Ran 38 miles yesterday to celebrate my upcoming 38th birthday. I guess I haven’t done birthday for a while!
I started at the Pacifica Pier at 4am – had some friends coming over at 2, so I had to finish in the morning to prepare for that. I ran by myself for about four hours in the dark. At 8am, I joined up with Pacifica Runners, the local running club that I run with – they’re super low key and super fun. We ran about 8 miles together, then I ran another 4.5 with Sebastien, one of the runners from the group, to get him back to his car. Then I ran the last 4.5 solo, although very slowly!
Nutrition plan was to use my car as an aid station and each as much “real” food as possible, e.g. not chemical sugar, which my stomach doesn’t seem to like. My food consisted of baked potatoes + salt, cantaloupe (a Farmdaze favorite), and half a banana. I didn’t have enough salt/electrolytes because I forgot to buy salt tabs, so my fingers got puffy, but otherwise this worked fine.
Course: start at the pier, then run south for a while, then turn around when I felt like it and come back. I ended up at my car three times – about every 10-13 miles.
I felt pretty good throughout. Physically I was pretty fatigued, but nothing out of the ordinary. Notably, the hamstring and the ankle both felt good.
Highlights:
- Running with Pacifica Runners. Thanks for hanging out with me, guys!
- Learning that the Pacifica Pier doesn’t actually stay open 24 hours. When I got there around 3:45am, there were some fishermen waiting for it to open
- There are some little gardens along a path in Pacifica that are community managed, and it turns out some of them have lights at night. That was really cool to see!
- The ocean is so pretty and I will never get tired of it.
Reflections:
- No major deep thoughts this time – time marches on, and this is just another birthday
- Running birthday miles when I started doing this (12 years ago) was about 12 miles easier than it is now
- I’m okay with loops / repeating the same part of the course a bunch of times. The predictability when running solo is actually helpful
- Running with friends is still the best part!
Prior birthday miles:
BRB Running 