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Bay to Breakers 2014 recap: first time for everything

Bay to Breakers 2014 recap: first time for everything

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Prior to the big move from Chicago to the Bay Area in December, as I was in the thick of some near-nightly anxiety- and tear-filled near-breakdowns, when I should have been working on things that really mattered–the little details, like actually preparing for the move, or grading my students’ essays–I often found myself researching, and then subsequently registering, for Bay Area races. I had no idea when A and I would actually make the move, but dammit if I didn’t already have a racing calendar lined up just in case. Coping mechanism at its finest, folks.

Naturally, then, Bay to Breakers, the world’s oldest, most consecutively-run (103 years in 2014!) road race, in San Francisco, came up on my radar. I was pretty sure Stone had run it in previous years, but all I knew was that it was supposed to be a big party, replete with tons of costumed runners (and some streakers). That was about it…and good enough for me to register.

aw. Chicago.
aw, look. It says I live in Chicago. *Tear.*

After I registered in the autumn, I all but forgot about B2B until May, when I realized that it was going to coincide perfectly with Pfitz’s prescription of an 8k-10k tune-up (eh, 12k, same difference) two weeks out from my goal marathon. With B2B being my first 12k,  and having this on my calendar specifically as part of my marathon training, I went into the race virtually pressure-free. I had a soft-but-mostly arbitrary time goal, in no small part because I wasn’t entirely sure how long a 12k was (and thus, my mental math on what my time could be was crude, at best), as well as a more practical goal of not pacing the race like an idiot. More than anything, in the immediate days preceding the race, I was looking forward to a quick overnight/weekend in SF with Stone and company.

Saturday

B2B hosts a two-day expo in the Concourse Exhibition Center, the same place where TSFM held theirs back in 2010, and I volunteered to help promote the ZOOMA Napa half/10k on Saturday afternoon for a handful of hours. I normally wouldn’t willingly want to be on my feet for four hours pre-race, but again, no pressure going into this, and really, I found the whole thing to actually be somewhat… energizing. (We got lots of runners signed up, including some sisters and some BFFs who were all going to run together! So sweet. Truly, I almost teared up because I was so touched. And hey, you should come run, too!). It was also nice to meet/see folks from social media world at the expo.

continuing my streak of 'everyone I meet from Twitter and is a runner' alive at the B2B expo. Super sweet to finally meet Robin!
continuing my streak of ‘everyone I meet from Twitter is awesome and is a runner’ alive at the B2B expo. Super sweet to finally meet Robin!

 

aaaaaaaand one can never have enough Lark spottings. She repped TSFM, while I repped ZOOMA Napa, at the B2B expo. All the races! All the races!
aaaaaaaand one can never have enough Lark spottings. She repped TSFM  (with virtually no voice, poor gal), while I repped ZOOMA Napa, at the B2B expo. All the races! All the races!

Post-expo, on Saturday night, I made my way over to Erin and Ryan’s, my ever-gracious hosts for the weekend, and shortly thereafter, Foxy and her boyfriend Eric, plus Julie and Arnaud, all came over as well for some winin’ and dinin’ and good timin’ (had to) pre-race. Most of us were running B2B, so it was awesome to just hang out with friends old and new (aw); the race was more of an afterthought which, again, was pretty perfect in that whole “no pressure thing.” It wasn’t even until folks were getting ready to leave that we even began to look at the course maps and began to figure out the race morning logistics.

Race morning, Sunday

We all again met-up at Erin’s to Uber/cab it over to the race start at the Bay (hence, the Bay in the “bay to breakers” race name) and got some pre-race obligatory pics before we left. In the spirit of the race, and in part because hey, let’s keep it real, let me practice the value of having a positive body image that I try to showcase to my impressionable 3 year-old daughter, and because realistically, I knew there’d be streakers out there who surely had to be a bit more flabby than me, I decided to just rock the Girl Scout vest sans singlet–and with the City of Chicago flag shorts–and hope that the vest and all its myriad patches on the front and back wouldn’t chafe me and reduce me to tears. And yup, this was my vest from when I was a Junior in Girl Scouts, circa… 6th grade? 7th grade?

a Stone, a Fox, and a Mink running B2B, two in cycling get-ups, one as a Girl Scout.
a Stone, a Fox, and a Mink running B2B, two in cycling shirts, one as a Girl Scout. source: Foxy

Colorful costumed runners and spectators, of wildly varying degrees of clothing coverage, were already out in force in the Haight hours before the race (and miles away from the starting area), and once we got to the race start, we split up since we had all been assigned to different corrals and since there was a decent amount of security detail actually checking bibs to ensure that only runners assigned to the specific corrals were gaining entry. Coincidentally, the race started mere blocks from where C’s previous employer’s office was, so I kiiiiiiinda knew where I was, which was nice.

last pre-race selfie with my E-twin.
last pre-race selfie with my E-twin. Love her…and despite that I kinda look like a creeper in this pic, it makes my heart sing.  source: Erin

 

I don’t really remember, but I think a marathon time I had used when I registered for the race last autumn allowed me entry into the “elite, seeded, and sub-seeded” corral (which was also where my friends should have been, too, but hey… next time), and luckily, adjacent to my starting area–which was totally sectioned off from the rest of humanity–there were probably about 10-15 porta-potties and a good .2 mi stretch of street the other runners in my corral were also using for their back-and-forth, back-and-forth, back-and-forth warmups. I was able to get in ~1.75 mi and an additional 3 PRP attempts before entering the corral and awaiting our 8am start.

Ryan had mentioned that there would be lots of flying tortillas being flung around as runners waited in the starting corral, and he wasn’t kidding. Apparently, it’s some sort of race tradition for folks to chuck the flour frisbees; I guess beach balls are too hipster, even for SF.

Our 8am start slowly got pushed to 8:03… 05… 10… and finally, to 8:23, thanks to some issues with spectators that race officials feared would interfere with the elites’ races, as well as some equipment issues on the Hayes St hill that needed to be rectified. I’ve run in (much, much smaller) races that have had delayed starts, and while it is a pain in the ass, there’s really nothing you can do about it. A shitty attitude isn’t going to speed things up any, so the most you can do is wait… and as was the case for B2B, watch for more flying tortillas above you and hope you don’t get knocked in the head. Besides, as is the norm, I was chattin’ it up with folks in my vicinity and got the skinny on the race from a female masters runner who had similar race goals as me (and, btw, was a total rock star. I want to be her when I’m a masters runner. She was so gracious and just so cool).

Once we finally began the race, I was immediately taken aback by the sheer number of spectators already lining the course at 8am (or 8:23, anyway). In the first half-mile of the course, the deluge of spectators lining the course was thicker than probably any marathon I’ve run–with the possible exception of NYC–and while I knew that runners often partook in the costume or streaking revelry of the race, I had no idea that the spectators did so as well–and quite frankly, to a larger extent than most runners.

I can’t recall every get-up I saw from spectators or runners during B2B, and honestly, you’re better off doing a Google image search anyway (and/or reading Scott’s recap of running it with his daughter), but what I do remember:

  • a clan of a dozen-strong Tibetan monks, outfitted in orange robes and swimming-style head caps
  • lots of superheroes
  • lots of men wearing old-school, Greco-Roman wrestling-style leotards, showcasing their clumpy and uh, kinda dirty-looking chest hair (ew)
  • men, typically seniors, with impressively small penises and gray pubes, just letting it all hang out there… but don’t worry, they donned a veeeeeeeeeery thin string around their waist because where else would they have worn their race bib?
  • women, mostly younger, donning little star-shaped nipple stickers, equally letting it all hang out
  • a trio of white guys, with crisp white button-down shirts, skinny black ties, ironed black dress pants, carrying small books–yup, a trio of Mormons
  • a slew of folks dressed as contestants from The Price is Right or Legends of the Hidden Temple (remember that show?!)
  • centipedes–groups of runners (10+, I think) who raced, roped together by bungee cords or some other mechanism–dressed as ladybugs (women) or in crispy, button-down business shirts (men). Note: the ladybugs were fast.
  • random shit, like tacos

Again, Google image search Bay to Breakers costumes. The creativity was actually pretty impressive.

Back to the race… soon after I started, I was immediately awestruck with how many people were lining the course. Only parts of the course were barricaded–so weird to me because all the pre-race communications made a huge deal of how the race was really crackin’ down on safety and having “zero tolerance” on stuff this year–and I saw a fair number of folks already in the street, which I didn’t think much about because I figured they were just trying to see their friends more easily, get side-5s, video, photo, whatever. While that might have been the case for some of these drunk as a skunk high as a kite let’s call them rather spirited spectators, there were also many who were legit standing in the middle of the street–I’m not being hyperbolic here, folks, the fuckin’ middle of the street–slowly but surely beginning to collapse in the throes of the race into a pile of their own shitfaced selves.

Remember kids, it was barely 8:30 a.m.

While it was initially pretty entertaining to see some spectators three sheets to the wind so early in the race, I think my ‘mom mode’ kicked in and I kinda began to fear for their safety. What I saw paled in comparison to what my friends saw, since they started a few minutes after me, but I can recall seeing at least one guy all but throw himself into the race, and were it not for the grace and sliiiiiiiiiiiiightly less-delayed reflexes of his buddy who intercepted him, Mr. Trashy McTrashed would have been in bad shape. And, besides the rather spirited spectators who wanted to have a front-row seat to the race action by thrusting themselves into the thick of the race, I also saw random shit that I’ve not really seen before in races, like people on the sidelines, mostly costumed spectators, seemingly decide on a whim to enter and thus run the race, beginning from wherever they’re standing.

All this spectator commentary over the first couple miles of the race isn’t to say that the race is bad or poorly managed or anything like that–it really isn’t–but I think it’s just something that runners should be aware of.  Truth be told, from my vantage point, it really was more entertaining than irritating… but then again, the stakes were quite low for me for this event. I don’t think I’ve raced anywhere that necessitated that I have my guard up so as to avoid being sidelined or body-checked mid-run by a shitfaced spectator, and fortunately, that wasn’t the case for me because of how soon I began the race after the gun went off. No doubt, though, had I started even a few minutes later, I would have had to dodge significantly more family members of the Trashy McTrashed brothers and sisters of humanity.

Anyway… once we got out of the downtown area, we made our way over north of Market and eventually, around mile 2 and change, to the storied Hayes Street Hill. HSH is a good .70mi-ish long climb, with a small dip about midway, just enough for you to catch your breath before you begin wheezing again, that totally makes me think of the old-school Rice-a-Roni commercials that featured the hills of SF as its backdrop–and, appropriately enough, I saw a spectator at the tippy top of the hill dressed as a box of Rice-a-Roni. B2B set up a challenge, as did Strava, to see who could be the quickest person to ascend the hill, and while it was a totally fair hill… damn, that was no joke! Here’s an image from the 2011 B2B for perspective.

Soon after HSH, most of the course, which wound through the Panhandle before dumping us into Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway–the GH at the ocean being the “breakers” in B2B–became quite flat and/or a series of descents. I didn’t pay a ton of attention to my splits, and I took the HSH at effort, not looking at my watch at all. After my first mile, a quick glimpse revealed that I had posted a  6:5x, so I consciously tried to reign things in a bit early on because I didn’t want to blow up and slog later. For the remainder of the race, I felt strong, and all the downhills through GGP definitely let me pick things up, but with my history of shittily pacing shorter distances during races, I was really trying to be mindful of how things were going and how I was faring. I wanted to enjoy the race and actually race it–which I did, on both accounts–but I also spent a lot of time in my head, simply gauging my effort and assessing, top-to-bottom, how I was feeling.

Once we had passed the panhandle and gotten into GGP, the race became less of a crazy shitshow and more of an actual race, which, compared to what we had just a few miles earlier, was almost somber. (And all the fog/mist that we ran through, near the bison, only added to the drastic mood change ). Somewhere in the park, I had noticed a guy wearing a singlet I recognized, and sure enough, it was a displaced Chicagoan, Ryan, who had run with TTAU (and with whom we shared some mutual friends… thanks for letting me name-drop you, Dan!). My Chicago flag shorts elicited some additional catcalls from other displaced Chicagoans mid-race (and afterward), which was a nice pick-me-up and a fun way to connect with people in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

the mistiness action of GGP, circa mi 6 and change. I channeled my inner Paulette and her always-jazzy jazzy hands in all her running pics for this gem.
the mistiness action of GGP, circa mi 6 and change. I channeled my inner Paulette and her always-jazzy jazz hands in her running pics for this gem. Also: I love the man in yellow behind me.

Before I knew it, we were passing the windmill–which always makes me smile because I’m a huge Quijote fan–and approaching the ocean, covering much of the same route as the Kaiser half in February (though we were running in a different direction). I was genuinely surprised at my splits at each mile marker–thank you, near-constant descents and flats–and it wasn’t until the last ~1 mile that I felt like my stomach was potentially beginning to revolt from the effort of running hard. I hadn’t seen any women around me for a long time, and despite my best effort to not let any women pass me, a couple got me in the final 20 steps (ugh!) before the finish.

First 12k, first Bay to Breakers, done and done — and arbitrary and more practical goal both realized.

flying Girl Scout
flying Girl Scout at the B2B finish

Soon after I finished, Ryan, Stone, Foxy, and I all connected and got some more fun pics before heading back to the Haight for some celebratory lunch, less so for our individual races but instead, for Arnaud’s and Julie’s, both of whom had just completed their first ever road race. No time like your first, right?!… and especially when B2B is your first. Talk about memory-makin’.

A slight rainbow of colored drinks to welcome Julie and Arnaud to the world of road racing. Yea!
An obligatory pic of a slight rainbow of colored drinks to welcome Julie and Arnaud to the world of road racing. Yea!

 

And ultimately, how I fared:

arbitrary time goal: 53 (or sub); practical goal: not pace like a moron

actual: 51:36 and better-than-I-expected (read: I’m happy) pacing

Garmin stats: 52:24 for 7.54 miles (not sure why the discrepancy for my time is so huge, but hey… operator error?) 6:54, 702 , 752 — HSH mile, 725, 654, 629, 628, 607 for .54

b2b - 2

So, is it worth doing? 

Yea, probably, even if it’s a one-and-done. In a lot of ways, B2B reminds me of Chicago’s Shamrock Shuffle, the world’s largest 8k (or so I’ve heard). Both the SS and B2B have a ton of racers, and probably only a very, very small number of those racers are truly chasing after a time; instead, most are there for the fun time with friends or the after-partieS. That’s not to say that you CAN’T run fast at B2B or the SS; it’s just that you will probably be in the minority…which, again, is fine; it’s just a different experience.

In the case of B2B, and for me, personally, if it weren’t for my lovely hostess putting me up overnight, I’m not sure I’d make the effort to get myself into SF to run “just a 12k,” (that sounds douchey, and it kinda is, but I generally don’t like to commute for anything besides marathons). I’m not really sure if I’ll run B2B again but not because it’s a bad race or because of the shitfaceapalooza  sideshow the spectators put on; it’s more a logistical thing than anything with the inevitable commute from SJ and the time spent away from my family. In this case, it’s not you, B2B; it’s me.

But — just like many of my races these days — what will stay with me for much longer about my first B2B is less so my actual race day performance and more so the memory of the QT with friends.

And, with that, we are THIS MUCH closer to the Newport Marathon…!!!

What about you? Have you ever done a race that started more than 20 minutes late? Or how about a race with thousands of shitfaced spectators?

The Essay… Yoda and the (P)PR

The Essay… Yoda and the (P)PR

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The Groundhog Day Blizzard/Snowpacolypse of 2011 has given me almost 2.5 whole snow days- that’s right, 2.5 whole work-less and class-less days!  What adult ever gets that?!

While the days haven’t been helpful in terms of getting in my desired mileage, because we all know that I don’t enjoy running on treadmills, the snow days have been good for getting around to things that I’ve neglected of late… like putting up a blog post 🙂

This post is a little different, though, and I’ll explain why.  One of my WRD (writing, rhetoric, and discourse) grad classes this quarter is on The Essay; no joke, that’s the actual title of the class.  We read essays, we read essays about essays, and we write our own, too.  I’m posting below my first essay I submitted for the class, as the relationship to running is quite visible and thus, more than appropriate for the context of this blog.  At the conclusion of the essay, I’ll also post my “objective statement” for what I wanted to accomplish by writing this text, so ultimately, you’ll be able to decide if I was successful.

Enjoy!

—————————————————————————————————————————-

title: Yoda and the (P)PR

Walking from my hotel in Chinatown to the Embarcadero in the pre-dawn hours, I stop to reflect on the surrealism of it all.

I’m in San Francisco, alone, on a random morning in late July, about to run my fifteenth marathon.

I’m on a quest to run a marathon in all fifty states, and not long after the sun rises this morning, I’ll be able to say that I’ve checked off twelve states in four years.

Awesome.

Throngs of runners, men and women, young and old, conspicuously large or unnervingly lanky, congregate at the Embarcadero, nervously milling about, performing silly pre-race rituals that they hope will help them run a personal best this morning. A tall-ish, muscular cop from Cleveland and I bond over our native Ohio status, and he grills me for advice in the final moments before he runs his first marathon. He is terrifically overdressed for the weather, but I don’t have the heart to tell him. I smile, tell him to relax, to enjoy the experience.

***

I’m pining to shave about three minutes off my marathon time, and I’m planning to do it at this fall’s Chicago marathon, a race I have consistently done poorly the two other times I’ve run it. The other marathons I’ve done this year, in Boston, South Bend, and San Francisco, have all gone well, and my weekly long runs and speedwork of late indicate that my fitness levels are right where they should be, right where I need them to be, in order to run a marathon in just over three-and-a-half hours. My body has not had any menacing flirtation with injury—a common malady for many endurance athletes—and I seem to be perfectly straddling the line of training “too much” versus “too little.” Like Goldilocks, whatever I’ve been doing, I’ve been doing just right. Everything—my training, my sleep, my nutrition—needs to be just right in order to make that 3:35 marathon finish time happen in October.

It will.

I am determined.

***

“Congratulations, you two,” Ariel says to Connor and me, not long after my San Francisco marathon, a smile beaming across her face as she takes off her latex gloves and rubs the excess gel onto her starchy white lab coat. Her manner is matter-of-fact, like she does this every day for a living—because she does—but she seems genuinely happy for us. “You’ve definitely got a little monkey in there. About seven weeks, as much as I can tell right now. We’ll give you an actual due date when you come back in four weeks.” She pauses, gathers her thoughts. “Since you’ve missed your period for a couple cycles, it’s tough to know for sure how far along you are. Don’t worry about it, though; we’ll figure it out in a month.”

Connor squeezes my hand and pulls my shirt down over my navel, still wet from the ultrasound goo. I look at him, and I bite down on my bottom lip, my nerves repressing my smile. Ariel exits the room and leaves us alone. The New Age music, like what you’d hear at a spa, reverberates softly in the background.

“Oh, my god… we’re pregnant,” I say. A tear rolls down my cheek, and that flat-line smile morphs into a Cheshire cat grin. “This is awesome.”

***

The notion of pregnancy and childbirth has always been something of a mystery to me. Very few people in my life to whom I am exceptionally close have been pregnant. Because of this, I have only heard horror stories from friends-of-friends-of-friends who tried to get pregnant for years before finally conceiving or of women who had to resort to IVF treatments.

It’s not that Connor and I were nervous about not getting pregnant; we just figured we wouldn’t know how long it would take until we tried. And in only about four weeks of somewhat-trying, we conceived.

Just.

Like.

That.

***

In the heat and dripping humidity of a Chicago August, my 3:35 marathon pursuit continues, though I know that the likelihood of my achieving this “A-list” goal is compromised, now that I have a “plus-one” status. Right now, however, I feel fine. No different. Not yet.

I read, and re-read, pregnancy books and sites that assure me I can keep up my active lifestyle as long as I feel well and still want to. A running friend, Erin, mentioned to me that East German female track athletes were actually encouraged by their coaches to get pregnant because they performed better in competition, something about an increase in oxygen production due to the fetus’ development.

Not that I at all am aspiring to be of the caliber of an East German Olympic athlete; I’m just itching to set a new marathon time personal record, a PR.

I can’t help but laugh when I read in one book that pregnancy “is not the time to run a marathon!,” exclamation point included, yet I’m doing just that—and soon. Ariel, our midwife, merely responded “more power to you” when I asked her last week if it was okay for me to run Chicago, when I would be about ten or eleven weeks pregnant; she just reminded me to heed my body’s signals and to hydrate appropriately.

Around mile two on my last twenty mile run before the marathon, I tell my three running girlfriends that I’m pregnant, about eight weeks in. Chris, Erin, and Stacey squeal with delight—they know that Connor and I wanted to start our family—and shoot eighteen miles’ worth of questions and congratulatory remarks at me.

Have you been sick at all?

Do you feel any different yet?

Do you want to keep running, and ohmygosh! do you still want to run Chicago?

Are you still going to shoot for a 3:35? And you know it’s OK if you don’t get it, right?

You’re freakin’ pregnant! That’s amazing that you even want to do a marathon still!

That training run, our last twenty-miler together, becomes one of our strongest and fastest runs of the entire summer.

I think: If I can run like this in training, maybe that 3:35 isn’t so far out of reach, after all.

***

The running gods are scheming against me, again.

That has to be the only explanation.

How is it that each year I have run the Chicago marathon, it just so happens that that particular October day hits daytime temperatures in the upwards of eighty degrees?

I’m dressed appropriately for the hot weather, my body is ready to run a 3:35 marathon, but the thought of doing it in eighty degree weather, which will feel closer to one hundred while I’m running, is not appealing. It’s not worth the risks of dehydration, let alone heat stroke or any other number of ailments that could damage my fetus, whom Connor and I have affectionately named Yoda, or me, to shoot for that time I have been coveting all summer long.

It’s a combination of the heat and the unfavorable risks-benefits analysis I mentally completed over today’s twenty-six-point-two mile jaunt that relegates me to finishing the race in 4:09, thirty-four minutes slower than my goal.

The disappointment saturates my body and leaves me chilled.

I’ve trained for this race for months now, some of those months while pregnant, and the one thing that I can’t control—the stupid weather—failed to work in my favor this morning.

Not realizing my goal this morning is unpleasant, to be sure, but I’ve got bigger things to worry about these days.

I remind myself: There’s always next year. There are always other marathons.

And most importantly: you’re pregnant.

***

By now, my secret is out, and people think I’m crazy.

Or child-endangering.

Or both.

Is it safe to run while you’re pregnant?, they ask, eyebrows raised. Their judging glances try to pierce me, but I don’t let them. They’re not runners, so they just don’t know, I assure myself.

Yes, it’s safe to run while you’re pregnant, provided you ran regularly before you conceived and your obstetrician or midwife gives you his or her blessing. Do they really think that I would knowingly do something that would harm Yoda?

Does your doctor know that you ran a marathon a couple weeks ago? Is he OK with that? Their definitions of “physical activity” don’t go much beyond the government’s paltry recommendation of thirty minute sessions, four-to-five times a week, so the thought of my having just willingly “exercised” for over four hours a couple weeks ago couldn’t be more outlandish to them.

Yes, my midwife knows I ran a marathon a couple weeks ago. In fact, according to our due date, I’ve actually run not one but two marathons—San Francisco and Chicago—since I’ve been pregnant, in addition to several hundred miles this summer. Not to mention a handful of other distance races, most of which I actually placed in the top ten percent for my age group. While pregnant.

And my favorite: How long are you going to keep running? Doesn’t it feel kinda weird, what, with the baby bouncing around and everything? They don’t understand that running has become a central part of my identity, that it’s as natural to me as eating or sleeping, that it’s not really something I think about discontinuing.

And no, it doesn’t feel weird when I run, and no, I don’t feel Yoda bouncing around, since s/he is pretty well cushioned in there. Just think of running as me “abdominally rocking” the little one to sleep while I work up a sweat.

I’d say Yoda has the sweet end of the deal.

***

I’ll keep running as long as my body permits it, which, if all goes well, should be right up until my delivery. As I’ve put on weight, running has become more challenging, since my legs fatigue more quickly, but I still find it immensely enjoyable and invigorating: even if my miles are a bit more slow-going.

Despite that, I have yet to regret going out for a run while pregnant.

For kicks, I registered for a few races, including a half-marathon and an 8k, set to occur in the final six weeks of my pregnancy. Regardless of my performance at these races or on any of my training runs, I don’t compare my pregnancy running to that of my non-pregnant self. My body is changing to accommodate my burgeoning Yoda, and holding myself to the same standards that I have for my non-pregnant self would not only be unwise, it’d be nonsensical.

There’s a reason why pregnant women do not hold any world records for speed.

Anything that I do while pregnant is an accomplishment, a PPR—a “pregnancy personal record,” if you will.

Ultimately, my goal for the thirty-six to forty weeks that I’m growing Yoda is to do everything in my power to ensure that s/he enters this world as healthy as possible. To that extent, numerous studies point to the array of benefits of being physically active during pregnancy, like having a decreased risk for gestational diabetes; a higher likelihood of having an easier delivery; and a better likelihood of giving birth to a healthier baby. Not to mention all the side benefits to the mother, like having a controlled, steady weight gain; sleeping well at night; or simply all the “good” physiological benefits that naturally come about because of exercise, pregnant or not.

Running while pregnant assures me that I’m doing all I can to bring Yoda into this world as healthy as s/he can be. That I can reap some of these benefits is just, well, fantastic.

***

The 3:35 pursuit will begin again this year, though realistically, not until after April 28.

Philadelphia in late November will most likely be the stage.

And, barring a Hades-like heat wave, I ought to be able to finally realize this goal that has become more than a year in the making.

As I envision setting a new marathon PR, I imagine that the best thing about it, about finally achieving this goal, will be seeing Yoda at the finish line and knowing that s/he had a part in it, that I have her or him to thank for helping me get there.

That it took the two of us to make that PR happen.

That it was a team effort.

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Objective Statement (or, what I wanted this essay to accomplish… it’s more helpful to read this after you’ve read the essay, IMHO, because otherwise my goals may unduly color your interpretation of my text)

Quite possibly two of the most significant things to have happened in my life are my becoming a marathon runner and, most recently, my pregnancy. Though my husband and I wanted to “try” to begin our family last summer, in the summer of 2010, my life—and my marathon training—went along as it normally would because never in a million years did I anticipate that we would become pregnant as easily, and as quickly, as we did.

Throughout my first trimester, I was at my peak of my marathon training for the Chicago 2010 marathon, and because I felt well, I was determined to try to go after my goal of completing the marathon in just over three-and-a-half hours. Ultimately, I came short of my goal, which was disappointing, but I still reveled in the PPR—the Pregnancy Personal Record—that I accomplished.

My Essay 1 shows the progression of the juxtaposition that my marathon training initially had with my pregnancy to something that became more synergistic.

From my writing, I hope to educate my readers and encourage a discussion amongst them regarding the benefits of staying active while pregnant. I aim to show my readers that pregnancy has not equated to paralysis—at least not for me.