Track your travel

Want to know how far you ran? Kinda cool, but time consuming as you click on every turn to mark your course. Ah the beauty of google maps. the gmaps-pedometer.

Why does it hurt so much? Or my shoes are too loose.

You know the comedy of errors I mentioned below? Here's a new one. a real error. An Uff-Da. But I was better off for it.

Thanksgiving weekend I went home to San Francisco. I had plans to leave Saturday so as to avoid the traffic hell that I was bound to run into driving south to LA on Sunday. So that means my final SF training run will be on Saturday. Not with my normal group, which bums me out. But I can accept it. I went to bed early on Friday night so I could get up at 6am to get to the site by 7am. Well, I got to the site at 7am and no one was there. I mean no one. Then I realized. Oh yeah. In SF the training runs are at 8am. The 7am runs are only in LA. D'OH!@! Like hell I was gonna sit around for an hour and wait for everyone. Instead I decide to drive to the Marina to go running. I know lots of people go there to run. Might be a nice change of venue. Then I realize I can do the thing that I missed out with the 26 miles group run. I now have an opportunity to run over the Golden Gate bridge. FINALLY!

I start running. All is well, except my ITband starts to hurt early. Then I notice something. My shoes are a little loose. I tighten them some. Hey. That really helped my ITB. You mean I have been running with my shoes too loose? Damn! I doubt that is the only thing going on cuz even now, Sunday night, my knee still hurts. But it certainly helped some. So did the knee brace that I put on. and the ibuprofen and the acupuncture and the massage and the stretching and holistic healer and the Reiki and the Chinese herbs and....Ok. So that list is not completely real. Can you guess which ones I made up and haven't actually used?

I continue running. and run from the marina to Fort Point and up over golden gate bridge and through t he presidio a little bit and back down to the marina and fort Mason. All in all 12 miles. Some pain. All manageable. 120 minutes on the button. That includes piss breaks and stretch breaks too. Which for how I have been training is really good.
it was really interesting running a long run like this by myself. I really learned a lot about running and what I am capable of doing. The group has been great in nurturing me and helping me to build myself up. But running on my own I can spread my wings a little more and do what I am comfortable doing.

not 26 miles.

I have been dealing with chronic ITband pain ever since my 23 mile run, that I never finished. I have done a couple of group 10 mile runs in SF and LA. This has made running painful. I was already to be healed when one day I created a comedy of errors.
Two weeks ago There was a group run of 26 miles. This is a huge event for AIDS marathon and all the different teams in each region get together to run as one group. All the people in the bay area come up to San Francisco to run. Everyone in LA goes to Griffith park to run. It is a big deal. I thought the run was on Sunday, cuz that is when I always train. I realized on the day before the run that I was wrong. Oops. The run is on Saturday. I cant do Saturday and travel to San Francisco and this was an SF weekend. So what do I do? Skip the run or skip SF? I skipped the run because I told a friend I would take him to SF. I mean I guess I coulda made it, but I get in to SF at 3am, and would have only gotten 1.5 hours of sleep before having to get up again. Ain't gonna do it. Instead I went down to the site on Saturday around noon when I knew my pace group would be getting in. Of course I was late and missed them entirely.
So instead I ran on Sunday by myself. I was bummed to miss the group run because it is fun to run with my friends that I have been training with for last 5 months. The route looked like fun too -- going through the Presidio and over the golden gate bridge. Our other training runs in SF were never that fun. :-/ But now, on my own, on Sunday afternoon, I knew there was no way I was gonna be able to run 26 miles and leave by 6pm for LA. Instead I chose to run to the GG bridge from my house in the Mission. Of course I just picked the route randomly and totally forgot about the huge hill I was going to hit. Gough street hill is a over a mile straight up, both ways. Oops. By the time I had gotten to the marina, I realized there was no way I was even gonna make it to the bridge in time and turned around and headed home.
total distance. 9 miles. Ok. Not 26 miles. But better than nothing. And I was by myself with no iPod.