Running away from it all

So then I took up running.

In 2008 I decided I would train for a half marathon and finished the Big Lake 1/2 up in New Hampshire. Then another friend tricked me into something.

My friend California Girl (CG) wanted to run the New York marathon. Now, there are some marathons you can just sign up for. For example, the Lowell Sun marathon or the Manchester marathon are open to anyone who wants to run them. Or walk. Whatever. Then there are the competitive marathons like Boston where you have to qualify for them--or beg for a number from a charity and raise an obscene amount of money for them (more on that later). New York is a little different in that anyone can run it, but you have to be chosen through a lottery.

Seeing that I never win anything by lottery or raffle, and being slightly interested in marathon running, I said I would do it with her.

Well, you can guess what happened. I got chosen and she did not. So now I was locked into running (they require your credit card number at the time of lottery entry and automatically are charged the hefty entry fee if chosen). I had gone from biker to 5k recreation running to marathoner in very short time. And then I had to train.

NY is run in the fall, which means summer training. Brutal. So I trained through the wet summer, and was up to 21 miles at a time. Really. Turns out you never run the full 26.2 miles while training because theory says that your adrenaline will kick in and push you those last 5 miles on race day. I found a running buddy for the marathon, a long lost friend from my childhood days in New York, and the first weekend of October that year I ran it. The entire thing. And the last 5 miles were the hardest by the way. Theory blown.