Dan Smith's Staging Area

The Surf City Marathon obviously has a great location with fantastic scenery with the course running along the Pacific Coast Highway with views of dozens of surfers. The weather was perfect for running this year with cloud cover, very little wind, and cool temperatures. They seemed to have fantastic spectator support from some pre-teen / teen group or organization? At least for the first half of the Full, there were dozens and dozens of kids cheering us on with as much gusto as they could muster. They were awesome! There were very few hills of any kind. I’m from Fargo, and even I thought the course was fairly flat. The water stations were as good as could be with exactly what they’re supposed to have. Bananas were also found a couple times throughout the race. At the end of the race, it was nice to see an orange and the usual water, banana, and other food items. For me, it’s practically REQUIRED for the finish line to have chocolate milk, and I’m thankful to say they had my wonderfully tasting chocolate milk waiting for me! The medal was awesome. I did the San Francisco Marathon in July of 2016, so I also was able to pick up my California Dreamin’ medal with a spinner on it … nice! Everything about this race was really, really nice. I do wonder if the length of the Full was a little more than normal. I believe it was more like 26.56mi, according to my GPS. This is significant to me, because, well, I had a time of 4:00:06! I would’ve gotten under 4hrs, if it was a tiny bit shorter … perhaps 23 miles would’ve been nice. Ha. Seriously, more clocks along the route would’ve made the race perfect … some races, for example Charlotte, have a clock on every mile marker.
Also, a big thanks goes to the Double Tree Club on Hutton in Santa Ana! They did a surprisingly good job making all of the runners feel welcome there! They had a perfect pasta meal the night before. They had the luxurious bus ride to and from the marathon. They even greeted the runners after getting shuttled from the finish line back to their hotel with loud clanking of pans while lined up at the entrance to the hotel! Lots of congratulatory noise after an exhausting, fulfilling day. Then, the hotel finished it off with a Super Bowl party in their restaurant.