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.