Amy's So-Called Life: San Fran Ultra Marathon 7/24-7/28/2025

My blogs are all out of order! But here is my attempts at catching up.

Since I turned the big 5-0 this year, I stole an idea from my friend Tracy to run 50 miles for my 50th birthday. I found this Ultra marathon in San Francisco that I decided I wanted to do.

On July 24th, I flew out from Grand Rapids to San Fran! On the way there everything was going fine. I was on the leg from Charlotte to San Fran when this crazy thing happened. I was sitting almost at the very back of the plane. The attendant was just starting to serve drinks/snacks with her cart. Then this girl comes up the isle and says that she feels like she's going to faint. The attendant was kind of bitchy towards her. Telling her that she had to use the bathroom towards the front of the plane and she can't use the back bathroom because she's serving drinks. The girl keeps saying, "I'm going to faint". She starts leaning on to the cart with her head in her arm. All of a sudden, she just starts to melt backward towards the ground. I grabbed her arm and I think the person across the isle from me grabbed her as well to keep her from slamming to the floor. She was just out for a couple of seconds, but then the attendant yelled, "Is there a medical profession on the plane? We have a medical emergency". This guy came forward for a second, but then his wife yelled at him in another language and he backed away from the girl not helping her!! Then this Indian woman comes up the isle. She says she's an emergency room doctor or nurse. We get the girl sat up. I have to say, I have never seen a white person turn so white before! Her lips we white as snow! Anyway, the ER doc got her standing and they walked to the back of the plane. Another man was right behind her and he said he was a nurse as well. Anyway, they took care of the situation and things went back to normal during the flight. At some point, I had to go to the bathroom. I used the back bathroom and had to wait for a minute to use it. The attendant who was kind of bitchy to the fainting girl was standing there. I asked her if that girl who fainted was ok. The lady told me the whole story. She said her cart was stuck and she couldn't get it out of the way in time before the girl fainted. Once the doctor got the girl to the back of the plane and sat down, they were looking through all their medical stuff and saw an IV bag with fluids in it. The doc was like, "I can get that fluid in her!". So they hooked her up to the IV right away. The attendant said that the fluids perked her up really fast. Once she started talking, she said that this has happened before and she was just really dehydrated. So, crisis averted. She was all good in the end. It was just such a weird event that happened!

Once I landed, the plan was for me to meet Amin and Alicia at Google for lunch. It took a minute to figure things out, but I got on the local metro, then transferred to the CalTrain and made my way down to San Jose.

I got to go to Google! It was freakin amazing

Google has this amazing cafeteria where we ate lunch for free. They had anything and everything available under the sun. It was like eating lunch in a food court. But nicer. haha

After lunch we walked around a little bit. The campus is so huge, we just saw a couple of the buildings and one of the merch shops.

Me, Alicia and Yara at Google having lunch outside

Because they were all getting over being sick, I didn't get to spend a lot of time with them, but it was fun seeing them for the afternoon. After a long lunch and a visit to the Google merch store, they dropped me back off at the CalTrain and I made my way back up to San Fran.

I finished off the day checking into the hotel, getting some food for my little apartment and then crashing out for the rest of the day.

My hotel was just up the road from the trolly tour start.

7/25/25: Alcatraz tour.

On Friday, the first thing I did was go to Alcatraz Island. I had been on tours around the island before but I had never been to the island.

it's a 30 min boat ride to the island and you have to get tickets months in advance!

The Golden Gate Bridge

Alcatraz Island

They still have the signs from when the Indigenous People occupied the island in 1969

When we arrived at the island. The DNR was VERY adamant that you DO NOT eat anything anywhere on the island except at the boat dock. It didn't take long for me to understand why they said that. There are approx 1 billion seagulls and other birds living and nesting on the south side of the island. If you were to take out a tictac, you would probably be swarmed by a tornado of birds.

One thing this picture does not convey is the BIRD SMELL. There was a trail that you could follow to see the side of the island where all these birds were hanging out, but it smelled and as you can see there is poop everywhere. Getting pooped on was a big threat there, so I walked through quickly with my hoodie on!

Wasn't there a Hitchcock movie called the Birds?

There are a lot of building on the island, but a lot of them are in disrepair.

The control center inside the main prison area

Alcatraz is not that big. I think that at most there were no more than 300 prisoners here at one time.

The cells I was most interested in seeing where where those 3 guys escaped Shawshank style through a hole they dug at the back of their cell. The cells are preserved the way they left them. The 'heads' they made were from soap and hair clippings. It's the biggest mystery because they never found the 3 men, but they think they drowned in the bay and didn't make it to shore.

The cafeteria area.

I spent about 3hrs on the island wandering around, reading the signs, looking at stuff, etc. It was super interesting! Before I left, I had to get a book of course. I'm wandering around the book store and I see that there was going to be an author there. He had written about his time at Alcatraz! He's one of the last living prisoners. Unfortunately, he wasn't there that one day, but he was going to be there next day or something. I was so bummed, but I still bought his book!

After I got back to the main land, I had to walk from The Embarcadero around the peninsula to the Fort Mason festival pavilion for my race packet pick up. On the way there I saw a lot of street vendors selling food. I didn't get anything but there were a ton of vendors!

Then I stopped at the sea lion viewing area

This whole area is cool to see but it's mostly just souvenir shops and restaurants.

After I got my packet info at the pavilion, I decided to walk over to a nearby Safeway to get some food for the next day or so. It would have been about a 4 mile walk back to my hotel. Instead of Uber I wanted to try Waymo! Alicia was just telling me about it and she said they are in San Fran. I downloaded the app and ordered my first Waymo. It was so strange riding in a driverless car! It didn't cost me any more than an Uber, I didn't have to have awkward conversations with the driver and I didn't have to tip. All the cars are Jaguars and you can watch your route on the screen on the back of the center console. The car talks to you when you get in and it tells you when it is parked and you can get out. It's kind of amazing! I would trust this car over a human any day!

There goes my Waymo car!

The next morning, I was running the 5k as a 'shake out' run before the big double marathon. I got up early, took the bus down to Presidio Park, then walked to the start of the 5k.

We got to run right along the bay in Presidio Park. It was a great route to see the Golden Gate bridge.

Finished the 5k!
After the 5k, I figured I needed to get back to my room to eat and rest up. I got side tracked of course... I've been to San Fran before, but there were a couple of places that I just wanted to see again. I got back on the bus and made my way to the Haight and Ashbury area. This is where the summer of love happened....The Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin lived and did their music for a while.

Those are what you think they are

There is a park in this area called Buena Vista. I had read somewhere that they had used headstones to line the street gutters. I wanted to see if this was true. I walked around and found the headstones. In the pictures above you can see they are definitely head stones. Most of them are flipped down so you can't see any writing, but a few were turned up. Apparently, they moved some graveyards out of the city to make room for houses back in the day...these came from 'unclaimed' graves. What the hell man. Any grave is only 1 maybe 2 generations from no one ever visiting again. I'm sure it was not ethical, but there they are.

After the park visit, I jogged over to Alamo Square Park where you can see the famous "Painted Ladies". At this point, I noticed I was only about a mile from the Full House house....So I jogged over there next!

The Full House house!

Ok, so after this, I had ran/walked about 7 miles and figured I had better get my butt back to my little apartment to rest up for the big run. The rest of the afternoon, I just laid around in my little apartment, napped, ate and watched TV

The way this Ultra worked was this: At 8:30pm on July 26, I made my way to the Hyatt Regency Hotel just outside of Embarcadero Ferry building. They had a 'staging' area for all the ultra runners. We had to check in, verify our lights (we were not allowed to run with out a headlamp and some other kind of reflective gear) and set up our little camp somewhere in this conference room. Once everyone was checked in, they briefed us on the course and what we needed to do. It was an out and back along the peninsula. There was an aid station at mile 6 and 20 and mile 13 at the turnaround. We were required to check in at each aid station so they could keep track of everyone. Pretty simple really. Once we finished the 'first loop', we could recover back in the staging area before the other marathon started.

The Hyatt Regency: This was where all the Ultra runners could store their extra clothes and food.

At 10pm, we all headed out to the starting line. There were only about 200 people doing the ultra.

It was actually really cool running in San Fran at night

It was about mile 14 when my runners gut kicked in. I couldn't make it to a port a john and luckily it was fairly 'woodsy'. I think I was running along the Golden Gate park when I ran into the bushes to do business. I got to a fence and there was this giant racoon hanging out on a fence! He just stared at me and actually got closer to me while I was doing business. Not sure if he thought I had a snack or WAS a snack, but our encounter was harmless and I continued on.

Funny I thought the Golden Gate bridge would look prettier at night. I think the Mackinac Bridge is way prettier at night than this bridge. But It was still really neat to see at night.

It was around 3:30 when I finally finished my first marathon. It actually felt 'easy'. But I also knew I had another marathon to run. Once I finished, I walked back to the hotel, changed my clothes and just sat with my stuff and charged up my watch/phone/and headphones. By the time I sat down to 'rest', I really only had about 45 min before the next marathon was going to start . Some people had what seemed like entire camp sites set up inside. Some people were all bundled up in sleeping bags, some people were eating giant bowls of ramen. They also had coffee, juice, breads and some other breakfast stuff for us. I ate some tuna and crackers....which sounds terrible, but at the time it sounded great! haha.

Below is the route for the first marathon. The hills were only hard around the Presidio Park area. Otherwise, it was actually pretty flat.

Around 5am I got inline for the 2nd marathon for me, but the 'regular' marathon for most of the runners.

For the second marathon, we got to run across the Golden Gate bridge, which was really cool.

The second marathon started in the same location as the first. Since this was the 'main' marathon, there were 1000s of people running this. There were more water stops and bathrooms and I didn't have to 'check in' with anyone. The one thing that did help was that the Ultra people had special bibs to wear on our backs that just said 'Ultra'. I think it was to give people a heads up that we were probably going slow and needed extra room. It's like when you see cars with 'student driver' magnets on them. haha

But what was amazing to me was that so many people gave me shout outs during the run when they passed me! I got pats on the back....I got people shouting 'go Ultra!'....people high-fived me...it was just really cool to have complete strangers cheering me on to the finish. Around the 2nd mile 14 (which would have been around mile 40 for me) things really started to get hard. I started feeling 'wobbly' and my feet were hurting. I was so nervous that I wasn't going to be able to finish. I was swearing a lot in my head. haha. But, I finished!!! At the finish, this girl came up to me and said that I got her to the end of the marathon. I was like, "what do you mean?". She said that she was having a hard time but saw my Ultra bib and was encouraged by me and she just used me as a 'pace car' to get to the end. She's was like, 'I know you didn't know you were helping me but you were!". We hugged and congratulated each other. It's stuff like that that makes me so happy. Everyone is just there for everyone. Sometimes it feels like races are the only place in the world where people come together to be happy and encourage and support other people.

The only thing that I did not like about this race, is that there seemed to be many different races starting at different times along the course. There was a 'front half' half and a 'back half' half and 10k run and who the heck knows what else...I was too delirious to understand. I'm not exactly sure, but I do know that there were a few times when a fast bike leader shouted 'GET TO THE RIGHT GET TO THE RIGHT' and then an elite runner came zipping by me. That was super frustrating. And the elites are COOKING. One of them accidently hit me as he ran past. So, If I got hit, I'm sure others got hit too. I did not like that. And I think it's dangerous for both the fast and the slow runners alike. Those fast runners should not be having to pass slow runners. Other than those few occurrences, the run was fantastic.

Alicia was watching my bubble and she congratulated me when she saw me at the end. I was up and running for 12hrs (10hrs of running and 1.5ish hours resting in between). Once I finished, I staggered back to the hotel, gathered up my stuff, hopped on the bus and got back to my hotel. I showered and collapsed on my bed for a few hours before getting some food. The rest of the day, I just watched TV in my room. My flight was early the next morning back to Michigan. I just hopped on the bus and made my way to the airport.