This race was one of my early attempts at a BQ in 2016. It was a quick weekend trip, so I didn’t have a lot of time for sight seeing. I flew into San Francisco and drove on in to Napa on a Friday, went to the expo and explored a little of the town on Saturday and ran the race Sunday.

The Expo
This was a very small expo held at the host hotel. There was wine tasting (although I didn’t want to drink the day before my race, a few booths and displays. The swag was good. We got a wonderful duffel bag and shirt as well as some goodies.

The Race
We were bused up to Calistoga early in the morning and waited about 45 minutes to start. The view was beautiful as the sun was rising above the mountains. Corrals were nonexistent as we just lined up wherever to start. The weather was cool and called for rain.
This is a net downhill course and headphones were banned. I read in the race info that if you were caught wearing them, you would be disqualified, so I did a lot of my training without headphones. I’m glad I did, because it really made me not have to depend on them as much. The course was beautiful. Not a whole lot of spectators until later miles. There is a BIG incline at mile 16 that I wasn’t expecting, so that kind of sucked. It began to sprinkle a bit around mile 18 or 20, but stopped quickly. The finish was at a high school, hence no wine at the finish. Boo! I was only 30 seconds off from a BQ and was happy with it. (Ended up with a BQ at my next race).
Medal was nice. For some reason there was a typewriter theme that was on the shirt and medal. I probably would have preferred a wine theme.
No free race pics.
Nice race and a great perk was the bag full of products that Whole Foods gave is if we visited the store.
Probably won’t do it again, but it is a good bucket list race.