San Francisco Trip Recap, Saturday 10/21/2006, Part 2

Here we are in front of Niketown. You can see a crowd of people gathered there on the sidewalk. On the wall of Niketown, all the names of the marathon participants were listed and people were posing in front and having other people take pictures of them pointing to their name. It was a little crazy.


Here's another picture of us from a different angle so you can see the big billboard that Nike put up on the top of the store:


Here's a picture of us in front of Niketown from later in the day when it was less hectic:


And here's a picture of my name on the wall. (Look in the middle.)


Inside, Niketown was just as loud and crazy as the day before but it was easier to navigate without children. I bought a marathon shirt and discovered that the heat press station was a place where you could think up a phrase (15 characters or less) and the Nike people would print it on your shirt for free. That sounded like fun but I couldn't think of anything so I took my purchase and went back to the hotel room to drop it off.

I then met Maura (the Team In Training Campaign Director from Syracuse), Harland (our coach), Linda, Ellen and Alicia (three participants from the Syracuse area that I hadn't met before) and we all walked to the Moscone Center for the Pasta Party. The Pasta Party is a Team In Training pre-raceday event where you gather with hundreds (thousands?) of other participants to share a meal (of pasta plus more), listen to some encouraging words, and hear the story of someone who has suffered from a blood cancer.

Our sitting (there were two more after ours) was at 12:15. Lunch was good--dark green salad, three different kinds of pasta, whole-wheat rolls, and fruit--and our group was seated near the front of the huge room so we had a good view of the speakers. Someone from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society spoke first, then Joan Benoit Samuelson (the Nike Women's Marathon began as a way to honor Joan Benoit Samuelson, the first American women to win an Olympic medal in the marathon), and then a man from Texas and his two children.

What started out as an encouraging story--the man's wife was diagnosed with cancer, was aggressively treated, he joined Team In Training, she went into remission, they planned their family trip to San Francisco--took an incredibly sad turn when he went on to say that his wife, at only 28 years old, had had a relapse and had died just six weeks earlier.

To see the struggles his wife had endured and to see him stand up there with his two young children, after all he had been through and was still going through, and have a sense of humor and encourage the rest of us to have a good race the next day was really an inspiration. It definitely put the whole race in perspective and made the idea of running 26.2 miles much less daunting than it had been a few hours before.

After the pasta party, I met Braman and the kids in Yerba Buena Gardens. By then, Nora was asleep in the stroller so we walked around a little more, had tea and treats at Citizen Cupcake (I had a delicious lemon cupcake filled with lemon curd, topped with lemon frosting and decorated with a meringue straw), then checked out another store on my paper list, Stacey's. I bought a few more cards (including one with cherry tomatoes, Nora's favorite) and Larsson picked out two new books.

Since Friday had taken such a toll on my feet, I had planned to spend as much of Saturday sitting down as I could. But San Francisco is such a fun city and we weren't there for very long so it was just too tempting to walk around and see as much as we could. My left foot was really sore, though, and numb after the day's activities so I iced it a few times that night after we got back to the hotel room and made sure to take Naproxen and Tylenol.

I was starting to get worried about the marathon so I did as much preparing before bed as I could. I set the alarm clock for 4:45am, pinned my number on my shirt, folded my shirt, shorts, and socks and put them in a pile with my hat, iPod, BodyGlide, GU, the transportation wristband I'd need for the shuttle from the finish line back to Union Square, and the Naproxen and Tylenol I would need for the next day.

I knew I'd need to eat breakfast, hopefully oatmeal, the next day so we confirmed that the Lori's Diner on Mason Street was open 24 hours and served oatmeal. I felt like there wasn't anything left to do so I tried to relax and get some sleep before the big day.

San Francisco Trip Recap, Saturday 10/21/2006, Part 1

Saturday morning we all got up early and had breakfast at Lori's Diner. This is a 50s-style diner with three locations in Union Square. The food was good (I had french toast-yum!) but pricey as are most things in San Francisco. We forgot Larsson didn't like freshly-squeezed orange juice and had to order him cran juice again.

Then we headed over to the Nike Expotique in the actual square part of Union Square. Big races like these usually have Expos, held in big places like convention centers, with lots of different vendors and free stuff.

Nike set up a series of tents in Union Square with different slogans like Feel Like a Girl (free manicures, etc.), Run Like Girl (gait analysis on a treadmill, pace calculators, free bottles of water, free postcards, sneaker testing, free Luna bars and Luna lip balm) and Shop Like a Girl (you can guess what was in there.) My foot hurt so I didn't want gait analysis, but I did get some free water and a postcard that I mailed to myself as a memento of the race. I didn't think the Expotique was terrible but it wasn't very exciting either. I guess I'll have to do another race to get the real Expo experience.

After the Expotique, Braman and the kids and I parted company. I needed to meet my group from Team In Training at 11:15 at their hotel so that we could all walk over to the Pasta Party together and Braman and Larsson and Nora were eager to start doing something fun.

Since it was only about 10:15, I went into Niketown by myself to check things out and the family headed over to the California Academy of Sciences to see fish and dinosaurs and other fun things.

Before they left, though, I made Braman take some pictures for the blog.

San Francisco Trip Recap, Friday 10/20/2006, Part 3

Before we left for our trip, I made a short list of paper stores I was hoping to visit, complete with addresses, phone numbers and store hours. In our room, the hotel provided an 8 1/2 x 11" map of San Francisco and Braman and I used the addresses from my list to mark the locations on the map. There were five stores that were in fairly close proximity to the Exploratorium.

We started out walking and visited Books, Inc. and Paper Source on Chestnut Street and Union Street Papery on Union Street.

I bought one card in Books, Inc. plus some postcards to send, nothing in Paper Source (this was mostly a curiousity stop to see if this store was much like the ones in Boston and Cambridge and it was), and a bunch of cards in Union Store Papery. I might have gotten more but it is a small store and Braman was trying to entertain Nora outside while I shopped and she got sick of this quickly and came tottering in by herself. Once I was holding her my shopping time was pretty limited.

Larsson had fallen asleep shortly after Books, Inc., and we were pushing him in the stroller while we carried Nora or let her walk. We were all tired after this walking and the next two stores were near each other but about 9 blocks away from where we were in a neighborhood called Russian Hill. They are not kidding about the hill so we took the bus there to visit Russian Hill Bookstore and Polk A Dot Stationers.

On our last trip to San Francisco, we had visited both of these stores and had great success at each so I was looking forward to going to them again. The stop at Russian Hill Bookstore did not disappoint and I found a bunch of great cards, including pirate cards for Larsson's next birthday and several cards with violins on them should we ever need to send personal correspondence to Larsson's violin teacher.

Sadly, although I thought I had all the information I needed, I should have called ahead to verify my facts since we discovered, after walking uphill to find it, that Polk A Dot Stationers had gone out of business. This was especially sad since the last time we were there I had found some interesting cards that I haven't seen anywhere else and they were cheap, too, for letterpress cards.

But I didn't mind quite as much as I could have since by then my left foot was really bothering me and quite numb from all the walking around. We gratefully got back on the bus which left us off quite close to our hotel.

With all my blathering about our day, you might have forgotten the purpose of our trip so I will now say that we arrived back in Union Square in time for me to pick up my race packet at Niketown.

Nike, naturally, is the host of the Nike Women's Marathon, and Niketown, a 7-story store on the corner of Post and Stockton streets in Union Square was making a big deal about the race. We were almost instantly deafened by the dj music as we entered the store. They had redone the store directory for the weekend so I could tell that packet pick-up was on the 4th floor, the Espresso Cart and Runner's General Store (stocked with things like GU and BodyGlide) were on the 5th floor and Marathon merchandise and the Heat Press station were on the 3rd floor.

Since we had the stroller, we took the elevator to the 4th floor. I picked up my bag and my number (but not my t-shirt which you only get when you finish), had my chip activated and we left. There were hordes of women in that store intent on purchasing a lot of Nike stuff and it was too crowded and loud, and we were too tired, to look around. But it was exciting to finally have my number and official race stuff in hand and I felt like I was actually going to run a marathon in two days.

We walked back down the hill later to have dinner again at Westfield Centre and then took the cable car back up to our hotel. Thank goodness it was a short ride because it turned out that Nora hated cable cars. I thought she would enjoy looking out at where we were going but instead she screammed, "No! No!" as we jerkily climbed our way up the hill. Larsson had a good time, though, but we didn't try cable cars again on our trip.

I iced my foot and my knee that night and hoped that neither of them would be a problem on race day.

San Francisco Trip Recap, Friday 10/20/2006, Part 2

After the Exploratorium, we walked over to Crissy Field where we walked on the beach and enjoyed a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

(I should mention here that the temperatures in SF while we were there were very warm, in the 70s and 80s. We hadn't expected those highs and so hadn't packed shorts for the kids, though it turns out they would have been appropriate, but thankfully had a few short-sleeved shirts. That afternoon there were lots of people walking around and even quite a few people lying on the beach in bathing suits.)

The sun was bright and the kids didn't feel like posing for the camera. They did their best but they mostly just wanted to poke around in the sand.






I don't know what came over me but I asked the kids if they wanted to walk a little bit in the water. So we took off our shoes, rolled up our pants and dipped our feet in San Francisco Bay. Nora, who is sensitive to cold, cried right away and wanted to get out.

While I was bringing her back to Braman (who had sensibly kept his sneakers on), Larsson ventured further into the water and got the bottom of his pants wet. He looked cute and it was scenic with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background so I went to get the camera to take his picture. Turns out that wasn't such a great idea because, while I was doing that, Larsson went a little further out, and, not being familiar with waves and how how the land can slope down, got soaked up to the top of his thighs and almost lost his balance and fell in.

Here we are before it all went wrong:


Here is Larsson on his way to get soaked:


And here he is all wet and sandy:


Of course, this was the one time we forgot to pack extra outfits for the kids so Braman wrung out Larsson's pants, Larsson put them back on and, at about 3pm, we finally began paper shopping.

San Francisco Trip Recap, Friday 10/20/2006, Part 1

I love to buy notecards (and send the ones I can bear to part with) and San Francisco is a card-buying Mecca. Since we live in the sticks where it is not so easy to buy fancy cards, I was anxious to get out and get shopping.

But I am also a mother of two small children who had just endured a long, tedious plane flight to the other side of the country so that I could run a marathon so I put aside my own consumer urges and we spent Friday morning and part of the afternoon at the Exploratorium, a fantastic kids' science museum with lots of hands-on exhibits.

Actually, we started off the morning by having breakfast at Sears Fine Food, a restaurant well-known for breakfast and conveniently located right next door to our hotel. I must have been really tired because I can't even remember what I had but I remember that Braman and the kids shared pancakes and Larsson discovered that he doesn't like freshly-squeezed orange juice and had to order a second drink of cranberry juice instead.

After going back to the hotel and packing the backpack full of essentials like diapers and wipes, books for the kids, stickers, crayons and other entertainment, we walked down to the corner of Powell and Market so that we could take a Powell-Hyde line cable car towards the Exploratorium. (I say toward instead of to because the cable car routes are limited and we still would have had to take a bus once we got off the cable car near Ghirardelli Square.)

Taking a cable car to go to the museum seemed a little crazy to begin with since it wouldn't actually bring us to our destination but Larsson had seen them going up and down the street in front of our hotel and really wanted to take a ride on one. However, it seemed extra crazy once we got down to the stop and saw how many other tourists were waiting in line so we ended up taking the bus. (Handy Braman had purchased a municipal transit map from the bookstore next to our hotel so we knew which route to get on and where to pick up the bus.)

We finally made it to the Exploratorium, spent a few hours there and had a great time. (What made the visit even better was that we got in FREE as part of our reciprocal membership with our local kids' science museum, the Sciencenter.) The Exploratorium is housed in a huge open, industrial-looking space and the lighting is not great for taking pictures. But here are a few from the baby play area where Braman built a cage for the kids:

It started out innocuously enough where Larsson and Nora were both helping to build.


Then started to become an enclosure for Nora.


Then Larsson wanted to enclose them both completely inside.


But Nora became scared...


...and busted out.

San Francisco Trip Recap, Thursday 10/19/2006

We left the house at 7am on Thursday morning to drive 2 1/2 hours to Buffalo for our 11:30 flight. This was Larsson's third time on an airplane but Nora's first. Here they are on the first leg of the journey, from Buffalo to Philadelphia. Nora was excited to sit in her own seat for a little while and click the buckle:


This is how Larsson interpreted "look excited":


After a brief layover in Philadelphia, we flew on to San Francisco. The flight was long but the kids were good travellers and we finally arrived in SF at about 5:30pm, west coast time.

We had decided not to rent a car so we took the train from the airport to downtown San Francisco. Between the infernally slow airport tram to the train station, waiting for the train, and the train trip itself, it took us about 2 hours to travel what would have been about 30 minutes in a car.

Fortunately, the train stop at Union Square is on Market Street in the bottom of a large shopping complex with a food court. Since you can't eat well on a plane, we were hungry by then and couldn't imagine trying to go out again once we checked into the hotel so, with all our luggage and two tired, hungry kids, we navigated a crowded, fancy (this is upscale shopping) food court to find some dinner. I got Thai food, Braman and the kids shared pizza and then we walked ten minutes uphill on Powell Street to our hotel. Larsson was excited to be out at night, in the dark, and to see all the bright city lights and crowds of people.

We stayed at the Chancellor Hotel. When we went to SF two years ago, we stayed here and found it to be a nice, relatively inexpensive place so we didn't hesitate to make reservations here again. We checked in, went up to our room, and all fell asleep without too much trouble after our long, busy day.

Goodbye, San Francisco!

I felt sick most of Sunday after the race (too much GU?) and yesterday we spent the day visiting the Aquarium of the Bay, gawking at huge dungeness crabs on Fisherman's Wharf and eating ice cream at Ghirardelli Square so I haven't had a chance to update.

We're leaving the hotel at 10:30am and won't get into Buffalo until 11:30pm so today will be a wash, too. But here's a picture of me the night before the race in my official Team In Training shirt:


and one right after I finished:

The race ended on the Great Highway right next to the Pacific Ocean. It was foggy and breezy and I was very glad to be sitting down and wrapped in my space blanket to keep me warm.

We took pictures of us doing things in SF (the kids near the Golden Gate Bridge, in Union Square, etc.), during the race and after the race so there is definitely more to post and more to write about. I'll try to start on Wednesday if we can manage to get Larsson to school. With jet lag and our late arrival this may be difficult but stay tuned.

I did it!

Today I finished the Nike Women's Marathon in 5 hours, 56 minutes and 25 seconds. Given all the uncertainty I had in the three weeks before the marathon, I am grateful to have finished and am very happy.

My knee felt fine but I am sore all over and very tired. I'll try to write more tomorrow and post some pictures from our trip.

Leaving for San Francisco!

I think my knee is better but it's hard to tell because I haven't been running. So I'm going to run the marathon on Sunday after not having done any running for 3 weeks. At least it will be interesting.

We're going to start packing soon (I don't know why but we always wait until the last minute) and will hopefully have everything ready before we have to drive to Buffalo at 6:30 tomorrow morning for our 11:30 flight to San Francisco.

We're bringing a laptop with us to SF so I plan to update on Sunday after the race.

Wish me luck!

Tried Again...

Braman took the kids out for the morning so that I could try to get the house organized and we can start getting ready for our trip.

Since the point of our trip is for me to run a marathon, I thought I'd see if I could run yet. So I got dressed, walked down to the 3-mile-course starting point, and started to run. While I have been walking and moving without pain, when I started to run, I felt a little something. And when I kept running, that something intensified. So I stopped.

Dr. Getzin said to try running this weekend and email him on Monday. I guess I'll just see if there's something else he can do for me.

To save money, Braman booked our flight to leave out of Buffalo. Oops. I hope they don't get two more feet of snow before Thursday.

Up But Not Yet Running

I haven't written in my blog for a week because I haven't been running.

After last Tuesday's elliptical machine workout, my left knee started to feel sore. It felt worse later in the day. I rested on Wednesday and then tried unsuccessfully to run on Thursday. I rested for a few more days, tried to run unsuccessfully on Monday and then made another appointment with Dr. Getzin, the sports medicine doctor.

I saw him yesterday and he diagnosed my problem as runner's knee. Evidently my muscles get tired and can't control the movement of the knee cap. Then the knee cap moves around and aggravates the cartilage and then I have pain.

Like plantar fasciitis, runner's knee can also be an overuse injury so this is probably my body's way of telling me that it wasn't quite ready to run 20 miles. But since I had a sharp pain when I tried to run on Thursday but a lesser pain when I tried to run on Monday, Dr. Getzin feels that I am healing pretty well and have a good chance of being able to run the marathon.

This is good because I just found out that I only have 6 1/2 hours to run it. People who are walking and who think it will take them longer than that have to start at 5:30 while everyone else starts at 7:00. Since I estimated it would take me 5 hours to run the race, I was placed in the 7:00 start group and don't have the option to change it now. After 1:30, the roads are opened back up to traffic and a van comes along and picks up stragglers. So if it turns out that I'm not able to run much, I will have to walk the course in 6 1/2 hours. Which I'm not sure I can do. So keep your fingers crossed that my knee pain is all gone by the 22nd.

I'm now to ice my knee as well as my foot and continue to take the anti-inflammatory medication. Keep resting and do cross-training if possible. But since my Fitness Station membership expires today and I have no desire to renew it, I don't think I'm going to be doing much cross-training. I have a knee sleeve that I've been wearing around the house. It feels pretty comfortable. Dr. Getzin thinks it may help my knee cap remember which way to go so it is worth a try.

I'm going to try to run again on Friday and see how it goes. I'm hoping to join everyone for the last group run (8 miles) on Saturday. But if it still hurts a little, I'll just wait and hope it's better for the big day.

55 Minutes on the Elliptical Machine

This week is the beginning of the taper, which means that the weekly mileage only goes down to give your body time to recover before the marathon. This week's schedule is 5-8-4 miles on T-W-Th and then 12 miles on Saturday.

Today I got to The Fitness Station at 6am when they opened and used the elliptical machine for 55 minutes to approximate running for 5 miles. I always feel funny using the machine and then really funny when I get off and try to walk around. But it's done.

I'd like to run outside tomorrow for the 8 miles but I'm not sure if I can squeeze it in in the daylight before Larsson goes to school.