Beyond tired

I know I've been slack on the blog.....coming back from Italy and then running Big Sur, well, I'm beyond tired.  But I do want to share all the adventures.  Top of mind, this weekends marathon - it was fantastic fun from beginning to end.  It really is a tough hilly beautiful course.  We had sun, fog, wind.....no rain thankfully.  The adventure begins having to catch a bus at 4am to the start line, for a 645am start.  I stayed in a swanky expensive hotel (this because I didn't get it together early enough to book and get the marathon rate.....), that was 5mins from the shuttle pick up point.  Dozens of buses ferried the 4000+ runners to the start, no cars allowed.  They close State Highway 1 for the race so everyone has to bus to the start.  I decided to go with a Pace Team this time.....I should have done this long ago.  Basically you choose a finish time and start with a group who has a pacer whose sole task in life is to get you across the line on time.  It was totally awesome.  The guy was fantastic, joking, being a tour guide, asking questions.  You find yourself running with a bunch of strangers who you end up chatting with.  I was very nervous about this run, given I ran a marathon two weeks ago.  But the pace team was great.  We lost some folk along the way (there are some mean hills on this course) then at mile 23 someone in front of us had fallen and was bleeding from a knock on the head - our pacer dropped to help and told us to keep going.  A group of four of us kept chugging along.  Best moment was when a voice from behind said "I've been with you guys for 23miles, I'm not letting you go now.......".  It was a woman from NY, in the end her and I paced each other to the finish, including the very gnarly hill that is part of the last mile.  It's an odd way to meet folk but for 2miles we were best friends, keeping each other going and determinedly crossed the line together, 5 mins under our goal time (5hrs).  It was totally inspiring and fun and worth every step.
Italy pictures next.