This was back in the early days of my budding relationship with Phillip. Back when anything I asked, Phillip would jump at the chance to do with me. And vise versa. (Luckily, this is still very much the case.) So I asked if he'd like to do run a marathon with me. Yes! he replied.
After thinking about this, I decided perhaps I should figure out if I can run a 5k first. I mean, come on, a marathon? Running 26.2 miles? Without stopping? Yeah. Probably not.
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| The one that started it all. |
The marathon idea was scrapped, but not the running. We signed up to run a 5k in April of that year, and started training.
Fast forward to New Years 2011.
On one of our many roadtrips, we were discussing goals for the coming year. We had moved to Atlanta, GA, and every July 4th Atlanta hosts the annual Peachtree Road Race, which up until very recently is the largest 10k race in the world. I want to run that race, Phillip says to me. Ok, I said.
Dang. I gave up running after May of last year. I got bored with it. I'm going to give this another chance.
So I signed up for another 5k. I went to a training program held at a local running store every Tuesday morning for 6 weeks, and kept a copy of the weekly runs on my fridge to hold myself accountable.
It worked. I kicked butt at my 5k, beating my previous time by a minute and a half.
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During my training for the 5k, Phillip was busy psyching himself up for the Tough Mudder race. All I can say is that it was pure insanity. Essentially he had to run a half-marathon, throw in a bunch of obstacles, oh, and run up and down mountains while you're at it. Yuck. The pictures speak for themselves.
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| The ice tube and pit obstacle. |
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| The Smoke House |
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| The Monkey Bars |
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| The Rope Bridge |
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| The Balance Beams |
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| The Electric Shock. |
The Electric Shock. What a great idea. (Sarcasm anyone?) Just before running through these positively and negatively charged lines, you had to jump off a 40 foot plank into ice cold water. Seriously. They dumped truck loads of ice into the water all day. And then made you run through the electrically charged mud pit before you crossed the finish line. Lovely.
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| Just in case you forgot. |
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| Before and After |
Next up: The Warrior Dash. We needed something fun to look forward to.
July 4th was here before we knew it. We were (mostly) ready. We gathered with the masses at the start line.
The sound went off, and so did we. Pretty soon after we started our race, Phillip took off. I'm much slower, and took my time. We kicked butt, with Phillip coming in at 55:48 and me at 1:04:02. Not bad for our first 10k.
This brought us back to the original question. Do you want to run a marathon? If we're ever going to do it, now is the time. We looked up the article Running Down a Dream that Phillip had read many years ago, written by his old college friend. After reading his experience with running a marathon, we decided that if he can do it, we totally can.
So. All of this leads us to what this blog will document. The training. The sweat. The almost tears. The aches. The sore feet. The countless miles. The massive amounts of water consumed. The research. The discovery of what we are capable of.
The marathon.
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| http://illinoismarathon.com/ |
And we WILL kick butt.
I'm glad you're documenting this! I look forward to hearing all of your trials (and using you as motivation from afar!)
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