The weather was excellent; cool with moments of sunshine. At the starting line in Folsom, 4 of us thought about the challenge ahead. Todd Sprague hoped to beat 3:40 & avoid the disastrous bonking of '95. But his 1-run-a-week training for the past month must have been a dark cloud. Trudi Sprague, in a last minute decision to run the marathon, hoped it wasn't a big mistake. Helen Kim hoped that 4 months of training since her last marathon would be enough to run 16min faster... taking off 37 seconds per mile! My hope was that I was recovered enough from Ironman to run 3:10 to qualify for Boston... Clarksburg didn't build much confidence.

3000 runners took off through the rolling hills towards Sacramento. We all ran separately, not knowing each others progress. Luckily my heart rate wasn't like Clarksburg. At the same pace, I was 10 to 15 beats lower. At mile 9 I had some wild ideas about gradually picking up the pace and finishing with a 40min 10k to break 3hrs (like last year) but by mile 13 common sense came back... "stay with the plan". It was getting tough enough to keep 7:10 pace. I was getting sick from the new "XLR8" sports drink used on the course. I had to stop 3 times, and once more to fix my shoes, which reflected another lapse of reason, "Never, never buy new race shoes the day before the race".

From our friend, Pat, who was running support along the course, I heard Helen was only 4 minutes back but that Todd & Trudi weren't seen. With all my stops I was constantly trying to catch up. I was nervous about making the 3:10 cutoff, my knees and feet were hurting, and I wasn't eating anything because of my stomach. I kept the heart rate below 165 until mile 22. Chugging down the gradual slope of "The Avenues" I felt more optimistic. I was back on pace and only 2 miles to go so I turned off the beeping heart rate alarm and focussed on the finish. It's a great feeling to have something left for the final stretch. If this was Clarksburg, I would have been dead 6 miles ago. Instead, I'm racing in, next to a guy who is matching my strides, until we're in an all out sprint for the finish, hugging the last corner, hearing the crowd cheer, and happily going under the clock at 3:06:58 (250th out of 1661). The guy beat me to the line but it was fun... I think. I shook his hand and hobbled back to the course the see the group.