Golden Gate

Well, the party is over. I did the half-marathon yesterday. That was idiotic and I regret that. But I got to run across the Golden Gate Bridge which was awesome and I'm glad I did. Here is a picture looking ahead to the impending bridge. A pretty foggy, but warm day. At the start at 7:00 a.m. it was a balmy 61 degrees.

It was way hillier than I thought it would be. The first three miles were all flat. Then it went up. I knew it would eventually get to the bridge, but it was quite a climb. Then it went past it and when up into higher hills along the coast. Arrrrrrrgh! It took forever, but finally turned around and back down and turned onto the bridge.

I knew I would have mixed emotions about the bridge. The traffic wasn't stopped, but there are pretty wide concrete walkways on each side. That was good. If there were those metal mesh things where you can see through, that would have been bad for me. As it was - still a little concerning. It was pretty foggy, so I could kind of blur my vision and just see a bit ahead of me and not the crashing surf and my impending doom down below. It was cool to get to where the cable hangs the lowest. Its about six feet above the road at that point.

Now the other side. There is a parking lot/observation point there. I was there with some college friends years ago and locked my keys in my car. If you're going to be someplace for a long time waiting for a locksmith, you can't pick a much more scenic spot. Anyway, through the parking lot and down a dirt trail that I didn't even know existed. It went almost all the way to the bottom. That was fun, but I knew it was going to go back up, so joy and sadness at the same time. On the way up, we ran (slow) the whole way. Everyone else, or at least 99 %, was walking.

Finally, back to the bridge and running across on the other side. This was the side facing the ocean. It worked like I kind of thought it would - my fatigue overcame my fears and I looked around quite a bit. It was fun. I was also feeling pretty good. I even had to slow down a bit for the people with me. We didn't run quite as fast as I was hoping overall, because when someone is having some trouble, the others slow down for them. That's fine. I didn't think I was going to win anyway. In fact at that point I was probably in about 3,000th place. Seriously.

So across the bridge and then down a trail. In fact the everything after the bridge was dirt trail or bike path. Usually I like running on trails, but with my growing fatigue, I didn't care for it.

I'm not sure my time or my place, but I don't really care. I ran over the bridge twice. Success.