SF Marathon Profile: Erik Charp

This is part of a series on Albany runners who took part in the San Francisco Marathon event last weekend.

Name: Erik Charp

Age: 42

What do you do? I'm an audio engineer in Daly City. I design computer audio systems, like mixing consoles, for live and studio recording. I'm also a musician. I play piano and keyboards, mostly jazz. I used to do pick-up gigs now and then but now I'm usually playing for myself either in my little studio at home or on my piano.

Albany Connection: My wife and I moved to Berkeley from San Francisco when my son was born, about 10 years ago. And then we were just looking to settle down more. I knew the Albany schools were really great. We bought our first house in Albany. It's a good place to invest in and settle down. It's just a great small town community in a larger urban area. It's the best of both worlds.

How did you get into running? I started running when I was 12 and I started running marathons when I was 12. I ran 12 or 13 of them through my teen years and then I took a break. I dropped out of road racing until I was 32 when my first son was born. This the 10th year since I started running again. I think it's the 14th San Francisco Marathon I've run, including when I was a kid. This was the 31st marathon I've done. I grew up in Santa Rosa.

Who inspired you to start running? My mom started running during the first running boom in the late 70s and early 80s. The second running boom was in the late 90s, and marathons are getting more and more popular now. So I have to say it was my mom's influence and the movie Rocky (1976). It changed my life. I got into fitness and working out, and running followed that pretty naturally. 

Were you into sports as a kid? I wasn't into team sports. I wasn't very good at them. But then, on my first run, I was gonna go out for a half-mile and ended up running for six miles. I felt like I could just keep going forever. I felt like I found my sport, like this was the sport I had been looking for, that I hadn't discovered yet, and there it was. I started with a 10k, but that didn't seem like enough. I wanted the ultimate challenge, like a marathon. So I did that after running for about five months.

What were the highlights of the San Francisco Marathon this year? Well, my wife, Heather Lewis-Charp, did the half-marathon, and my sons did the 5k together with their grandma. They did really well. My son Kai, 6, and Sage, 9, both go to Cornell. We're all pretty into running.

For me, it was a fantastic run. It was the most relaxed I've even felt from beginning to end. I started out really comfortable at a relatively slow pace for me and got into a groove right at the first mile. It usually takes 10 miles to really find a groove. I felt great at the end, even the last couple miles. Usually after mile 24, I'm just hanging on. All bets are off. Your legs are like bricks and you're trying to pull your body along. But my legs felt loose all the way to the end. The last six miles can be brutally painful if you don't pace yourself.

What does that feel like? One feeling is just brutal general fatigue. Like you're running on empty and can't even pinpoint what it is. In your head, in your guts, there's nothing left. Every cell in your body is telling you to stop and sit down. Your leg muscles feel so heavy, like each one weighs 100 pounds. Your stride shortens, you're not bending your knees, not lifting your feet as much. You feel really stiff and sore. That generally happens between 18 and 22 miles. It's very common. Your muscles run out of glycogen, their basic fuel. Runners call it "hitting the wall."

What's your focus when you're running? It's mainly on having fun and having some kind of spiritual, deeper experience. A sense of awareness of my body and my physical limitations. It's an enlightened experience, almost like a vision quest is how I think about it. I want to be running a smart race where I'm relaxed in the first half and strong in the second half. If I do hit the wall, I want to do it at 24, 25 miles. That's what I'm aiming for. The speed is just a background consideration for me.

Can you say more about the spiritual nature of running for you? It's like something will be revealed to me. I'll learn something and also have an awareness of where I am. The course is really important. I've done the San Francisco Marathon the most of any repeated race, but I learn something new each time.

Internally I get a sense about my body, my limitations. There's no feeling more alive for me than the latter parts of a marathon when I'm just fully aware of what I'm doing. Outwardly, I sense my surroundings, the roads I'm on. The distances stretch out and I feel the infiniteness of time and space. Running a marathon is kind of just like getting close to the infinite. When you start out, it's like there's an uncountable number of steps to go. You just take one step at a time, not thinking about it ending. The race stretches out in front of me sort of off to eternity. When I finish one I just want to do it again. 

What do you like about the San Francisco Marathon? It's just a brilliant course. It really hits so many of the highlights of the city but it avoids the worst hills. It has a couple of unavoidable hills, but it doesn't send you up anything that's really that steep.

What makes San Francisco a great running city? Actually it's one of the main reasons I got back into running 10 years ago. I was living in the city and I wanted to get to know the city better. I would go on slow runs, almost like an urban hike, at a pace that was almost effortless. I would take my backpack with water and food and go out for four to five hours. Running is a great way of exploring. I would just go out and make up the course as I go. It's also a great way to learn the city better. In Albany, Berkeley, El Cerrito, there are a lot of areas I discovered that I wouldn't have driven to.

What do you like about running around Albany? I like the proximity to the waterfront. I never drive, I just run from my house. I get to the waterfront in under a mile, and then you can just go for 25 miles either north or south and hardly deal with any traffic. There's Cesar Chavez and the Emeryville shoreline bike path, the Bulb and the footbridge into the aquatic park and down to Emeryville. In the the other direction are the hills, Spruce and Grizzly Peak and into Tilden, so there are a lot of good options. You can have a six- to 10-mile run by following the Greenway. From Solano you can head up to campus, go three miles through campus and then up into Strawberry Canyon.

I noticed that the fastest male and female runners from Albany were both in or near their 40s, a fair amount older than the next fastest runner. What do you make of that? If you look at road races in general, you'll see an amazing number of runners over 40. Often the winners are in their 40s. I think running is a sport that you kind of mature into. The older you get, the more you want to run longer and more. In longer races, more than half of the runners tend to be over 40. Long distance running takes a lot of patience. 

Do you have any running tips to share? I would say, try to be patient and accept where you're at. Take it slowly. Approach it gently and with patience and consistency. Empty your mind and meditate and reflect. It's a great time to just chill out. It's great for relieving stress. Even if you can just run for five to 10 minutes a day, you'll find some benefit in doing that. 

To take it to the next level, slowness is really the key. Slowness and patience. Not being hard on yourself. Try to get that "should" voice out of your head and just be where you are. Add a minute to your run every other day and just ramp up slowly. From one week to the next, don't add more than 10 percent to your time or distance. That's common wisdom. If you want to keep going, follow the 10 percent rule. Be accepting and patient with where you're at. Try to find the joy in it.

See profiles of other Albany runners here:

• Harold Lueders
• Natalie Kay