Running Diary – 4 : a crazy marathon
So yesterday, I ran the Golden Gate half marathon in 2 hours 50 minutes. This run took about 46 minutes more than the Boston half marathon. Compared to the Boston run, yesterday’s run was brutal. You gain an elevation of about 1500 feet in the first 2 miles, the trail keeps going up non-stop. The total elevation gain over the entire run is 2200 feet.
Having done this run, I feel confident and humble. Humble because you see specks of humans crawling away on the hills. And it hits you that humans like us have been doing this for millions of years. We test ourselves against nature, and then we perish in less than a hundred years each. New offsprings do that over and over again for eternity. Yet the hills and the earth remain. The hills erode away too, but its much slower compared to our own erosion.
Another thought that occurred to me (and I’m sure this is no novel thought as such) was that each of us alive is at the end of a long line of survival starting right from the first man or men(if you believe in evolution). When you die without an offspring, you cut one of those lines of succession that had survived these millions of years. Hardly does this occur to me when someone passes away who had no children. But it is true. But then does it really matter that this happens? I mean, there is mating within the human population between pretty random points(though traditionally the randomness has sometimes been confined to sub-populations such as Americans, Brahmins, Hindus, Catholics, Norwegians etc..). So is there really a true identity one might have of oneself? How long can one go back in time and trace one’s identity?
Now for very long, I’d argue. You go back a few thousand years and all these notions of nationality and religion and community that we have today would be nonsense then. Go back a few million years and even the distinctions of race vanish. So does the line of survival idea make much sense? Yes and no. Yes, its true that you who are reading this blog post over the Internet are a member of the survived community. You are at an end of a one-way succession over time and you have maybe already produced or will produce the next generation. But if I go back many million years, I can’t really tell the distinction between my ancestor and yours, even whether they were different at all. A lot of our present day notions just vanish.
Think of civilizations like the Incas, highly developed civilizations of which there is not a trace today. When we feel like we are the ever powerful humans, the most developed species, do we ever stop and think if we’ll disappear like the Incas, and our technology that is all so cool and advanced(or so we think!) will just go away? This is not such an impossible scenario. I am sure an Inca guy developing a smart invention or technique had never imagined his civilization just doing a disappearing act.
Well, coming back to the run, it was much fun. I met two girls, Katie and Rebecca on the way and we ran together most of the route till they sped away to the finish while I followed close behind. Katie is from Berkeley, so my Stanford shorts were unhappy and sulking later over my letting a Cal girl beat me at marathon timing 
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But then I have an excuse. I was running with a foot I had sprained last weekend, and I had to stop and rest several times, or hop with my weight on the right foot whenever the left foot started hurting. It was kinda challenging, but I enjoyed it. And I really enjoyed the beautiful views all over the race route. What a sight!
I am wondering if there is a marathon(other than crazies like in the desert or on the south pole) which has a more challenging course than the golden gate marathon. I’d really like to know.. 
Coming back to my original point, doing this run has definitely been a confidence booster. I only had a month to train, with work schedule forever screaming for attention, and a sprained foot. But it wasn’t as hard as I felt the night before the run. I did not feel like I was going to die. And now I feel I could run a full marathon sometime later this year. Maybe the NY in Nov! After all, Louis Armstrong, the biker I reallyyyy admire, also runs it! 
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