This week’s #ThursdayVibes is a #runnerspotlight on @cb_runnerchic 

In an amazing feat, Celeste ran FIFTY half marathons in FIFTY states! We’re honored to have been the last leg of her race, pun definitely intended. Here’s what Celeste had to say:

“I am a person who has fallen in love with running later in life. To date I’ve run 75 half marathons, 5 marathons, 1 ultra marathon, and 2 sprint triathlons. I’ve been running since 2012, when I started with the Couch 2 5k. I was struggling with depression and the endorphins from working out were my incentive to keep showing up. Once I ran my first 5k I was hooked. I joined several local running groups and enjoyed the social aspect of running. I also was inspired to run longer distances and started running half marathons. Couple that with always wanting to visit all 50 states so the goal to run in all 50 states seemed like the perfect goal. I started in 2013 and finished in 2021. I think the hardest parts were trying not to do too much and finding the right balance of smart training while enjoying the journey. I always tell runners to enjoy the moments, the people, and the places. It’s been a fun goal and I have so many great, unforgettable memories. Next, I want to run one more marathon; my dream and goal is to run the NYC Marathon in 2022.”

In addition to being a phenomenally inspiring runner, Celeste works remotely for tech company, Lucidworks HQ here in San Francisco, check out this beautiful display of community with her co-workers cheering her on! Thank you for sharing your joy of the sport with us and we can’t wait to see where your journey takes you next! See you in July for the #45thFinishLine! Support Celeste as one of our newest ambassadors by giving her a follow!

#sfmarathon #45thFinishLine

The post #ThursdayVibes Week Two: Runner Spotlight – Celeste appeared first on The San Francisco Marathon.

Lexxi Conroy

“If you’ve never run this race before, you are missing out!” A direct quote from Felicia Canales, a loyal runner to the San Francisco Marathon for the past six years. Felicia and her SoCal sisters, Shelley and Gayle (who are actual sisters!) return year after year from Anaheim and Los Angeles just to soak in the beauty of views and sites on course. 

Despite overcoming a breast cancer diagnosis in 2016, Felicia knew she wanted to continue to experience the joy and beauty the race brings her every year. She deferred her race and came back the next year, just as in awe of the gifts Mother Nature bestows. 

Together, Felicia and Shelley participate in our Half It All Challenge by running the half marathon, as well as the Double Up Challenge by running the 5K along with it! After showing her sister Gayle how amazing the half marathon experience was, Gayle decided to take her own adventure at running both the first and second halves before deciding 5K is her golden distance. 

Shelley says, “The SF Marathon is my go to destination race. I have participated for seven years in a row…love the beautiful and challenging courses, the variety of races and challenges offered for all levels, and the extremely competent organization that goes into this event. I am loyal forever!”

As if running together, soaking in the enchanting scenes of San Francisco wasn’t enough already, Shelley and Felicia made the absolute most of their time on course, running alongside and assisting one of our wheelchair athletes up some of the steepest hills Mother Nature has to offer! Here’s what Shelley had to say:

“Helping out Scotty on the course was such a positive and rewarding experience! Felicia and I saw him struggling a bit with the long uphill stretch once we passed the Golden Gate Bridge between miles 6-7. I did not want to offend him, but I wanted to offer him assistance. I asked if he could use a little assistance and his eyes lit up. We took turns pushing him up the gravelly portions of the course and had great conversations! He was such a trooper and we were so happy to be of assistance!” You can hear more from all three ladies in our Youtube interview, linked below!

Here at the San Francisco Marathon, we strive to gift our runners the beauty of an entire city and long for them to feel pure joy while soaking it all in. The SoCal Sisters truly embodied that and we’re honored they continue to share that experience with us year after year. 

See you in 2022, ladies!

Pictured here are Shelley Merrill (left), Gayle Heifetz (right), and Felicia Canales (center) with their Half It All, Double Up, and participation medals! That’s a lot of bling for one race weekend! Wanna be next up to earn it? Click here to find out more: https://www.thesfmarathon.com/2022-challenges-overview/

The post #ThursdayVibes Week One: Meet the SoCal Sisters appeared first on The San Francisco Marathon.

It’s finally here. The final week before your marathon. How are you feeling? Nervous? Excited? Worried? A mixture of all three?
Some of you will show up this week with a pop in your stride. The runs feel easy. Your training went well – perhaps not perfectly – but very well. Your main struggle this week is holding yourself back.
I’ve been there.
Others of you will show up tired. Training was difficult and you faced a number of challenges. Maybe the runs do not feel easy. Maybe you are starting to get worried. Maybe the race begins to loom in your mind and it seems almost insurmountable. You begin to wonder whether you can do it.
I’ve been there, too.
From personal experience I can say: sometimes you feel as ready as you’ll ever be and sometimes you feel decidedly unready. And while the former is infinitely preferable to the latter, I can also say from experience that you can begin your final week sore and worn-out and broken down, and still show up on race day and perform at your highest level.
How to Train This Week:
Keep your runs short and easy. Not too short. Run an easy tempo workout 4-5 days before your marathon. I recommend you run or cross-train every single day – as long as you keep it light. I also recommend taking the day off 2 days before your race to do some light cross training (biking is my go-to, but elliptical is great too).
The day before your race, run a short run, maybe 3-5 miles at an easy pace. Do not take the day off completely.
This is not the week to show off how fast you can run during easy runs. You may need to hold yourself back.
How to Prepare:
Sleep is your priority this week. You want to bank as much sleep as you can this week. I would aim for 10 hours every night. The most important night will be 2 nights before your race. The night before will not matter much if you are already rested.
Focus on all the recovery practices you may have neglected during your training. Do not overdo it on the foam rolling, but definitely spend some quality time working out soreness and practicing physical therapy.
Eat right. This is not the week to do the Vermonster. In a few days, I will have one last post about how to eat the nights before the race.
Stay loose and mobile. Walk around. But avoid overly strenuous activities.
Avoid sedentariness. This is not the week to lie around with your feet on the couch.
How to Think:
Relax.
Whether you feel nervous or excited, you want to remain calm this week and avoid worrying. Some people recommend pre-race visualization. This works if you know what you are doing. If you don’t, it could lead to rumination. You definitely want to avoid ruminating.
If you find thinking about the race makes you worry (and if you have trouble relaxing), try to avoid thinking about it. Distraction is better than rumination if it helps you relax. As long as you are training right and preparing right, thinking about your race will not help you.
Finally, I think the best attitude to have this week is gratitude. Gratitude for the training. Gratitude for the opportunity to race. Gratitude for the physical health and ability to run. And gratitude towards everyone who supported you along the way. Not everyone gets a chance to run a marathon and not everyone can. Count yourself lucky.

The post How to Navigate the Final Week of Marathon Training appeared first on The San Francisco Marathon.

At the commencement of September, it is evident that autumn is near. Fall is, unequivocally, my favorite time of year. I surround myself with the sights, sounds, smells, and tastes of all things pumpkin-related, much to my husband’s chagrin. Yellow, orange, brown, and red are nowhere near being my typically favorite colors. At this time of year, they absolutely are! 

Despite my adoration at seeing these beautiful colors, we must be honest with ourselves and admit that they are signaling an end. Spring and summer bring back the bright greens on the leaves and grass to remind us of the emergence of life. On the opposite end, the burnt colorings of fall mean this is the end to something. The beautiful blooms of the previous two seasons are beginning to wither and decay, leading us into a period of dormancy through the long, cold winter ahead.

When viewed through this filter, autumn can seem downright depressing. So why do I love this particular season so much? Let’s count the ways.

First, we have, as previously mentioned, the resplendent colors! Nature really knows how to put on a show. The way they intermingle together, they seemingly dance with a vibrancy that warms the heart. The dark and ombre richness to the colors on the falling leaves brings to mind the comfort of a smoldering fire on a brisk, late-autumn evening. 

If you happen to live in a part of the world that is typically warmer, you may not get to experience these colors except through the artifice of the many fall decorations that grace the store shelves. This brings me to the second reason I love fall; a change in weather. Even in warmer climates, the searing summer heat becomes a bit more muted. The air turns crisper with the accompanying winds of change and the rains, a more frequent companion.

And finally, the last reason I love fall; the holiday season. Starting with Halloween and leading into Christmas (yes technically, this happens in the winter, but the buildup is decidedly a fall occurrence). You can feel the atmospheric change in the air through the people around you. This season brings about pure elation, most especially for children. Perhaps it is because I went from raising two children into adulthood, only to start again with my youngest who is now 4 but I love watching children experience such unadulterated joy.

Of course, my reasons for loving fall are quite optimistic and there may be plenty of people who hate fall for these very same reasons. For them, they may produce feelings not of joy, but of discontentedness. But that is my point…at face value, the beginning of an end to something sounds distressing. With the right perspective, joy can be found. Good can come from bad.

Marathon 2021

September is here and we are beginning the end of our marathon season. We have waited a long time for this to happen. This will be the first time running in person will be possible in over two years. While the changes brought about by the pandemic have been very distressing, we can find the good from within. 

I can only speak from a personal vantage point but my journey brought about by having the extra time to write for this blog has been one that has allowed me to make physical changes of my own. As I have discussed in my past entries, I made necessary changes to my exercise routine by working with a personal trainer. This was purely motivated by the fact that I would be writing to an audience of people that will have many different reasons for wanting to be a part of the San Francisco Marathon elite but ultimately have one thing in common; running. And when engaging in a running race, there will be conditioning of the body. Thus, I had to be willing to do the same to some degree in order to relate. 

There will also be conditioning of the mind, which is where my major hurdle lies. It is the fact that I have been unable to condition my mind to see an exercise plan through that has put me in this predicament. With my trainer friend, aka battle buddy, I am finally making progress.

A runner faces this very obstacle. Deciding to run the race is a very noble decision but it is only the beginning. It is not one for the faint of heart because he or she will have to condition the mind to accept a punishing commitment to run….often. Something that will take a toll on every person that is bold enough to make such a decision. The toll will be on the body, the brain, and even on the wallet. This initial decision will lead some into a lifetime commitment to run, furthering the overall toll it will take.

Where is the good in that?

As any seasoned veteran of running will tell you, there is no other feeling quite as rewarding as when you cross that finish line after a very arduous journey to get there. The same can be said just in the attempt, even if something occurs that prevents you from getting to that finish line. Just watch a few videos on YouTube of people that have run a marathon to see what I mean. From hearing about the many different reasons why people felt compelled to run a race to watching athletes help one another, you won’t be disappointed. The stories you will see are so inspiring, they may even bring tears to your eyes. They did mine. After all, it is the resilience of the human spirit that can remind us all that we are not alone, despite our vast differences. 

I have no doubts that the stories of each one of you running the SF Marathon in 2021 have an inspirational tale to tell of your journey. I only wish that I could hear these tales personally. I’m willing to bet that there are quite a few tales that exist only because of the loop that the pandemic has thrown us all into. Quite a few more will come about during the races and after they are done. The media might have you believing that everything is bad because of this pandemic but my willingness to take the aforementioned bet is because I have faith in the human condition. The one that can take a seemingly hopeless situation, like a pandemic, and churn out the good from within. 

Battle Buddy Step #12: Find the good within

The post Battle Buddy Series – A Prayer for Beginning the End appeared first on The San Francisco Marathon.

At last, we come to the final phase of training: tapering. For tired runners, ready for a rest after many weeks of high mileage and hard workouts, tapering comes as a welcome relief. For other runners, tapering feels paradoxically wrong; the runs feel too short to count and the newfound ease seems strangely uncomfortable. 

I have been in both camps. At times, worn out from relentless training, I welcomed tapering and a chance to rest. But when training went really well – when I felt good and crushed long runs and workouts – even a 5-mile dip in weekly mileage was a letdown. Sometimes – I suspect many runners experience this – tapering is a bit of both.

Every phase of training poses its own physical and psychological challenges. Weeks of struggling through fatigue and soreness take a mental toll. But so does holding yourself back when you feel good and want to run further and faster. For many driven, type-A runners, tapering poses a unique challenge. 

Navigating a Fine Line:

If you do not taper enough, you will enter your race sore, fatigued, and potentially nursing injuries. If you taper too much, you will show up on race day feeling sluggish and unready. 

The goal of tapering is to show up rested and ready. You want to balance resting enough to recover from hard training, with maintaining peak readiness and fitness gains. If you drop your mileage by 50% and stop performing any workouts, you will lose fitness. On the other hand, if you keep running 20-mile runs, you will arrive on race day with excess muscle damage in your legs.

A good rule of thumb is to start dropping your mileage about 5 weeks from your race, about 10% every two weeks. You would have a couple weeks at about 90% of peak mileage, a couple at 80%, and your final week would be 70-75% (including the race). At a later date, I plan to post about what to do in that final week.

As you drop your mileage, your workouts should shorten commensurately. They should also get easier. Shorter tempos, medium hill efforts, medium-length M-pace segments, and mixed M-pace and tempo-pace workouts. 

Outside of Running:

Much of your work during the tapering phase should come outside of running. Focus more than ever on nutrition and sleep (8-10 hours a night). Now that your runs take up less time, you have more time to devote to supplemental recovery work and mild strength training. Foam rolling, physical therapy (preventative or rehab for any minor injuries), pre-run mobility drills, post-run stretching, trigger point massage/self-myofascial release, etc.

This is also a good time to treat yourself to a sports massage. Tell your massage therapist that you have a race coming up. 

Avoid strenuous activities in these last weeks (long hikes, martial arts competitions, etc.), but stay loose and active. Keep walking around and using light cross training to keep your legs fresh. Now is not the time to spend hours a day on the couch. Again, the goal is to balance rest with readiness. Too much extra activity could hurt recovery. So could too little.

Finally, stop worrying. Tapering is when runners often begin experiencing pre-race nerves. Try to relax and avoid rumination. Keep your mindset positive. Remember the work you put in during training. Soon, you will have a chance to prove it worked.

The post Tapering appeared first on The San Francisco Marathon.

The last year and a half have seen more changes than an average year and a half for most, I suspect. I can say that that is true for me and my family. Truthfully, my average daily life began to change a little over four years ago and while the changes have mostly all been positive, a few things have been difficult. After I moved to Canada, I went from seeing my children daily while raising them as a single mom to watching them fly the coop and only seeing them every other month as I transitioned into a huge change for myself with the move to another country. All of this occurred with my newborn in tow.

Overall, the transition went smoothly with a few hiccups here and there. Life wouldn’t be real if those hiccups were not encountered on occasion. But I had gotten settled in. This “new” life quickly became my norm. I was able to see my two adult children fairly frequently, thanks to the mere three-hour driving distance away from each other, despite there being a country border between us. Often we would meet at a restaurant halfway and hang out for a bit, lessening the drive for either party (and the gas bill) so that we could do it more frequently.

Then Covid hit. Suddenly my new norm changed on a dime. The border crossing that was only seven miles away from my house in Canada swiftly closed shut and has remained so to this day on the US side. I had taken it for granted that it had always allowed me easy access to my adult children with a relatively short drive. Locked up with an active three-year-old (at the time) and having nowhere to go proved challenging. Suddenly the guilt of not seeing my older children and not doing enough for my youngest began to wear on my mental state.

Over the next year, I would go through more life transitions. A new movement began amongst women in my age bracket. Without access to their hairdressers, many women stopped dyeing their hair and eventually let the gray growth become their crowning glory. I had already become restless with dyeing my hair pre-Covid but becoming a mother again in my forties prevented me from seriously considering that option. Since I had started showing gray in my mid-twenties, I never let them see the light of day with my relentless hair dyeing. There was no telling what my true hair looked like. I had already been mistaken for my youngest daughter’s grandmother with my dyed hair whenever my oldest daughter was around (she was automatically assumed as mom), and I did not want grandma to be the everyday assumption. My youngest’s dad (my husband) already had a full head of gray so if I were to take the plunge too, I worried what my daughter would go through with both parents being assumed as her grandparents.

Now after fully taking the plunge, I see how vain and silly those thoughts were but I really had to work through them before I could take the next step. I realized neither decision was right or wrong but deciding on what would ultimately make me happiest was important. What wasn’t making me happy was the itchy scalp and increasing hair loss that drugstore dyes were leaving me with and the feeling that I had to dye my hair every 3 weeks to cover up. Not to mention that doing it never made me feel content and the brassiness I could not seem to conquer meant I was fooling no one.

After 5 months of no hair dye, I was having a hard time with the concept that I would be going through this painfully slow and obvious process over the next 2+ years if I wanted to keep the length in my hair. The dyed parts of my hair were turning the dreaded Blorange (blended orange) that I read about in my Going Gray support group on Facebook and was a stark contrast against my true salt and pepper roots. I was not down for that.

So, after putting my child to bed on a night my husband was working late, I was left alone to my own devices. A YouTube DIY tutorial video and a snip session later, I emerged with my fresh new short ‘do. I will tell you that for my entire adult life, I feared ever having short hair because of trauma resulting from being called a boy on more than one occasion when my hair was short as a child and also from being told I had masculine facial features. Imagine my surprise, when my new DIY haircut looked surprisingly complementary to my face shape and I didn’t feel like a “dude”. I actually liked it!

Unfortunately for me, I am left to my own devices all too often and the same antsy anticipation I experienced 4 months ago with that first haircut doesn’t always translate well with all my DIY experiments. There have been many a snip session since that first time in an attempt to get rid of ALL the blorange and then again, in an attempt to tame the grown-out thickness that began to resemble something of a mushroom cap. After too many times with my trusty scissors in hand, what I am left with is a little less than stellar and an uncertainty of where to go from here. A visit to the hairdresser may be in order soon but new Covid restrictions mean that that will have to wait. If you have learned nothing from reading my blogs, you must know this…I am not very good at waiting.

Oh and if I haven’t mentioned it in the past (ok, maybe I have), I gained a lot of weight during Covid. Between admitting that I am a normal, middle-aged woman with gray hair, gaining upwards of 35 lbs. and chopping my hair to smithereens, my confidence has taken a bit of a hit, as of late

It was my birthday a few days ago. My husband sweetly posted a message of love for me on Social Media that day. For more than a moment, instead of being grateful that my husband thought of me, I actually was feeling upset with him for tagging me with RECENT pictures (the audacity!). I hadn’t yet revealed to most of my friends and family about all of my physical changes. He outed me to reveal that I was less than perfect. I seemed to have forgotten that I never was.

Thank God my husband loves me no matter what and doesn’t see the changes in the pictures he takes of me in the way that I do. On the plus side, being out can be quite liberating. There is no one left to try and impress and you can be the true you.

Adding on to all of this, last year I decided to embark on a new business venture with my brother. Due to life changes of his own, he is frequently unavailable so I am doing most of it by myself. My older children, whom I still cannot see because of the border situation not changing with all of these new Covid variants, are having life transitions as well and my son is struggling, A LOT. The guilt is real when it comes to feeling like I could be doing more and SHOULD be.

What does any of this have to do with running, you ask? Well, it is this blog that started me on another new transition in my life. One that I actually feel good about. This blog has been an excellent battle buddy, you might even say (you like how I worked that in?)

As I may have mentioned in some of the past entries in this series, the notion that I was talking to a bunch of people on a path of fitness and wellness while I was headed in the opposite direction just seemed silly to me. I decided I needed a change to my own health and wellness. Shortly after starting to write this blog, I met my trainer friend. She began holding small group fitness classes about 6-7 weeks ago, and I have been joining her classes 2-3 times a week since.

My initial thoughts of being able to run a virtual marathon by the time of the SF Marathon in mid-September seem laughable now but nevertheless, I am motivated to stay on course. The dramatic transformation that I had envisioned by this point is not all that dramatic. The changes that are happening are probably more the speed that I need them to be to make the lasting changes that I want. Dramatic for me always makes for failure when I reach the inevitable stalling point. Something in me wants to give up when that happens. Just look at what happened with my hair transformation.

I have not seen my clothes falling off as I hoped for but a gradual loosening of the tightest areas so that my clothes are finally comfortable. For the first several weeks, all of the weight-lifting made me too sore to want to do much physically with my four-year-old. Recently, I have to admit that every day, I am in a little less pain. My endlessly sore knees, which were not a result of the strength training but were just part of my everyday life, seem to be supported a bit more. Suddenly I can keep up with my youngest just a little better than before.

I am slowly starting to feel better about myself. I have always been susceptible to falling into a rabbit hole of despair due to low self-esteem even on the best of days. Now with all these changes, some days I can feel so sorry for myself that it seems like I am personally carving out that hole to the darkest of recesses just so that I can have an excuse to fall even deeper.

On the flip side, I know that I have plenty to feel blessed about. With this pandemic taking actual lives and destroying others, I cannot take it for granted that my family and I have not personally been affected by Covid in this way. Beyond Covid, I also know many people that are going through things that are not merely life-altering but life-threatening. It is my duty to be there for them when they need me just as so many have done for me in the same manner.

With that being said, we cannot forget that we are human and it is ok to allow ourselves to feel all the emotions that come about when things are no longer in our control. As long as we remember not to dig ourselves in deeper. Instead, we must become willing to begin the slow ascension out of those rabbit holes. Take a break in between. Our feet may slip on the way, causing us to fall a little further down. When that happens, grab a hold and start the climb again. The goal is to stay a little bit ahead. And of course, surround yourself with the right kind of people that will give you a hand up when you need it the most.

Therapy

Ironically, the things I dreaded the most turned out to be the most therapeutic for me. Writing a blog for people I worried could not possibly relate to me because of our differences helped me to work through my own personal struggles. Struggles in life happen to every human being on planet earth and as such, are extremely relatable. This holds true despite the fact that everyone’s path is divergent from the next.

This spring I planted a bunch of beautiful flowers in my front yard to enjoy throughout the summer. While I have enjoyed watching them all flourish, it is the least beautiful one on the surface that is my favorite. I planted a succulent that seems like nothing special. In fact, it is what one might describe as plain to look at. But for a certain window of time in the day, when the sun hits it just right, it opens these tiny little yellow and white daisy-type flowers and it is the prettiest little plant you ever did see. Perhaps I favor it because I myself could be described as a wallflower. And as us wallflowers can attest, we often feel we are nothing special to look at and the fear of judgment often makes us close ourselves off to the world. Sometimes though, on occasion, we feel confident enough to let ourselves be exposed and vulnerable for a brief window of time. And sometimes, we get to showcase the most beautiful of our qualities that not everybody knows about or may have even missed entirely. But when it is our time to bloom and you just happen to have a keen eye…oh what a sight to see!

Battle Buddy Step #11: Find your therapy

The post Battle Buddy Series – A Prayer for The Wallflower appeared first on The San Francisco Marathon.

When I was in high school, my teammates and I used to routinely gather the night before a 5k to eat enormous quantities of food – usually pasta, pizza, bread, cookies, and brownies. At the time, we actually thought this would improve our times. Luckily, we were at an age where our digestion and metabolism could keep up, and most of us raced fine the next morning.

While most runners probably understand why carboloading the night before a 5k is unhelpful at best, many still fall prey to the misconception that carboloading will improve their marathon times. It will not. Today, I am going to explore why.

The Theory of Carboloading:

The theory behind carboloading is that runners need to store up large amounts of carbs which they will then burn off during a race. It should be obvious that, at distances as short as the 5k, this is untrue. Many runners will be lucky to burn off the calories in a single plain bagel while running a 5k, let alone a bagel with peanut butter on it. 

But a marathon burns far more calories than a 5k. And marathoners need to ensure their glycogen stores do not run low in order to avoid hitting the wall. So, carboloading should help, right?

There are a couple reasons why carboloading will not help your marathon time, and a couple of reasons why it might be counterproductive.

Why Carboloading Does Not Work:

Even if you drink vast quantities of water, there is a limit to how much glycogen you can store in your muscles. If you gorge yourself on a carbohydrate-rich meal (likely high in fat, too), most of the excess calories you consume will be stored as fat. Unless you are already at 4% bodyfat, more fat is only likely to slow your race, not help it. 

The process of storing glycogen in your muscles takes time. A single meal the night before your race is not going to cut it. In fact, that might be too late to help at all. The next best hope for the carboloading theory is that some of the carbs will still be undigested by the time you start the race. But that brings us to why carboloading is counterproductive.

Why Carboloading is Counterproductive:

If you have large quantities of undigested food in your stomach at the start of your race, you risk gastrointestinal mishaps: from vomiting to bathroom visits. Even worse, most of the foods runners gorge themselves on the night before races are – by themselves – culprits for gastrointestinal distress during races. Fettucine alfredo, pizza, beer, blondies, cookies, buttered bread, fries, garlic knots, etc.

Indulge post-race, not the night before. 

Finally, eating a very large, hard-to-digest meal any night of the week can cause stomach troubles and difficulty sleeping. If you stuff yourself the night before a race, you are definitely not helping your race the next day. 

What to Do Instead:

The night before your race, you want to eat a small, easy-to-digest meal of primarily carbohydrates and protein. Plain rice, with nothing on it, plain chicken, and some very-digestible vegetable. Or plain pasta (without sauce or butter), and maybe some chicken and cooked spinach. 

To build up glycogen stores, you want to prepare in the weeks before your race by consuming more of your calories from carbohydrates – while cutting total calories as you taper. The day and night before your race, your main goal is just to avoid doing anything that might harm your race, not to try to catch up on your carbs. 

If a food or beverage sounds like it would be “unhealthy” any normal night, you definitely want to avoid it the night before your race. The night before your marathon, eat enough so that you do not go to bed hungry, but not so much that you feel full.

The post Why Carboloading is a Mistake (and What to Do Instead) appeared first on The San Francisco Marathon.

That’s where excellent sportsmanship comes in. Last time, I discussed the wonderful displays of sportsmanship I was seeing during the many different Olympic events. It was motivating to see so many athletes that were truly happy for their opponent on such a large scale. There were a multitude of inspirational tales that came about during Tokyo 2020. We recently saw the closing of the Olympic Games. Sportsmanship is at the very core of the concept I continuously talk about in this series but it extends even a bit beyond. To have a battle buddy, we are reminded of someone by your side, rooting for you every step of the way. But what about your opponent? They don’t usually root for you. Or do they?

The story that resoundingly stands out in my mind as outstanding gamesmanship overall has to be when two high-jumpers, one from Qatar, the other from Italy, were tied. They were given the choice to continue with a jump-off to determine one winner or to share the gold. Without hesitation and without even a verbal answer to the official who gave them this choice, they chose to share the gold. Their answer came in the form of a hug of epic proportions, followed by jumps of pure elation. It is difficult for me to even describe the scene without a tear welling up; their joy was so immense for one another and their friendship.

Tokyo Marathon 2021

Let’s get to the competition we really came here for. The marathon portion of the games was no different from the other sports, in that it had plenty of drama. To begin with, the actual route was not even in Tokyo but in Sapporo, further north in Japan. The decision to hold it there was made because it typically tends to be cooler in the north of the island nation but the ongoing heat wave made that an obsolete theory. Conditions during the marathon weekend were brutal with high heat and high humidity. The marathon in Sapporo saw the highest number of runners that did not cross the finish line in several decades as a result of injuries and the extreme heat. This was true for both the men’s and women’s races.

It certainly wasn’t all bad news. There were plenty of triumphs along the way. For my blog, I will talk about the story from the marathon races that inspired me the most. In the women’s marathon, the USA saw a bronze medal winner up on that podium. The most awe-inspiring thing about it was that Molly Seidel won the medal in only her third-ever marathon. Her first one? The Olympic trials no-less. Before that, she was on no one’s radar. No one expected her to even place in the top ten at the Olympics but instead, she became the first American woman to medal in the marathon since 2004. She was actually quoted as stating, “I want everyone to be saying ‘Who the hell is this girl?’” Mission accomplished Molly. Well done!

One less than inspiring incident had us all questioning the motives of an athlete in the men’s marathon. If his motives were less than honorable, we can all look at his actions at what NOT to do to our fellow athletes, for it was these actions that displayed the opposite of excellent sportsmanship. I won’t name names here but one athlete in particular was caught on camera grabbing for a water bottle. Instead of grabbing the first one in the row, this athlete left his hand out to knock over almost every single bottle in the row, save for the very last one that he grabbed for himself. This action left a few other athletes without the chance for water until the next available station. Without knowing the particulars, watching this video looks very incriminating for him. Initially when I saw the story headlines, I immediately jumped to his defense in my mind because who would want to do a thing like that? After watching the video, I had to admit to myself, it did look a bit purposeful. It wasn’t bumbling in nature like a true accident might be but well-executed in the way that his palm was left open and not grasping until that last one. 

Eventually, this athlete did come out with a statement to indicate that it was indeed accidental. In his defense, he was sandwiched in between two other athletes making it difficult to reach the bottles. It was also near the end of the marathon. His claims of losing lucidity and energy would certainly not be out of place given the circumstances of the intense heat and humidity. Whatever you choose to believe, the outcome of the race was this: one of the runners directly behind him who did not get a water because of his actions went on to finish second, winning the silver medal; the runner in question placed 17th. Some say it’s karma. I will let you decide for yourself if you believe the same. In incidents like these where it is difficult to determine, I believe in the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise.

The moral of this story is that when engaging in extreme events like a marathon or race-running of any kind, we have to be each other’s battle buddies. Whether you are the most well-prepared athlete there or the one whose only goal is to get across that finish line regardless of the time it takes, we can support every single person for being the truly amazing individual that they are. When it comes to awesome sportsmanship, there are no opponents, only advocates.

Battle Buddy Step #10: Find your inner goodness

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It is never too late to start practicing your prerace routine. One of the most important parts of that routine is eating. 

Likewise, it is never too late to start practicing eating during long runs. What and how you eat during your race can make or break it.

Today, I plan to break down both of these topics and give you some simple takeaways you can start applying right away.

Eating Before a Run/Race:

Rule #1: Never try something on race day that you have not tried before

Your main goal when gearing up before your long runs is practicing the plan you will execute on race day. This is especially true for eating.

Before a long run, you will want to eat light – enough to fuel your run, but not enough to cause indigestion. Your needs will vary depending on your metabolism and body size. But for some runners, this might look like half a bagel with peanut butter, or a banana and a gel. 

Rule #2: Choose foods you can easily digest – Easy on the stomach. Low in fat and fiber. Preferably a mixture of simple and complex carbs and a little protein. I prefer to err on the side of not enough food than too much. 

Assuming you have a morning race, and a morning long run, you will probably have an otherwise empty stomach. I recommend eating within 1 hour of your run/race. 30 minutes might be ideal. Some people recommend a small meal 1 hour before and a light snack immediately before starting. Experiment yourself to find your ideal routine. I do not recommend waking up 3 hours before your race to eat a meal.

Eating While Running/Racing:

Rule #3: Start early – a gel at 23 miles does nothing for you (except psychologically). Start eating at 2 miles or 4 miles. When you feel the need (i.e., you hit the wall), it is too late. 

Experiment with various types of racing food. I like Clif Bloks. Many people prefer gels or gus. A friend of mine actually ran his whole marathon on Starburst. Trial and error will help you find food you can digest (and chew/carry/open/swallow) while running. This is not the time for a high-fiber cereal bar or carrots.

Quick Tip: You will find it easiest to chew and swallow while running downhill. Or rather, going uphill, you will need to breath more heavily and having something in your mouth can impede breathing.

Some people recommend trying to consume all of the calories you will burn during the race while running (including calories eaten immediately beforehand). Even with a slow metabolism and high-calorie choices, that is a lot of food. In my opinion, that will only slow you down or cause gastrointestinal disorder. The human body will not collapse from a 200-calorie deficit. There is no need to try to avoid even a 1500-calorie (or more) deficit. 

I recommend 800-1200 calories beforehand (again, depending on size and metabolism) and 300-500 calories during the race. On a long run, you could go much lower. With practice, you can run for a couple hours on a complete fast. I never eat more than 200 during a 20-mile long run.

Summing it Up:

Rule #4: Eat during the race and before the race. Not too much. Not too little. 

Key Takeaway: Use long runs to practice what, how, and when you eat. Develop a routine based on your personal needs, body type, and preferences. Then execute that routine on race day. 

Final Tip: Do not obsess over this. As I said, a friend of mine ate Starburst. You do not have to execute a flawless plan flawlessly. Most mistakes can be overcome with cleverness and a good attitude.

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As I type this, the 2020 (2021) Tokyo Olympics are underway, with the United States leading the overall medal count and in third place for gold medal count. The Olympic Marathon, is about a week away (Friday, August 6th for women and Saturday, August 7th for men). 

Whether or not you are watching any of this year’s Olympic Games, it is worth reflecting on why the idea and spirit of the Olympics matter. And why they should inspire us in our own athletic pursuits. While specific issues about this Olympics, or previous ones, can be divisive, let us put aside those concerns and look at the larger picture. The Olympics is a celebration of athletic excellence at the highest levels of human performance. That is something worth celebrating. And it can remind us of why we pursue our own athletic excellence and push our own levels of performance.

Some Background: 

The marathon is one of the oldest Olympic events, beginning with the Ancient Greeks. Since that time, the race has grown longer (from 24 miles to 26.2). But it remains a core event. 

According to USATF’s website, the last Americans to win gold in the marathon were the legendary Frank Shorter (1972) and Joan Benoit (1984). Which means it has been almost 50 years and 40 years since the U.S. men and women won gold, respectively. The most recent medals won by Americans were Deena Kastor (bronze, 2004) and Galen Rupp (bronze, 2016). Notably, Rupp is returning this year to make another attempt at medaling. Abdi Abdirahman, Jake Riley, Sally Kipyego, Molly Siedel, and Aliphine Tuliamuk round out the U.S. Marathon team. (1,2) We wish them well. 

Zooming Out:

Taking a step back to reflect on the larger picture, we can admire the idea of the Olympics: that every two years (alternating winter and summer events), the world’s top athletes gather to compete in front of billions of viewers. To some degree, the Olympics is a celebration of peaceful athletic competition between nations rather than violent war. But in reality, the Olympics is a celebration of athletic excellence. 

Olympic runners are at the highest levels of the sport. They have not only worked hard for years to arrive at this stage, they are gifted with levels of natural talent that many of us can only marvel at. There is something beautiful about striving and competition, and about human beings who attempt to redefine the limits of human endurance, speed, and strength. Steve Prefontaine famously said that “a race is a work of art.”(3) We watch these men and women and we admire them and – at their best – we are moved by them.

Our Lives:

Most of us will never run a marathon anywhere close to the speed that Eliud Kipchoge, or Brigid Kosgei, or Galen Rupp, or Sally Kipyego run. But the great thing about running is that we often measure our performance in comparison to our own physical limits and past performances, rather than in comparison to the performance of others. 

When Kipchoge keeps striving to break the 2-hour marathon (and eventually does), we are reminded of our own attempts at an impossible goal. When we see the effort that these elites put into their training, diet, and recovery, we are inspired to put in our own effort – whether that means waking up at 5am to run 18 miles, or cutting refined sugar from our diets completely in the final weeks of training. When we watch the world’s greatest athletes compete on the highest stage, we can understand that competition is not always a bad thing, and that sometimes it is a beautiful thing. 

At its best, competition brings out human greatness and human flourishing. And ideally, that is what it does at the Olympics. When humans transcend previous records (whether world records or their own previous records), they accomplish something great. When watching the Olympics, we can admire the greatness of the world’s greatest athletes. And we can be inspired to pursue greatness in our own lives. 

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