Get hydrated, get carbo-loaded and get ready! The famous San Francisco Marathon and Half-Marathon is this Sunday, beginning and ending on the Embarcadero at the Ferry Building. This beautiful course goes over the Golden Gate Bridge, through the Marina and Fisherman's Wharf, and makes a loop through Golden Gate Park.

In addition to the full 26.2 mile course, runners can choose to complete either half of the course, or run a 5k. This one's a Boston qualifier that has beauty, history and years upon years of hard work behind it.

It's no easy jog, even for experienced marathoners. The hills and overall difficulty led the Wall Street Journal to call this "the race even marathoners fear." But this course offers a scenic run, shielded by fog from the heat that makes summer a season bereft of events for long-distance runners.

Lulemon is sponsoring an EMPOWER station at mile 23, so if you're not competing, come out and support your fellow athletes!

Back in 2008 (remember that good ol' decade?) Japanese fiction writer Haruki Murakami published a memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The preface will tell you: it's not a get-in-shape guide, it's not a chronicle of the author overcoming tremendous odds, and it's not even entirely about running.

It is, however, a thoughtful, amusing reminisce about life, challenges, and what goes through his head as he slogs through those 26.2 painful miles. Murakami's memoir is particularly interesting to us as runners: it's always interesting to compare your recollections of what is admittedly a daunting task with another's.

While this book is not intended to motivate readers to get off the couch and go train for a marathon, that's the effect it had on me. The reservations I had, the ones I thought were unique to me, turn out to be fairly ubiquitous. The lack of time, the stress, and not least the boredom that sometimes overtakes me...Murakami's seen it before, and he's put those feelings in print.

The phrase that stuck with me is the one that pounded through my head on race day, and the one that started the book: Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.