Oakland Marathon Race Report

Posted by Rachel

I’m pretty sure I have said this before, but I really love the Oakland Marathon!

The fun all started yesterday, when we deemed that we could and should eat anything and everything we wanted. After all, marathons require calories! Here’s a snapshot:

The three keys to a successful marathon: gelato, booze, and pasta.

After eating twice as much dinner as I needed, we watched some horrible/weird movies and went to bed. Our alarms went off at 5:30-6:00 am… later than a normal weekday of training! For how many marathons do you actually get to sleep in LATER than usual? We prepped our uniforms, sang/danced to ‘Thrift Shop’ and Pitbull (sorry neighbors), and walked out the door 15 min before the gun went off.

Despite having basically a VIP bathroom and intentionally dehydrating ourselves, Chen and I both still had to stop at the porta potty at mile TWO. That’s a first for me, but since this was essentially a training run, we went for it. The crowd support is always awesome at ORF, and in the first part of the course there were a number of fans out, especially in Rockridge. As we climbed into more residential areas towards and in Montclair, there were several families in their yards saying ‘welcome to Montclair!’. Totally awesome. After the descent (the worst part of the race- a quad pounder), the families in East Oakland were out cheering and a few even had bought water bottles to give to runners. It’s so awesome how all of the neighborhoods come out to support the race. After running on International back toward downtown, we joined up with half marathoners and headed to Jack London. This point is always good and bad; good because there are more fans and they are way more rowdy, but slightly inconvenient because there are 10,000 people running the half, and the way that the starts are structured means that people running a 3:40-4:00 marathon are linking up with people running ~1:00/mile slower on crowded streets. After running through West Oakland, which has an awesome Arch of Fire and fire breathing horse (and a very cool raincloud that I somehow missed while trying to antagonize the horse guy to make it breathe fire for us (he did)), we finally head back toward Lake Merritt for the home turf home stretch.

Right when we hit the lake, we came upon my favorite cheer station every year- the Oakland Raiders. I grew up a Bills fan (ugh- always hate admitting that one!) and I’ve heard many people across the country say negative things about Oakland fans. But I’ve run in plenty of cities with professional sports teams and I’ve never seen other fans do what the Raiders fans do for Oakland Running Festival. Every year that I’ve run they came equipped with a PARTY: a DJ, costumes, and vocal running supporters. In fact, they’ve been so popular in the past that the ORF made them an official water stop this year. Thanks Raiders fans- you guys are amazing!

After a lap around the lake, we passed by my house and then we were finished! I felt great at the end, and I’m glad to know that the answer to the question “can I run a full marathon on around or less than 30 miles per week?” is “yes” (note- there is a lot of other exercise outside that 30 miles). My feet are a little sore (they have become unaccustomed to long runs, oops) and I have some rookie chafing, but everything else is good. We finished in 3:51:57 and then had lunch with our amazing friends/family that came to cheer us on- thanks Becky, Sandi, Matt, Katie, and Mark! Next time I move that far on my own two feet will be on July 26 at IM Canada…a scary thought!

Thanks for another great year, ORF! Great run, great volunteers- can't wait for 2016!