Gene Day's Staging Area

This course is amazing and really should be part of the Wine Country Race series. That is how nice and scenic the Livermore course is. You also can’t go wrong with the All you can drink Beer and Wine at the end of the race. The shirts and medals were great too. I just can’t rave enough about my hometown Livermore Half Marathon.

Well, the fastest course in the West didn’t disappoint this year. Everything was just epic this year on race day. The weather, volunteers, support crowd, and the on course nutrition was just awesome! I really liked that had a few stations set up with food. At Mile 19 that half banana was just what I needed to keep moving forward. The best thing is that I qualified for the Boston Marathon with plenty of time to spare so I will be running my First Boston Marathon in 2018.

I found my first San Francisco Marathon to be very cool. I really love crossing that Golden Gate bridge and doing it on two closed lanes. You don’t have to run on the sidewalk, which is very nice. It is a very early start 5:32 but if you can get past that then you will have a great race. The temperature is perfect for running. This year was pretty misty and felt like rain on the bridge. But, these temps keep your body cool so you can run your heart out! Water and Nuun stations were plenty. They had some bananas at like Mile 21, which was very nice! Medal and shirt were pretty cool too. I am glad that I finally ran the SF course. The Golden Gate park, settle hills take their toll on you but once you get out of the Park, it becomes a runners course again with some nice rolling hills! I would run it again even if I am not a huge fan of getting up at 3am to make my 5:32 start time.

The San Francisco Spartan AT&The Sprint was fantastic. The stadium is awesome and the bay views were great too. If you like stairs, the sf giants, and obstacles this is the race for you. This is a great introductory into Spartan racing

This was by far the toughest and longest beast course I have done. Well, Monterey 2013 and 2014 have been the only beasts before this one. This one was longer then both of those at almost 15 miles. It was also very cold weather and it didn’t help starting out at 6,200 feet and almost reaching 9,000 feet. The Swim at Mile 10 hurt pretty bad. This affected me and most of the racers as I felt just fine before going into the freezing cold lake. This was a very beautiful course though! Obstacles were tough, Elevation was tough, and weather was very cold. All this made for a pretty long day on the Mountain. Everyone that finished this course should be very proud! I am coming back for some redemption in 2016!

The course doesn’t get any better then this. The views are probably better then any Napa race I have ran. The Swag was very nice and the beer/wine festival was great after. The only thing I would have changed is nowhere on the mens shirt did it say Livermore half Marathon or the distance 13.1 that we ran. Other then this one miss it was an awesome event!