My Busy-ness

What's been sucking my time all summer you ask?

Well, I'll tell you.

It looked like this:





That's part of my four month training schedule.

Remember those half marathons Vanessa and I have been running?


Well, one of us, (and we can't remember who it was so we'd know who to blame!) - thought it would be fun/a good idea/challenging/ whatever, to run a full marathon.

That's 26.2 miles.

Yeah. It's a long way.

Let me explain. Vanessa and I are not athletic. Yes, I know, we've run some half marathons. Well, walked/run them. And they've been tough. We're really NOT very athletic. But we were told that we could train for a full marathon in four months - and all the running sites online agree - so, for some very odd reason, (now that I look back on it, it does seem so VERY odd), we thought, running a full marathon - "Yeah, good idea!"

So we signed up. And we started training.

At first it wasn't too bad. The runs were four days a week. Not bad, right? Not at first. The runs were rather short - three 3 mile runs and a 5 mile. No problem.
Then, of course, they get longer; Two 3 mile runs, a 4 mile run and a 9 mile run.
Yeah, a little tougher.

The training wouldn't have been so bad if we weren't also working 40 or more hours a week and attempting to have a social life of sorts. Lucky for me Kim picked up most if not all, of the gardening chores. At least two runs per week had to be done after working 8 hours on my feet all day. When we started hitting the longer runs of 12 to 18 miles all I could do the rest of the day was recuperate.

So I ran both the longest runs of the week during my weekend. Not the best plan. I really needed more rest then NONE between the longest runs. Oh well, hindsight and all that.

We did get some great advice on where to run a marathon and I'm glad we listened: choose a destination marathon.

So we looked around and found one happening at Lake Tahoe. A place we'd never been. Beautiful!

And Lake Tahoe is very pretty.

Here we are pre-race.





Mile 13; halfway through.





































Mile 20 with beautiful Emerald Bay. You can see the 2nd hill behind Vanessa we still have to climb.






I'm still not sure how, but we made it to the finish. (Don't want to mention how sick I was from mile 15 to mile 21. But I was; nearly vomiting and almost passing out.)

Actually, I do know how we made it to the finish line. Hard work and perseverance!!! And thanks to my lovely daughter for never giving up on me!

Post race well-deserved Champagne.




And hours later we're still managing to stay upright and go out for a fantastic celebratory dinner.





The time spent at Lake Tahoe was great. Loved finishing the marathon. Enjoyed spending time with Kim, Vanessa and Chris.

Smartest thing we did the next day: NOTHING!!!!




Would I run another marathon? Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo. But I'm glad we managed to do at least this one.