Lake Tahoe Marathon scheme

I think I've mentioned before that our vacation plans are to go to Yosemite National Park in late September. We chose the time of the trip because we were (are?) thinking about going to see the Eagles play the 49ers that Sunday in San Francisco before we head to Yosemite.

Since we made the plans, Brian decided to do the Marine Corps Marathon and that means that one of his long runs is supposed to happen the day we leave for vacation. One of my long runs for NYC is supposed to be the weekend we arrive back home. As much as we both love marathons neither one of us has been willing to schedule/change our vacations because of training. We'll be fit enough to finsish our races if we skip one run, even a long run. Especially since we'll be hiking all over the Sierras and not just lazing on a beach. But then this weekend I noticed an ad for the Lake Tahoe Marathon on the back cover of Marathon & Beyond magazine.

I noticed it at first because it's a week long sports celebration at the Lake. They have several bike rides, kayak and other paddling events, tons of running -- including four different marathons, a 20 mile "power walk", and a 72 mile ultra. Then I noticed that this week of sports was the same week that we're going to be on vacation in California, not too far from Lake Tahoe.

Hmmm. This could be interesting. They say it's “From start to finish, maybe the most beautiful set of events you will ever do”.

I'm not quite crazy enough to want to run a marathon that close to my main event but a 20 mile walk sounds quite nice. Especially for Brian. So I check out the scoop on the walk. It sounds ideal. "20 miles of non-competitive training and fun plus a finish line picnic". It also says that "This is designed for the power walker, but a runner can use it as a long training run for a future marathon event". Could this be any more perfect for us?

So our new scheme is to blow off the Eagles game, which probably has less payoff for us than the Lake Tahoe thing, and head right to Yosemite. Then we can get four solid days there before heading to Lake Tahoe on Thursday. Then we'll have a day to check out whatever there is at Lake Tahoe followed by the 20 miler on Saturday morning before driving back to San Francisco Saturday evening. We fly home early in the morning on Sunday.

We get an extra bonus destination on our trip and our training in to boot. All we have to do is figure out where to stay as we adjust out hotel plans but I think we're going to do this.

Marathonguide says good things about the marathon but does speak kind of harshly about the effects of altitude but since we're doing it as training I don't think the slow times will bother us much.