Well, it's over, and it was great. The race was on Sunday, but it poured rain all day Saturday. I think I told you that we were planning to go on a hike through Jasper Ridge, Stanford's local biological preserve, with the ex-president (and also ex-chairman of the biology department) of Stanford. We went in spite of the rain, and it was fairly interesting -- I learned about a few new types of local plants, but didn't take any photos because the rain never let up. We did hike through the downpour for about 2 1/2 hours, however, and Ellyn got pretty chilled. I had to register in person for the race in Monterey on Saturday, so Ellyn and I drove down late in the afternoon, and it continued to pour all the way there. (Rain in April is pretty unusual here, but it was still drizzling a bit when I drove in to work this morning.) Anyway, we registered for the race and walked around Monterey a bit, had a cappuccino, and I had a huge dinner of pasta and salad. Then I ate a bunch of bran muffins for dessert to make sure I'd be able to "flush the system" in the morning. It rained off and on all night, and I don't think I got more than about an hour of sleep, so I heard all the rain. We had to get up at 3:30, since the busses to take the runners to the start left Carmel at 4:30. The race is from Big Sur to Carmel up Highway 1, and unless you want to drive an extra 400 miles or so, it's the only way to get between the two places, so on race day, the traffic was severely restricted. I met my friend Gary, who's run lots of marathons at the bus, and we rode down together. I ate a Power Bar for breakfast on the way down. When we got to Big Sur, it started raining again, and they let us stay on the bus. The rain stopped at about 6 AM, so we got out, washed down the Power Bar with some Gatorade, took a couple of passes through the potty lines, smeared on gobs of vaseline, and got ready to go. I don't know how many runners there were -- the race is limited to less than 3000, and it usually fills up, but I suspect the rain kept a few hundred away, so perhaps there were 2500. After the gun went off, we got to the starting line after 26 seconds, and probably should have started closer to the front, because we spent the first mile trying to pass the slower runners who had lined up in front of us. But maybe that was good, since it forced us to keep the pace in check for the first mile while the adrenalin was still flowing out of control. The weather was still cool, but you could see clouds dumping rain here and there out to sea. After about 5 miles, we found ourselves running with the same set of people for mile after mile, and by mile 10, our overall average pace was 7:45 per mile, and that's what we were hitting every mile. But from mile 10 to 12 is something called Hurricane Point -- a 2 mile climb of about 600 feet, and as soon as we started the climb, both the rain and the hurricane (in our faces) started up. If I were a race horse, I'd be a "mudder", since I do relatively better in bad conditions, and I was really pleased that I had pounded out all those miles in the hills behind my house during training. It bugged me a little to leave Gary behind only 10 miles into the 26 since he's had so much more experience and is much better at pacing the longer runs than I am, but it felt like we had slowed down way too much, so I just kept the pain level constant with what it had been on the flats, and figured Gary might catch me later. Apparently I was the only person among that group who had done so much hill running, since I must have blown by 100 people on the climb. I figured that at the top, my advantage would be over, so I was glad to pick up that many places on the climb. But apparently if you haven't trained for it, a long nasty climb like that can really take it out of you, and for the entire rest of the race, I continued to pass people. It was wonderful -- I'd be running along, pick out a person 100 or 150 yards ahead, and think, "I'll catch that guy". And I always could. Then I'd pick out the next guy, and so on. By mile 16 or 17, I made up for all the time I lost on the climb, and was back to an overall 7:45 pace, and I kept that up for about 6 miles. None of the remaining hills was longer than a quarter mile or so, so I was able make up for a slower climb with a faster descent on the back side. My longest training run had been 20 miles (and that was at perhaps an 8:15 pace), so of course starting at mile 20, I began to wonder when I was going to blow up or "hit the wall". I was trying to run it in 3:25 (Boston Marathon qualifying time), and by mile 20, I had about a 2 minute pad, so I could drop to 8 minute miles and still make it. But I kept doing the 7:45s until mile 23, where there's a relatively long, steep climb, and I lost 15 seconds, but I was quite confident, since I knew that even a pair of 8:30s would be good enough. In every race of length n miles I've ever run before, mile n-2 to n-1 is always the worst: 24-25 in a marathon, 4-5 in a 10K, and so on. The final mile is never so bad, because you're "headed toward the stables". So after the slow mile 23, I was really dreading mile 24. I just decided to try and put myself into a Zen-like trance and concentrate on each stride and the mile felt much better than I'd feared. It helped that it was slightly downhill, but I think I did it in about 7:30, because at mile 25, I was back exactly on a 7:45 pace. Of course I should have just kept going the same way, but I relaxed and figured I was on the home stretch, and then I started to feel terrible, and one of my calves was starting to cramp. But everything was fine about a half mile from the end, when I could actually see the finish line, and I ran the final mile+385 yards at a 7:45/mile pace. My friend Gary finished about 3 minutes behind, so he didn't do so bad himself. Ellyn was my photographer at the finish, and she did herself proud. She had the F4 set on continuous focus and high speed frame advance, and took 34 pictures of me in the last 50 yards or so. Of course, they're off to Fuji in Arizona now, so the final test is yet to come.