Marathon Monday

I am very proud to say that yesterday I completed my first marathon. I ran the Northern Ohio Marathon in Mentor, Ohio. The weather was perfect, other than a brief drizzling rain. Unfortunately, around mile 19 my left hip started hurting and my last 7 miles were a real struggle. Still, I finished, and now I can say for the rest of my life I have done a marathon.

I started this running journey on May 20, 2020. I was worried about Covid and how out of shape I was getting, and figured that if I did get Covid, I wanted my lungs to be in as good of shape as possible. My neighborhood in Wickliffe is almost exactly a one-mile loop. By the time I staggered home for that one mile I thought I was going to die! Before that, the most I had ever run before was 3-4 miles tops. But, despite how bad I was, I ran a mile again that next day, then the day after that. After a week, I bumped it up to 1.5 miles, and did that every day for another week. A year and a half later, I ran across the finish line of a 26.2 mile marathon!

I'm done bragging now, but I am really proud of myself. I'm also really grateful to my wife for allowing me to be a delinquent dad on so many weekend mornings when I went off into the woods for long training runs. I can barely walk today, so I think it's time to chill out and relax a bit from the running!