Nike + Women’s Half Marathon Race Report

Well, I can officially say I am a finisher, but I think I’ll be in the books next to Barry Bonds with a nice little * Details below…

Decided to run the half marathon Sunday morning at 7:30 AM with my “long run” partner Asako. We met at Ryder Park where we begin all our long runs. It was a bit chilly, and VERY VERY windy. It was so windy that we decided to start by running north (instead of our usual south-bound departure), through Coyote Point Park, and along some of the hotels near SFO. This would have us start into the wind, but more importantly it would have us running through more tree and building sheltered areas than if we had started running south. As it turned out, it was a great idea. For one, the end of the run had the wind at our backs, two, there were more sheltered areas where there was some calm, and three, the wind seemed much more tame as we neared SFO. As we reached the turn-around point we thought, hmmm the wind is dying down, but as we returned to the starting point, we realized that it hadn’t settled down, it was just calmer further north, and things were still blowing like mad where we started. The run was decent, mostly because the anti-inflammatory/analgesic I took in the morning was keeping my right foot in check - until mile 5 anyway. I figured the foot would be an issue, but decided firmly that I would finish this race before I started the healing process -which is now underway. It never got to all-out pain, but it was reminding me the second half that I need to do something. But I also had a bit of luck on my side….

This is where the story of the asterisk comes in… The story starts like this. After the previous week’s half marathon, I decided my shoes were getting pretty nasty. Dirty and smelly. I thought about throwing them into the washer as my mother had done to our shoes when we were kids… but I wasn’t sure I wanted to ruin the shoes… would it ruin them? After my failed 5 miler, I decided that they had to be cleaned - my new shoes are on order, and won’t be in for another week (Asics Gel Kayano - in LIME). So into the washer they went, and I let them air-dry afterwards. It worked. They weren’t ruined, and they were sparkly white and smelling clean…

The * you ask? Well prior to washing them, I had to remove the Nike+ transmitter from the shoe, along with the ChampionChip attached to the other shoe. When I reattached them, I must have put the Nike Xmitter one lace higher than it was prior to washing, making is less horizontal, and now slightly angled. This really tweaked the calibration of the nike device. I didn’t know it would, and found out only after starting the run…. As one who relies heavily on the continuous glucose monitor, and knows that proper calibration is MANDATORY to get useful information from it, I am all for good calibration, but today’s bad calibration of the nike system would have it’s silver lining.

When bad things happen for good reasons. So just before .8 mile into the run, Paula comes into my headphones and tells me I’ve completed the first mile. HUH - that’s odd… when the second mile came early too, I realized what was going on and hypothesized what had caused this. At that point I was feeling great (from a foot standpoint) and convinced myself that even though I would get credit for the half marathon while running less than the prescribed 13.1, that I would follow the GPS until I had actually completed the entire run… After my foot started flairing up however, my tune changed, and I realized that this might be a sign that I should get off the foot sooner rather than later, and decided that I would take the 13.1 miles on nike when my GPS was telling me 10. An episode of miss-calibration heaven! So that’s what we did - I feel a bit small, but since they don’t rank people, or even display the final times, I wasn’t cheating anyone out of a better finishing spot, so I went with it. Just finished to collect my tech-tee and key chain, and went home to begin the icing!

Hell, even when the thing is perfectly calibrated, it always deviates by up to 10% anyway, so I’m not really that upset, and it was a “virtual” race, so I ran a “virtual” half marathon. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it, even if Greg Anderson has to sit in jail for me.

Jamie, The Diabetic Runner^*