End of a running rut

Along the San Francisco Bay Trail

My husband doesn’t know it yet, but he’s run himself into a rut; Matt runs the same, extremely steep, suburban route each day and then complains about his aching knees. He loves to get a rise out of me by popping said knees in my presence (gross!). But I have a solution to his problem: the San Francisco Bay Trail.

A neighbor mentioned the San Francisco Bay Trail when Matt and I first moved to Belmont, and I first ventured to explore it a few months ago. The trouble is that I mistakenly took the left path instead of the right after coming off the Highway 101 pedestrian bridge, and I ended up in the Marina Food Market Shopping Center and then had the dumb idea of following Hillsdale Boulevard back to El Camino Real. Thanks to the traffic, I was not particularly enamored with that route.

Today, I took the right route – the one that snakes behind Oracle’s corporate headquarters and extends for miles through Foster City along the Belmont Slough until it empties into the San Francisco Bay. The flat, paved path is shared by pedestrians, cyclists and dog walkers (free poop bags!) alike. Traveling toward the bay, the path passes parks, playgrounds and exercise stations before entering serene marshland inhabited by geese, egrets and songbirds. Near the edge of the Bay, sand and dirt trails weave through the tall grasses and lead to a series of jumps for mountain bikers.

In researching the trail, I was dumbfounded to learn it currently extends 330 miles to encircle the entire Bay Area but will eventually expand to cover 500 miles. Apparently, I’ve glimpsed just a tiny fraction of a massive recreational corridor encompassing the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Candlestick Point and the Golden Gate Bridge. Needless to say, there is plenty of new pavement for Matt to explore. I can’t wait to enlighten him.