2022 Goals + Spring 2022 Races!

Now that that half marathon monkey is off my back and I'm no longer haunted by the idea that I will never finish 13.1 miles ever again, I've been having fun thinking about spring races. I have another Spain/Portugal trip coming up in the first half of June, which creates a kind of natural running season + break over the next few months. I've also been ruminating about what other goals I want to take on over the course of next year. Very little set in stone, but here is a bit of an update at least!

Oakland Running Festival 10K (Sunday 3/20). This is a Pacific Association race that some of the other masters women on my team are planning to run, so I'm jumping in! I was originally signed up for the half (deferred from 2020) but I'm dropping down to the 10K to help the team score. My expectations are low -- I ran couple of 10Ks last summer just to kind of see what I could do, but they were both quite slow, in the 50:00 range, so even just under that would be progress. Right before the pandemic I ran a 46:23 on fairly moderate training, so I'd expect that to be about the lower limit of what I could do in Oakland if everything went perfectly.

On my way to 46:23 in February 2020, my last pre-pandemic race (No idea how I ended up completely alone in this picture, I remember being surrounded for most of the race!)

Race Report: Kaiser Permanente Half Marathon 2022

Huzzah! The Kaiser Curse is broken! 🎉🎉🎉 After something like a decade of attempting and failing to both start and finish one of my favorite local races for the second time (the first time was in 2010), I finally managed it this past Sunday and it feels amazing.

Not only did I break the Kaiser Curse, I also brought my more general half marathon dry spell to an end--Sunday's race was my first half marathon *race* since October 2018 and my first 13.1+ mile run of *any* kind since July 2019. Also feels good!

Why did I sign up for this race?

The Kaiser race is super local for me (less than three miles away) and since I do a lot of runs in Golden Gate Park and surrounding SF, I know the course really well. I'd run the half once before, the 10K twice, and the 5K once (not to mention DNFing the half once and signing up & not being able to run it so many times I've lost count, hence the curse). The course is (mostly) nice and relatively fast, the weather is usually pretty good (usually), and with the exception of the bag check pickup in 2020 (it was 2+ hours before they found my bag!), it's always been very smooth and well-run.

I signed up for the half last summer when registration first opened and there was a chance they'd have to significantly limit the field due to COVID. I'd just started training again in earnest, SF case numbers were at an all-time low, and in a burst of optimism about the world that I hadn't experienced in quite a while, I signed up for this and a couple other half marathons, excited to spend the next few months getting back in shape, throw down in Golden Gate Park, and just see what happened.

And then what happened?

January 2022 Reads!

Getting on top of this from the beginning this year! It's been a good month for getting some reading done. Maybe there's a suggestion for you in here somewhere, dear reader?

(1) Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson (2020, 270 pages) (crime/mystery/drama). Audiobook, reread. Years ago, bookshop owner Malcom Kershaw published a blog post listing “Eight Perfect Murders” from literature–murders that he, as a crime/mystery aficionado, believed to be the most airtight in terms of what a person could actually get away with. Now, years later, it seems someone is using the blog post as a to-do list, and the police want his help to identify the killer.

I don’t 100% adore everything by Peter Swanson BUT when he’s at his best in this genre, it’s really something. I remembered this book being smart and riveting the first time around but, as often happens, re-reading something where I already know what happens gives me extra bandwidth to appreciate all kinds of little brilliant details that I missed the first time around. Anyone who loves a good mystery/crime thriller/psychological thriller will enjoy this one, especially if you’ve read a lot of classics of the genre.