So you made it through my last marathon post (pun intended) and you came back for more? <edit>I promise the story from San Antonio won’t be that long?</edit> Where to start. It all started one night out with some guys for a beer. They were both going to be having babies and were looking for an excuse to keep them in shape. Jenny and I weren’t expecting (yet), but I’m not one to back down from a challenge so I said I was in. We were to run the San Antonio Rock & Roll Marathon, November 14, 2010. We had plenty of time to train and at one point I even thought I would try to run it barefoot. Wow, that was crazy. But I’ll post on barefoot running some other time. Work hours got long and I finally decided I just needed to get my mileage up so I ditched that I idea and laced the shoes back up. Training went pretty well for me, but my buddy Trim, ended up pulling a muscle and re-targeted to running the Austin Marathon in February. The best thing about training was getting convinced to go all the way downtown at Lady Bird Lake. The nice thing about running downtown is jumping into Barton Springs Pool after a long run. The only set back to my training was a pretty bad ‘black toenail’. I had already gotten a half size bigger shoe but I think I was also leaving my shoes too loose and on runs over 16 miles my big toe would rub on top of the shoe enough to cause a problem. I got one of my planned 20 mile runs in before it finally got bad enough that I had to do something. Instead of doing the farmer thing and heating up a paperclip, I went into to the health clinic at work (yeah, we’ve got our own primary care clinic at work) and had it looked at. I admit that even I had doubts when the doctor said he was going to drill a few holes in my toenail using a 16 gauge needle. OK, OK, that is probably enough detail on that topic, but it didn’t hurt and it felt much better afterwards. It forced me to take a week off from running, but I was still able to workout on an elliptical. The last week before the race I was able to run and everything felt pretty good. I was ready. Well almost. The final step was shaving my beard into… friendly mutton chops. (There are no pre-race pictures so you’ll have to wait for the post-race pics.)

Race weekend rolled around and I was surprisingly calm. We got checked into the Embassy Suites on the Riverwalk where the girls were just half a block off the course at mile 8. The morning of the race I felt good and had a banana before heading out to the starting line with Gerardo. They had set up “corrals” to start the field in waves and we were in #5. That seemed a little close to the front but I wasn’t going to complain. We were planning on going out at 3:45 finish time pace (8:35 per mile), and in my mind, likely falling back to 3:50 finishing time pace. The race started and within a couple of minutes it was time to start.

Mile 1 – Haulin’: We crossed the starting line and most of the corral took off haulin’ it. We joked that we’d be passing them later when they gassed and we tried to settle into our pace. At about .75 miles, we turned a corner and noticed people the people up ahead of once were taking off sprinting. I also remember hearing a train horn. It took me a bit to put two and two together, but it wasn’t hard when I finally noticed the freight train barreling down the railroad tracks. Not tracks along side the course; tracks we were about to cross. A lot of runners ran past the lone race official posted there waving an orange flag and ducked the cross-arms to get by ahead of the train. I don’t think Gerardo and I actually said anything to each other but we got to the tracks just as the train was about to the crossing and we both knew better and we pulled up. We were actually in the first row of people who stopped. Pretty quickly I stopped my watch so that I would still end up with an accurate time. Now what. Was the train stopping? It seemed like it. The crowd of runners grew and spread off the street along the side of the tracks. I admit to feeling more than a little unsafe turning around and seeing the huge crowd of runners gathered hoping that the ones in the back didn’t decide to push forward since at that point we were about ten feet away from speeding freight train. But after just under 4 minutes the train cleared and the race was on. It worked out pretty good for us since were in the front and didn’t get tangled up in the crowed. Here’s the new report:

Stay tuned for the rest of the story…