Marathon Anniversary!

I can't believe a whole year has pasted since Shauni and I ran the Des Moines Marathon. It was such a great experience. Something that I will never forget. I didn't have a blog last year at this time so I only have the memories in my head, but I need to write them down so I will always remember. The story started after I came back from Idaho for the summer and Shauni and I were on a long run along the Neal Smith trail. We got this great idea to ask our manager at work if he would sponsor us for the marathon. It didn't take much persuasion, he said he would pay our entry fee which was $80/person. We were so excited and grateful. Then came the early mornings of training. We got up everyday about 6am before our husbands left for school at 7:15am and ran. On Saturday's we would do our long runs. Most of the time we were running in the dark. We ran up and down all of the trails and sidewalks within a 10 mile radius of our home. I think our favorite run was across the Saylorville dam early in the morning as the sun was coming up. The Saylorville dam was high enough that you could look out across and see the few tall buildings in downtown Des Moines which was about 12-13 miles from where we were running. Saturday's were our long runs which usually consisted of 2-4 HOURS of running. The time goes by fast. The first couple of hours we would just chit-chat and then we would run out of things to say so we started taking our i-pods and we listened to music the last 2 hours. We started eating these power gels to get us through our longer run. They were disgusting! But they helped out so much. So as time went on the marathon got closer and on Oct 21, 2007 we started our pace for the marathon. We were so excited and nervous at the same time. We knew this was once in a lifetime opportunity and we were going to do everything we could to finish. As they say at some point everyone hits there "wall". Mine was about mile 19 and I was getting so tired, my legs were cramping and I was getting very dizzy. I remember sitting in the port-i-potty thinking that it was going to tip over while I was in there. That was a SCARY feeling! About this time we saw all kinds of people laying on the side of the trail crying, or people just collapsing on the side because their legs were cramping. But we kept pushing ourselves and over the course of 4 hours, 45 mins we finished the marathon. I'm still amazed we finished while running. Don't get me wrong, we didn't run the whole time, we had to take some breaks and walk, but we did finish running. It took us longer than we had anticipated but at that point we were just excited we made it. I will forever be grateful to Shauni for helping me complete my goal of running a whole 26.2 miles. I couldn't have done it without her.

So today is the 1 year anniversary of the marathon and hopefully it won't be the last one I run. I did promise Steve that I wouldn't train for anymore until he was done with school. Until then, I'll keep running my 20 miles/week.