finishing the Boston Marathon is a piece of cake. The Manchester City Marathon and the Vermont City Marathon also offer up interesting ways to kill your legs. But San Francisco was a whole new experience entirely, though it wasn’t just about the hills.

There were some hills.

The people involved in the marathon were easily the friendliest bunch I’ve met so far. When I think back on San Francisco, I know I’ll remember the hills and I’ll smile a little. But I’ll remember the people too and even now I can’t stop grinning ear to ear. They were phenomenal.

I met Monica, the head of the race pacers, the Friday before the marathon, on the shuttle bus to the expo at Fort Mason, a former military camp right on the bay. She spent the entire bus ride giving me pointers on surviving the course. She told me the worst hill was just past the two-mile mark, and to not worry about finishing the race because the last half of the race is almost all downhill. When I arrived at the pacer table, she made me laugh, telling the volunteers to take good care of me because I was a friend of hers.

And the volunteers DID take good care of me. They took good care of all of us. From the expo volunteers, a mix of school kids and runners, who smiled and wished me good luck, to the leather clad, gray pony-tailed bikers who manned the water stops and helped with crowd control and yelled out lies like, "Looking good!" and "Almost there!"

At the expo, I met a couple of guys giving away free wine if you signed up for their half marathon, which unfortunately is during my work year. We got to talking and turns out we’re practically neighbors. One is from a town a few miles away, and the other is from New Hampshire. Then I met wonderful Stephanie, a race volunteer with a great Facebook page dedicated to running California. She gave me some tips on staying hydrated out on the course and shared how psyched she was to be accompanying gorgeous and gorgeously strong ultra runner Dean Karnazes on a pre-marathon shake-out run the next morning.


Dean Karnazes is awesome.

Race morning, my daughter and I were out the door of our Union Square hotel way before dawn, and speeding the mile down to Market Street hoping we weren’t too late for her 5:50 a.m. Wave 4 start time. Around us, the streets were silent, the only other pedestrians our fellow race participants.

We arrived at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero just a few minutes too late. Her wave gate had been closed. No biggie. She decided she’d start with me, in Wave 8. We hit the portable toilet line along with several thousand other runners. The guy in line behind me noticed my Boston Marathon hat and started talking about his 2015 Boston finish. Turns out, he ran for the same charity team my daughter and I have run for. Typical marathon magic: Traverse the country to run a race in a new place, and randomly meet up with a teammate from all the way back home.

My daughter got bored waiting around, and scurried off to join Wave 5. Pedro and I headed to our start line. We spent all our wait time talking about marathons we’d done and hoped to do. Behind us, the Oakland Bay Bridge glittered in the gray dawn. A couple of hundred feet ahead of us, the start banner beckoned.

Once we began running, Pedro and I parted ways. Every runner needs to run her own race. As my wave passed the Ferry Building, crowds screamed and waved like it was mid-afternoon at Fenway, not 6:25 a.m. in a city that had just gone to sleep hours before.

Things quieted down a bit by the time we made it the two miles to Fisherman’s Wharf. Workers kneading dough in the windows of the Boudin Bakery restaurant nudged one another and laughed at us as we ran by. No one stood outside at Ghiradelli Square offering chocolate.

The first hill – the steepest, according to Monica, took us to Fort Mason, sight of the marathon expo. From the top of the hill we took in breathtaking views of the Golden Gate Bridge, at that time still mostly enshrouded in fog. We took a meandering route along the bay, past the Palace of Fine Arts and Crissy Field, and eventually, just at mile five, started the second steep hill on the course, one that took us up and onto my reason for running: the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d been dreaming of running over that bridge since the last time I visited San Francisco, on a 2003 cross country trip with my daughter. That's when I learned from another tourist that it was due to a marathon in the city that the traffic was so bad that weekend.

"A marathon in July? Over the Golden Gate Bridge? I could run that!" I remember thinking.And now here I was, finally.

You’d think I’d remember a ton about running across that bridge, seeing that I’d been dreaming of doing it for more than a decade. In truth, I don’t remember all that much. All us marathoners were scrunched up into a couple of the lanes heading toward northern California. My people ran in one lane north, while the speedier folks who'd already reached the other side and turned around ran south in the lane next to us. The rest of the bridge was open to traffic.

The bridge was wet. Not sure if that was due to rain during the night or the fog, which still lingered among the topmost cables. I studied the faces of the runners headed toward me from the Marin Headlands side, looking for my daughter who was at least two miles ahead of me by that point. When I wasn’t watching for her, I was high-fiving the speedsters, or watching my footing. The roadway was slippery and pocked. When I could, I remembered to look up at the glowing metal above, and sideways to the massive pipes holding the structure in place. We couldn’t see much beyond the bridge because the railings were so high and the fog over the water was pretty dense.

At the other side, we did a loop in a parking lot around a parks building. A few runners joined some entertainers who were doing in-line skate dancing to loud music coming from a tie-dyed painted van. Don’t know where those crazy runners got the energy for that. The air on this side of the bay was thick with the scent of some flower I couldn’t put a name to. It was beautiful. The hills beyond were green and gold. Mist was everywhere. It was Disneyland forest. I would have been happy to continue running on that side of the bay. The smells and colors were just perfect.

But the race continued back over the bay so back we went: up the bridge’s slight incline, then the flat middle, then down again, then up a steep hill to mile ten which gave us more great views and a sweet downhill that I could have stayed on forever.

We soon entered the Sea Cliff district of San Francisco and found ourselves rolling up and down streets lined with pastel homes. When we finally entered Golden Gate Park, all I could think was, “Well, at least the hilly portion of the race is done.” Then we hit more hills as we scooted by picnickers out enjoying the morning, and bison grazing in distant gray green fields.

The hardest hills for me were the park hills. I don’t know why. They weren’t long. They weren’t steep. They were dull though, quiet views of mossy trees and fields; sleep-inducing, compared to the rest of the vibrant course.

At mile 16 I had a moment of panic. We left the park and I assumed, from having memorized the course map earlier, that we’d be heading back into the city. I did not need any more greenery and solitude. I wanted cheering crowds and pretty houses. But I’d read the map wrong. We weren’t done with the park. We were simply entering a different section. As we re-entered, I could feel my resolve faltering. I was finished.

The marathon however, was not. So after a few minutes of walking and feeling sorry for myself, I started to run again.

We re-joined humanity at Haight Street. You couldn’t ask for a better, louder wake up call. The fans cheering us on were nutty. The storefronts were bizarre. The music was loud and perfect. I could have run there forever and certainly, by the end of that steep downhill at mile 19, I felt like I had.

Miles twenty to twenty-three were urban and somewhat blighty. Nothing I hadn't been running on for decades. As I cruised that part of the city I got talking with the runner next to me, a California woman who travels to Boston every year to cheer on her qualifier husband. She talked about wanting to run the Boston Marathon too, one day. I told her about my connection with the American Liver Foundation and said a nationwide organization like that would be a perfect Boston charity for her.

Then she told me about her sister, who died from liver disease complications brought on by diabetes. She said running on behalf of ALF would be a perfect fit for her. We marveled at fate, and talked about how strange it was to run into one another when we both shared such an important commonality. As we parted, I couldn't help but feel strong, even though the landscape was bleak and my legs minutes earlier had felt so worn out. Marathons are magic that way.

The miles passed pretty quickly, as I thought about this kind runner and all the neat people I'd met these few days on the left coast. Before I was ready, I hit mile twenty-four and we were back at the bay, Oakland off in the distance, past freighters so close I wanted to run up and touch them. Then we ran around AT&T Park and there ahead of me, was the Bay Bridge and the marathon start where Pedro and I had chatted for a good twenty minutes, then the finish line banner just beyond.

I turned up my headset which, weirdly, was playing my latest psych song, Rachel Platten's "Fight Song," then heard a familiar voice call “Mom!” There was my favorite sight of all, my daughter. She was cheering me on from the sidelines. She’d finished much earlier, walked the mile uphill to the hotel, showered, changed and, legs stiff and worn out, had walked the mile back to watch me cross the finish line. Which I did.

The next hours and days were a blur. We spent the rest of our time in San Francisco walking everywhere and eating everything and saying to each other, “Did we really run a marathon in San Francisco?” The whole thing felt like a dream to me.

My daughter, who is speedy, would say, “Well I know I did.”

And from me, the slow poke: “Well, I sort of did.”

I left my quads in San Francisco. And a little bit of my heart too. What a great time!

State: #10, which means I get to join the 50 States Club!!!!!!!

Marathons: 19