The San Francisco Marathon Official Training Program started today. Greg Rosenberg, the Marathon Program Director, Coach (and several other titles and roles) kicked off the program early this saturday morning.

greg rosenberg - the sf marathon program director and coach

Program Overview

Greg and another long time runner gave everyone a nice overview of several things including

• the san francisco marathon event
• the intensive, but fun san francisco marathon training schedule for the 2 training groups (san franciso, east bay)
• pacers and pace groups – what they are and how to find your pace group
• running and safety gear
• running etiquette
• track (at Kezar Stadium) etiquette
• diet and nutrition
• staying motivated

and lots and lots of other useful information on several related topics.

I was very excited to see that so many people had signed up for the training program.

Interestingly, women outnumbered men by a high percentage. I kept wondering about this and can only thing of 2 reason why this would be the case.

1. Men, with our brash bad-ass attitude try to “wing” everything, including a difficult and challenging activity like running a 26.2 mile marathon. Women, on the other hand are more self-aware and have plenty of sense to realize that if they didn’t train for the marathon, they would dramatically increase their chances of ending up with a DNF,  a lots of injuries, or a cop out somewhere during the days leading up to the marathon.
2. More women, than men had signed up to run the marathon and this ratio cascaded into the corresponding training program signups also. This makes sense also because women have better endurance than men, and are as such more likely to signup for and accomplish a long distance run like a marathon than men.

Pace Groups

The SFM Training program has various volunteers who act as pacers. A pacer is someone who leads a pack of runners at a certain pace.  The pacers were holding up pace cards that had a name (ex. painted ladies – to easily remember the group next time around),  a half marathon finish time and a full marathon finish time. Greg told us to stop worry about our exact pace / finish time at the beginning, and instead just pick one group that is approximately close to the time we expect to finish the race we have signed up for (half or full marathon). “After a few runs”, he said, “you will automatically figure out your pace group and start running with them for the rest of the training program.”

I picked the 4:30 marathon finish group and ran with them for the 1st training day run.

Maiden Run @ Crissy Fields

After all the trainees gathered around the pacers of the pace groups that they wanted to run with, we all started off our maiden run !

The run started at the Sports Basement in the Presidio. We ran on Mason Street, onto Hamilton Street and finally onto Marine Drive, touching base at the “Hopper’s hands” under the Golden Gate Bridge.

hoppers hands under the golden gate bridge

Then we turned around and made our way back along marine drive, back to the Sports Basement @ Presidio.  My Garmin Forerunner 205 GPS Watch told me that I had run 3.2 miles over a 45 minute period.

Back at the Home Base

Back at the home base of the training run, which was the Sports Basement for today’s run, the program co-ordinators and volunteers were waiting for our return with lots of food and drinks. We had bagels, cream cheese and good old drinking water ! We also got our SF Marathon “In-Training” T-Shirts !

After that, we stretched and cooled down before heading off to the “Shoe Clinic” inside the Sports Basement Store.

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