Oakland Marathon 2023 Weekend
I didn’t stay overnight in Oakland for the race since the Oakland Marathon was not very far from home. You can totally make a weekend out of it though.
Downtown Oakland has some cool cafes and restaurants and the Lake Merritt area has some really awesome bars like Mad Oak Bar ‘N’ Grill. We didn’t visit any of bars on this particular weekend though.
The Oakland Running Festival weekend includes a kids component with a partnership with Eat. Learn. Play. which is a foundation founded by Stephen and Ayesha Curry in 2019. There are family activities and music at the Snow Park Kaiser Kids Zone. The race expo is held at Snow Park where you can pick up your bib plus cool shirts, energy chews, and samples. Next year, Apollo will run the Kids Fun Run.
After going to the race expo, I went to a very early dinner at Le Cheval. It’s an upscale Vietnamese restaurant right downtown serving really delicious Vietnamese cuisine. I actually ran by the restaurant on the race route. Everything we had was yummy I highly recommend the Le Cheval. I wanted to eat dishes with carbs so I chose Huu Tieau Xaoo Cao Ry – Soft Stir Fried Noodles made spicy and Claypot Rice. There were a few tables dining while we were there and half of them had Claypot Rice. You can read my Yelp review of Le Cheval.
The race route is fairly flat. There’s an incline that lasts about two miles starting close to 8.5 miles but it’s not an actual noticeable hill. Your legs will feel the incline though. I really like the course because it’s flat and goes around Lake Merritt and downtown but doesn’t retrace steps. The starting line is easy to get close to by car. We parked at the Target parking lot and walked over. Bart wasn’t an option this year because of the limited weekend hours. What did suck was that it rained the entire race. It didn’t pour rain but it was definitely raining. I liked this course and would run it again.
Once I completed the run, I just wanted to head out for something warm. I didn’t realize there was a Limon location across the street from where we parked. Ceviche isn’t warm anyways. We headed over to Lakeshore Cafe to meet my cousin and her family for brunch. There was a 45 minute wait which wasn’t so bad since there were stores to visit. We perused the Arizmendi Bakery and sadly nothing I saw was Gluten Free. We had a nice brunch at Lakeshore Cafe. You can read my Yelp review of Lakeshore Cafe.