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Bay to Breakers is less than a week away, and I am losing my shit.

(By the way, the Bay to Breakers people did a cool little timelapse video of the course here.  It's worth checking out as a mini-tour of large swaths of a San Francisco most folks don't see much of outside of town (it's pretty bereft of cable cars), even if you're not interested in what me and 25,000 others will be doing next Sunday morning. You can check out the Hayes Street Hill and ardaliz 's neighborhood, but to me, the most amazing part of the video is that they somehow got footage of one of the bison by Spreckels Lake actually up and moving around their paddock. Usually those mugs just sit there like furry lumps.)

I've been experiencing a sore dull pain on the left side of my left knee while running (and only while running) that started a few weeks ago...I'd tempered my mileage and intensity, but when running the course last Sunday as I'd been doing, I started feeling the pain again while heading up my dreaded Hayes Street Hill, and I ended up having to stop in the panhandle, which is about 3.5 miles into the 7.5 mile course, because of the increasing pain. Obviously that won't do.

So I decided to shut it down completely for a week and just keep on RICE like I'd been doing while figuring out what the hell was going on. I communicated with an acquaintence who ran for Stanford and still casually competes in marathons, and he told me it was almost certainly my IT bands rather than my knee ligaments (he also confirmed for me that my idea to run the race on painkillers was a terrible idea!) and gave me some good stretches to try and advice about using a roller to loosen up my muscles and especially the bands.

It seemed to help, but when I went out yesterday after the week off, there was still some twinging near the end of my run even though I just ran 2.5 through the park down to the Pacific. I got the feeling if I'd gone even just a bit longer, it would've developed into full-blown soreness and pain again, and I'd have had to stop running once more.

ANYWAY, this is just all very, very frustrating. I've been looking forward to doing this a long time. Last year's Bay to Breakers I "participated" as a fat drunk spectator, 40 pounds heavier and sucking down a bottle of cheap red wine (I also bought a can of beer from a guy selling Tecates from his backpack--nothing but class for me).  I mean, I'm still all too much for sucking down cheap red wine, but I've been amped about actually, you know, running the thing first. Besides feeling like a victory lap of sorts for losing a bunch of weight recently, I'd hoped for this to be my entree back into running longer roadraces like I used to years and years ago (I haven't run longer than a 10K in about 15 years).  Apparently a lot of people have IT band trouble (which is strange to me--when I was running 30+ miles a week as a teenager, I never had problems with my IT bands or much of anything else. Getting old sucks), but that obviously doesn't make me feel any better about it.

So I'm resting again most of the week, stretching and rolling, doing some RICE, maybe getting a massage. Keeping my fingers crossed. Sigh. I'd already curbed what were pretty modest time goals to begin with, but now I just want to finish, running the entire 12K. Man oh man, I just want to finish.

In other news, we walked over to Stow Lake yesterday and did a little rowboating:



I was terrible at it. But had fun. And that's what counts, right?

Maybe I should keep that in mind for Bay to Breakers.