we belong to each other

Yes! The lady and I ran our first marathon on April 11 (hence the animated gif). This was a real feat for the both of us. 26.2 miles. That is really far. About 2 round trips of our old commute to work, but who’s counting.

Back in August or September, somewhere between swimming in the lake every morning, watching Lost, and the general cabin fever associated with living with 12 people, we decided to run a marathon. Seemed like a great way to become more intimate with this landscape and achieve a goal. We needed to sweat more, for everyones sake.

Training
As we increased our mileage in training, our world here felt small and close and well… we had a hard time finding long runs. We zig zagged through streets in Anacortes trying to get enough miles. This is a small island. We even resorted to driving to Bellingham (nearly an hour away) where they have longer trails.

The necessity of mechanic rhythms and mantras is much greater than it was with riding bikes. The sound of the wind is much quieter than the sound of your feet, breath, and heart. So much pounding. The biggest lesson so far over the past 7 months: run no matter what. Don’t worry too much about distances or times of days or when you last ran or any other self-inflicted constrictions. Get out and run, every day, and the rest will come. After the first 4 miles, the weird aches work themselves out.

281 and 321

The Race
We started out running around this tiny soccer field, graduated to jogging through the misty night air on the high school track, to 6 miles trails along the water, and now we’ve run 26.2 miles. In the early morning, the first 17 miles of the race almost felt like a breeze, even the massive hill at mile 7. My feet hurt and I was tired, but I felt great.

But the last 8 miles, now that is another story. This was the part of the course that the lady and I didn’t drive. We figured it would be mellow, on the water front, flat. Ha! The hills rolled on. If there is one word to describe the Whidbey Island Marathon it would be hills. Lots of them. I did get a lei, though. It seemed that everyone had an iPod. For some reason I thought this would be frowned upon. I thought I would want to commune with nature and the sounds of everyone running. But at mile 22 all I wanted was to listen to some Usher.

After the race we went out with Nick and ate a whole lot of pizza and then I slept for 4 hours. It took about two days to start walking normal again.