Published November 14th, 2009
2009 Nike Women’s Marathon
I’m no girly-girl, yet when one of my Maniac friends asked if I wanted to put my name in the Nike Women’s Marathon lottery hat, I jumped at the chance. After all, who can pass up the opportunity to get a Tiffany necklace handed out by a hunky firefighter? My darling also needed little convincing; while the necklace held no sway, the chance to run with 25,000 women was trés appealing (he’ll give his necklace to his mom).
In an “all for one, one for all” move, we registered as a group under a friend’s email address. If that got chosen, we were all in (there were at least six of us in our group). As with my Boston registration, I started checking my online credit card statement daily to see if it had been charged, and sure enough, on March 21 I saw it go through. Woo hoo!
While this would be yet another big-ticket item (we already had the Goofy Challenge and Boston scheduled for the year), since it’s a west coast race we figured we could make do with a whirlwind trip — fly down Saturday morning, fly out Sunday evening after the race. I found an extremely cheap hotel just blocks from the start in Union Square through Hotels.com; while I would never want to stay there on vacation, it was fine for a basic place to crash.
Given my time goal for Portland, I was quite regimented with my nutrition. I laid off the hooch and made sure I ate healthy lean protein and carbs in the days leading up to the race. But with Nike? Hell — I was running for fun! There was no way I was going to miss out on the culinary delights San Francisco has to offer.
