Like clockwork each Friday afternoon, one of our running group leaders sends out a simple email:  “7:30 at Peets”, inviting any of the dozen or so recipients who are in town to meet at 7:30 am Saturday morning outside Peet’s Coffee at the town square in Mill Valley for a run of indeterminate length and difficulty.   No follow up questions tolerated.  Just shut up and show up.   And if you miss a few weeks in a row, be prepared for public shaming, other forms of ridicule, or, worse, being taken off the email list.  (Which, truth be told, is hardly an effective punishment, as you can always show up at 7:30 anyway.)

This particular Saturday morning, it is mostly regulars,   But a high-school senior  joins as well, a gangly 6 foot 2 with tousled reddish brown hair, dimples, and long, fast legs.  He bounds along with us like a gazelle.  But for courtesy shown to his father’s friends, he would bound off and leave us in the dust.

We climb Tenderfoot, three of us lagging a bit behind the others.  At the top of the climb, by Mountain Home Inn, the rest of the group plots their path, dropping into Muir Woods after a mile along Troop 80 Trail.  I’m going to stay high.  Like last week, I climbed for another three miles to the top of Cardiac.  But there’s no fog today, so I’m planning on continuing out to where the trail crests, looking down on Stinson Beach and the coastline.

Just before splitting up, we pass a woman running along our trail.  As we pass, she jokes, “no worries, I’m 70, so go ahead.”   After high-fiving the group as we split, up, I caught up to the woman again, and ran with her for the next mile so I could hear her story.  

“I want to be running like you when I’m 70,” I said, and the woman (Frannie) laughed.  She told me she’d been running these trails since her early 20’s.  Before that, she’d been a “flatlander”, running streets like most people do.  “From telephone pole to telephone pole,” Frannie described it.  But then her friends got her running on Mt. Tam’s trails, and (like me), she was hooked.  More than 45 years later, she’s still out here whenever she can, and she runs a good pace.

Frannie doesn’t run the Dipsea (too crowded for her taste), but has been a regular for the Double Dipsea, and has run two Quads (matching Urban’s total).   She doesn’t care as much about the formal events (has never run a marathon).  She runs “to keep her sanity”.   Frannie told me about one “training” run she did, from Pt. Reyes to San Francisco — 50 miles!   She ran it with some friends who were preparing for the Western States (famous 100 mile ultra marathon).  The Pt. Reyes to SF run took her 10 hours, which on that terrain is very fast (averaging 12 minute miles).  Incredibly impressive and inspirational!!  

We parted ways at Van Wyck Meadow, a tiny patch of green where three trails converge, and where there’s a cute sign (“Van Wyck Meadow, Pop. 3 Steller’s Jays”)

 I thanked her for sharing her story, and said I’d look for her on the mountain.  Heading off towards Pantoll and Cardiac, I was so energized by what she told me that I practically skipped along the next section of trail. Thinking about Frannie would power me through today’s long run.

At the top of Cardiac, the ocean glistened, the hills were bright green from all our rains, and my muscles were pleased at the prospect of a long galloping four mile downhill — most of it on the Coast View Trail — down to the valley floor.  I’d never been on Coast View before, but friends have raved about biking and running on it, with panoramic views ranging from the Farallon Islands to SF.   They were right, it is truly magnificent!   There were stretches where the vistas were so outrageous that I had to shout and laugh.   How had I managed to miss this trail until now?  The only downside was the treacherous footing, as the rains that had painted our hills green also created ankle-breaking ruts in the trail.   Next time I’ll be able to relish the views more, now that I have a sense of the terrain.  

The Coast View trail eventually abuts the Pacific Coast Highway just above Slide Ranch, and about a thousand feet above the frothy Pacific. I then took a left on Heather’s Cutoff and bounded down countless switchbacks before dropping into Santos Meadow, a couple miles south of Muir Woods, and joining Redwood Creek Trail.  The trail meanders for those two miles, crossing the creak three times (one crossing over a narrow fallen tree that tested my balance five or six feet above the water) and through spring flowers and tall grass, before joining up with the DIpsea Trail.  After walking up the steepest part of the Dipsea, the first mile up from Muir Woods, I finished strong, dropping into Mill Valley and running 13.5 miles in about 3 hours.   
What an awesome run!   Running with an 17 year old, a 70 year old, and several of us in between, all sharing a passion for our Mountain’s trails.  And, what’s more, for the first time it feels like maybe, just maybe, I can really do this — as in train for, run, and survive the Bridger.