I’m especially good at spectating.

The San Francisco Marathon was on Sunday and my friend, Megan, was running, her first time with the 26.2.
Since it’s such a monumental accomplishment, we got up at 6:30 am to drive into the city and cheer her on.

We wanted to be in Golden Gate Park because we knew that that was a really lonely and endless part of the course (I did the 2nd half and David did the full last year.)

After some tomfoolery trying to get to where we needed to be while avoiding road closures, we scurried into the park, saw the runners and then we stood there.  With signs!

People were loving David’s sign, “Run, total stranger, Run.” So may runners saw it and said “That’s me!” It was totally fun.

We knew Megan was going to be wearing a pink shirt and a white hat. We had a half an hour window in which she should be passing by us, around her Mile 15.

So we looked for Megan and we cheered for the total strangers. I teared up watching them go by.

After a bit, I noticed that most people had their names printed on their bibs. A bit too small to read easily, but you could pick them out if you looked. David got a total kick out of calling people out by name. I just wept and tried to pretend I wasn’t.

I started to wonder if all the people passing by seemed like they were probably slower runners than Megan, who’s roughly a 10 minute miler.

But who knows with all the different waves and the half marathon people mixed in with the full.

And then later, I noticed that all the people had green markers on their bibs saying “2nd Half,” for the second half marathon.
And they ALL said that.

What? Where are the marathoners? What’s going on?

So you see this little course map? The dark blue line is the marathon course and the lighter blue is the half. Most of the time, their course is the same.
But they take this extra little out and back extension here. The yellow arrows point to where we were standing. If we had been standing in the path, we would have actually seen the rest of the race course, just a bit further on.

So we didn’t see Megan around Mile 15 like we said we would. And I was preaching the gospel that “It’s hard doesn’t mean I can’t” to the half-marathoners before they had even hit the 2 mile mark.