How I Became a Runner…. (part 3)

If you missed the first couple parts of this long story, you can find them here and here. 

After hitting my goal of breaking 2 hours in the half marathon, I stopped distance running. I started taking classes at the gym again (I was really into spin class), and started lifting weights. I fell in love with getting stronger and making strength goals.

I would make a big goal each year. One year, my goal was to be able to do 10 unassisted pull ups. Another year, it was to be able to bench my bodyweight. I LOVED the challenge of it! I would still run every now and then, but nothing consistent and I wasn’t running longer than 3 miles when I did run. 

This continued till the fall of 2017. It had been 3.5 years since I had ran my last half marathon, when my mom asked me to run a race with her. She wanted to put together a group of us to run the relay at the Baltimore Marathon. You create a team of 4 and each person runs a leg of the marathon. It ended up with each person running 5-7 miles depending on which leg you had. I signed up with her and started running every Saturday again, working my way back up to 6 miles. 

My leg of the race was the first leg, and it was around 6 miles long. My mom ran the next leg, my brother the third, and a friend from the gym ran the last leg. Since my mom and I had finished earlier, we were at the finish line waiting to see our friend cross the finish line. This was the first time I had been at the finish line of a full marathon, and it changed my life. 

We were standing at the finish line watching runners come through. As they would come through, the announcer would say over the loudspeaker (thanks to the electronic chip which would send your name and information to the announcer when you crossed over the strip a few hundred feet before the finish line)  “________ you are a marathoner!” 

Watching these incredible athletes cross the finish line brought me to tears. It was the most amazing experience. You could see the look of accomplishment all over these runners' faces. At that moment, I turned to my mom and said “I’ve got to do this. I have to run a marathon”. 

This was October 2017, and my hometown had just announced over the summer that they would be hosting our first ever half and full marathon in April 2018.  We left that Baltimore race that day, and I knew I was going to sign up to run the Salisbury Marathon in April. I had to become a marathoner.

To be continued….