Marathon Me

So after all of the controversy over result of the Nike Women’s marathon, today we have a guest post from the offical winner herself, Nora Colligan.

Nike Women’s Marathon Race Report:

Earlier this year, one of my friends decided it would be fun to have a girl’s weekend in San Francisco and run the Nike Women’s Marathon.  We all signed up and five of us made it to the starting line of either the half or full marathon.  Originally I wasn’t planning on racing this marathon, but as I got into shape, I decided to try to break the 3-hour barrier once again.   In the future, I won’t be trying to set any PR’s in the hills of San Francisco!   The morning of the race, the weather was about 55 degrees and cloudy as it usually is in the Bay area.  The race started early, 6:40am, so we were running in the dark for about 40 minutes.  Around the Presidio and Golden Gate bridge area, the sun came up just in time for all the hills…at least the scenery was beautiful!   I felt pretty good through the hills, my pace slowed a little, I just tried to maintain an even effort through this part of the course.      Around mile 12, the half marathoners veered off towards the finish and marathoners kept going through the hills of golden gate park.  This is also the point where the pace car picked me up, it was a pretty cool feeling running behind a pace car except for the fact that it had a big time clock mounted on the back.  A marathon takes a long time to run, and it seems to take even longer when you watch the seconds click by.  I felt great through about 20 or 21 miles and then my legs started to cramp a bit.  It was tough to resist the urge to eat a square of chocolate at the Ghiradelli stop and get a pedicure along the way, but somehow I managed.    Over the next 5 miles, my pace slowed a bit, I just kept trying to focus on turning my legs over to keep the cramps from getting worse.  With about a half a mile left, my friend’s dad was alongside the course cheering and told me nobody was in sight, this was the biggest relief of the day.  Breaking the tape was by far the best moment of the entire race; they even let me keep it.  The race had a great finish line party, complete with firemen dressed in tuxedos and tiffany finisher necklaces.   The rest of the day I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.   I didn’t find out about the controversy until the next afternoon while we were wine tasting in Napa.  It’s funny because I almost made the same mistake not starting with the elite section, if my friend hadn’t switched to the half about a month before the marathon, I would have never known about the elite section.    -Nora

Here’s to you Nora.  Congrats on a great race!

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