2011 Bay to Breakers

This race pretty much went exactly as planned and not in a good way.


The husband and I met up with a couple friends at 6am and took muni downtown. We made a quick port-a-potty stop, there were like zero lines, and headed to our corral.  After getting hit in the head numerous times with tortillas, the race started. It took about 5 minutes to get to starting line.


I was feeling a bit anxious, like I knew I shouldn't be running seven miles, but the first few miles went OK. There were just way too many people! I felt like the whole race I was in a game of frogger, trying to get around the slow people in front of me. 


We saw some fun costumes, the salmon running the opposite way, and some naked people. Around mile 4.5, I started to feel pain in my hip. I tried to ignore it but i knew it wasn't a good sign. At this point I was also feeling a bit fatigued and it felt really hard to keep my pace, even though I finished with negative splits? Maybe it was just mental. My head was just not in it. I didn't want to be out there and, I just wanted my medal. Once we saw the ocean, I knew we were approaching the finish line and I was SO happy.  I finished with a time I was happy with, 1:13:59, like thirty seconds from a PR. IT might have helped if I had checked my 12K PR time before the race. I definitely PR'd on the course, since last time I ran B2B was 5 years ago and my time was 1:35:xx.  Of course, after we finished we had to walk forever to get our medals. Compared to the T-shirt, which we picked up at the expo, the medals were super nice. Since we already had our T-shirts, there was no reason to go to the footstock. So we headed out of the park to catch muni home. 


So now I know that the SF half is definitely out of the question. My hip pain is way out of control. This week I'm going to take the week off running, get in some cross training, and foam roll like crazy. I'm pretty bummed about this hip issue but luckily I was smart and didn't sign up for any summer races, so I can take it easy. Not sure the medal was worth it, oh well....