| Race Report: Oakland Marathon |
[Mar. 29th, 2010|01:09 pm] |
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Yesterday Oakland had its first marathon in more than two decades, and I got to run it!
My first ever marathon was last year's San Francisco Marathon, which is one of the bigger marathon events on the West coast. This being the Oakland Running Festival's inaugural year, the crowd was not nearly so massive. Only 946 finishers!
The weather was good, light and airy and cool. A nice gaggle of runners was standing before the big red Start sign, an inflatable arch. Comedian Mark Curry, an Oakland native, ran through the waiting crowd, high fiving runners!
The race started around 7:32 AM, and just after the first few runners took off across the start line, the inflatable arch started to collapse! Someone ran under it to hold it up with outstretched arms as the rest of us runners zipped through. Holding up the arch for us: Comedian Mark Curry! (He's rather tall, so he had the height to do it!)
The first few miles part of the course went through the main streets of downtwon Oakland, streets I'm very familiar with since I grew up in the East Bay. We were running towards the Oakland hills, so the street course was a very gradual incline all the way to lake Temescal. That's when we got hit by the Oakland hills around mile 6!
At Lake Temescal we went up a very steep incline, which looped around, going downhill and then through the Lake Temescal park until we got to the neighborhood of Montclair. Miles 6 through 10 were some small hills, and towards the end two very steep hills. This was the part that started to tear up some of the runners. I didn't do too bad on the hills myself, but I did stop to walk for a minute or two up some of the more steeper inclines. The hills ended with a run down Lincoln Avenue, a very step decline that went past Oakland's Mormom Temple and down into Fruitvale, one of the hearts of Oakland. Just past the halfway point we were making our way to Oakland's famous International Avenue, and it was around this time that the weather started to warm up. The air wasn't so cool and it started to drag on some of us.
There was plenty of support along the way. Everyone was out on International Avenue, cheering and cow belling and handing out bottles of water and fruit slices. After a few more miles we were running through Jack London Square. It was shortly after Jack London that we started into West Oakland around mile 18. I had been chugging along the route just fine up until then. I suddenly felt like I was hitting the wall. I didn't think I would be getting dragged down that much until mile 20 or later. Mile 19 was a trial for me. I had run out of gas, so I had thought.
Much to my surprise my energy picked up again around mile 20 and I ran the rest of the course just fine. I was, of course, tired and thirsty and going slower, but I hadn't hit the wall. Up from West Oakland and all the way around Lake Merrit and back downtown. I ran steadily, until I saw the finish line, and then my legs just took off. I ran through a gauntlet of cheering people and waited at the finish line a few more minutes for my friend Lisa to run across.
Overall I was in much better shape for this, my second completed marathon, than I was for the San Francisco marathon last July. I was not nearly as sore and stiff this second time around, and I am recovering much better compared to my first time. (Lot's of squats and leg machine workouts this time around really helped out!) I was hoping to really improve my time, but Oakland's course was waaaay tougher than the SF course. I think if I had been running the SF course yesterday, I would've come in at least 20 minutes faster, if not more. Those hills from miles 6 through 10 really took it out of a lot of runners, and looking back I think it took just a bit more out of me than I realized.
Kudos and righteous props to the vastly underrated town of Oakland!
The big difference between this marathon and San Francisco: All along the course, whether we were running through the nice upper-middle income neighborhoods of Montclair, or along the Ghettolicious International Avenue, there were always people standing along the side, cheering and clapping and ringing cow bells, holding out water or fruit slices or giving out gummi bears! We were serenaded by mariachi musicians, heavy metal bands, lots of hip hop music, and even a three piece Swiss Alpine Horn combo at one point. Some metal artists in West Oakland set up a "gate of fire" for us to run through, we were cheered by a large contingent of green-wearing Oakland A's fans who had set themselves up along the course at an obscure corner in the industrial section in West Oakland, waving A's flags and rooting for us, and towards the run to Lake Merritt, we ran through a gauntlet of Raiders fans, all dressed in silver and black, blaring soul music. That's where a guy in a gorilla suit gave me a high five! It definitely picked us up and kept us going, all along the way.
Oakland has a bad reputation for violence and gangs and poverty, and it can really be a bad rap sometimes. This is the town that gets a lot of flak from many sources, including from its more famous sibling San Francisco, but even though lots of supportive people came out to cheer the runners of SF's ginormous marathon, we didn't get that virtually nonstop kind of spontaneous support during the San Francisco marathon. For example, when I ran down San Francisco's famous Haight Street during last year's SF Marathon, people just stood there and stared at us as we ran by. Nothing of the kind happened in this marathon. Even people stuck in traffic because of the road closures were cheering us!
As one writer put it, Oakland truly has the kind of cultural diversity that other cities only pretend to have, and that really came out during this marathon!
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