Tidbit: sore glutes and achy thighs

It was a pretty busy weekend involving a visit by a fraternity brother currently living in California and a super-half marathon.

The visit from the fraternity brother resulted in two late nights and a realization of how old we are, or conversely, how young we once were. Anyway, it was a great break from the doldrums that normally define my weekends and involved drinking, Guitar Hero, and a trip to Cowgirl Inc (a bar whose concept I don't get - if you have seen the movie Coyote Ugly than you have a pretty good idea of the place: packed, full of men staring at women dancing on the bar, and bouncers pushing you around. Some of my friend love the place but I just don't get it.)

Despite late nights on Friday and Saturday, I woke up at 5:45 Sunday morning so that I could run a half marathon at 7 AM. It was an experiment by Nike to allow users of their Nike+ technology (their partnership device with the Apple Ipod) to run a marathon in conjunction with the Women's Marathon in San Francisco. The event was coordinated by the great running store, Road Runner Sports. The store staff hosted the event, mapped out a course, provided us with aid/water stations on the course, and made the marathon seem like more than just a training run. The event, however, wasn't very well publicized and only 6 or 7 people showed up to run Sunday morning. The store manager has said 20 or so signed up. Despite the attendance issue, it was a great event with one little caveat.

I called it a super half marathon because of a mistake by the course planner that made the 13.1 mile course into a 15.1 mile course. So, it was a half marathon plus 2 miles. I had thought something was wrong when I realized before the turn around that I had already ran 6 miles and I still would have to do 6 miles back and run a 2+ miles loop around Greenlake. Regardless, I ran the whole course (I came in 1st by the way) and mentioned to the store manager that I thought the course seemed long. He cheerfully admitted to me the mistake. It was a pretty funny in retrospect. In the end, I managed to do it a little over 2 hours and averaged a 8.25 min/mile pace. Not to bad for my first super half marathon and it came with a Nike t-shirt and Tiffany key chain for my wife.