Back Story.

Well, since I'm starting this blog well after I started my running journey I will try to catch up and give you the back story. It's a long one but I will try to condense it as much as possible.

Let's go back to the year 2000. I was newly married, living in Columbia MO, and working the 3-11pm evening shift at University Hospital. I had a lot of time on my hands back then and got the whim to run a marathon. There was a fantastic trail there, the MKT trail, that I loved to run on in the mid-mornings before going into work. I bought the book 'How to Train for and Run Your Best Marathon' and started logging miles and writing down notes in a spiral bound notebook. The lack of technology I had back then makes me chuckle...no apps to track distance and pace, no internet stat keeping or online running community participation, and my only gadget was a digital watch that had a stopwatch feature on it. Without all that though I was on track to run a fall marathon, St. Louis I think it was. At the point in my training where I had run a 16 mile long run I hurt my ankle. A bad sprain, and I let that set back derail my whole plan. No marathon, not even any shorter distance races instead. Crazy but I just let that injury defeat me and I never really started running regularly again after my ankle healed. Then life happened, we started our family, and running fell out of my routine all together.

Flash forward 10 years and 3 kids later to 2010. I hadn't run even 1 mile in all those years. We had just gotten back from a family beach vacation and I was appalled at the photos of myself in a swimsuit from that trip. Kinda vain I know but that is seriously what kick started my butt into exercising again.

We had now relocated to the small town that I grew up in where there was no gym or organized exercise facilities. The most natural decision was to start up running again. C25K was all the rage so I loaded the app onto my iPhone and decided to give the program a shot.

I'm not going to lie it was super difficult! I was definitely at couch potato status. Who knew a minute and half of running intervals could feel so long! My entire body revolted...my lungs hurt, my side hurt, I had the uncontrollable watery saliva thing going on, and all the muscles in the lower half of my body were screaming in agony for 3 days after the first workout...it was a very sad sight. I stuck with it though, and eventually the dread of heading out for another torture session turned into me actually looking forward to my 3 times per week runs. I was so proud of myself when I got up to running 30 solid minutes without a walking break...that seemed so unreachable back when 2 minute runs were kicking my butt. After 9 weeks I had completed the C25K program and signed up for my first ever 5K race.

I started my race experiences with a nice and safe 5K right in my own home town. It was the first year for the event so the participant count was only around 50. I was very familiar with the course, but even with that, the low number of runners participating, and the relaxed feel of the race with stopwatch timing instead of timing chips and pace clocks, I was still terrified. I stayed nervous the whole time, but I finished it and in a time better than I thought I would...28:16. My family cheered me into the finish line and several other local women I knew ran in it also...it was a good day!

The weekend after my first successful race I saw on Facebook that my friend from college was running in the Chicago Marathon. This totally blew me away! It was unfathomable to me that she ran 26.2 miles that Sunday when 3.1 miles seemed like such a huge deal to me. Her accomplishment inspired me to set a goal on the unfinished business of running a marathon as well. In February I registered online to run in the Chicago Marathon on October 9, 2011.

I got a little lax on running during the winter...the weather was too miserable for me to run outside and the treadmill is not my favorite thing. I restarted with week 4 of C25k once spring weather hit and signed up to run another 5K in May. This race was a much bigger venue with multiple distance races included and a course where you run over 2 bridges that straddle the Mississippi river. That morning was rainy, windy, and about 50 degrees. I was just as nervous as I was for my first 5K, so when the gun went off I just turned my music up loud and tried to pretend I was on any normal daily run. The weather was crap with misty rain and wind gusts hitting me in the face along the way, and I never really felt warm the entire time. But I finished and with an unexpected time of 27:16...a whole minute faster than my first 5K race and on a much more hilly course. Jackie Joyner-Kersey gave me my medal at the finish line and I received a text message with a congratulations and my official time. I was liking this racing thing : ) Plus, at the award announcements I was shocked beyond belief that I was 3rd in my age group of women 35-39. My friend nearly took me down when she hugged me as soon as they called my name for the plaque presentation.

Next on the agenda was a 10K race sponsored by the hospital where I work during the July 4th weekend. The course is extremely difficult with hills the entire way and even a monster hill called Lovers Leap a mile from the finish. The thermometer read near 80* before the race even started that day and my nerves were an issue once again. I have this problem of having to pee about every 10 minutes when I'm nervous. The multiple bathroom stops before the race coupled with the extreme temperature and hilly course made for a disastrous experience!

The 10K started out good...I cranked up my playlist and tried to forget about the 'race' aspect of the event and tried to run like I was used to. The first half of the run was ok and I took water at all the available water areas, but after the mid-way turn around I felt myself slowing down. There was a ginormous hill in front of me and I was thinking to myself that if I get over this hill I can coast down the other side and then walk up Lover's Leap, which had been my plan all along. That honestly was the last thing I remember...and then I found myself sitting in a lawn chair on the side of the road with a team of medical volunteers around me. I had lost consciousness somewhere on the other side of that hill due to heat exhaustion. I don't remember feeling overheated, or even making it up and over that hill, but I went down. I sat there talking out of my head for awhile and when I went to stand up I couldn't even support myself. That's when they called for a truck to come get me off of the course. I blacked out again once they got me out of the truck near the race finish and when I became aware again I was in the triage tent with a whole new team of medical staff around me. My entire body was cramping up, volunteers were covering me in wet sheets and putting ice under my clothes, and I was breathing crazy fast. They were asking me things like "What city are your in?", "What day is it?", "Who is the president?", etc., none of which I could come up with the answer to. That's when I started panicking, knowing that I knew the answers but couldn't actually recall them. Once the ambulance arrived I was able to get oxygen and IV fluids started on the way to the hospital which helped to calm me down some. Apparently I had become so severely dehydrated that I stopped sweating and my core body temperature became elevated enough to start shutting things down. Seriously the scariest event of my life! After 3 liters of fluid though I began to think clearly again and the extreme muscle cramping subsided. It took me a good 4 days to fully recover from my bout with heat exhaustion and it made me more aware of proper hydration. I always thought I drank enough water but now I have become a hydration freak!

In the next months I focused on marathon training. I religiously ran the mileage scheduled each day on the Nike training calendar. The weekends were when I ran my long runs and I built on them each new weekend. My right knee was killing me and my heels felt more bruised than ever. Unfortunately my physician diagnosed me with IT band syndrome (knee) and plantar fasciitis (heels). I started doing prescribed stretches, got new running shoes, and also Super Feet arch support inserts. These all helped with the aches and pains but they never fully went away. I kept pressing forward though...through the pain, blackened and missing toenails, and the muscle soreness that would still come after a newly extended mile run. These were long hard months and a huge time commitment!

The longest run I accomplished was 18 miles. I was scheduled to run 20 miles on 2 back-to-back Saturdays, but I just could not make it. My body would give out before I could get to 20, mostly because I would cramp up into a stiff ball of unmovable muscle if I tried to walk at all, and I just couldn't make it that long without a walk break. This scared me A LOT looking forward to the marathon, but at that point the training schedule called for a slow taper and I knew I would need to comply in order to have fresh legs for the event.

Then the most ridiculous thing happened. Two weeks before the marathon I headed out on a Friday morning for an easy run before work, and WHAM, I tripped not 5 steps down my driveway. It was dark outside since it was 5:20am and I had totally forgotten that we had had a load of boxes containing our new outdoor playset delivered onto our driveway earlier that week. I fell flat into the boxes that were full of wood and steel and smashed my face against them. Since I was bleeding profusely from above my eye and my left arm was also killing me another ER visit was in order.

I had a broken radial head in my elbow and the laceration over my eye went all the way through to the orbital ridge bone and had to be repaired by a plastic surgeon. Later that day I saw the orthopedic physician about my elbow and fortunately he cleared me to still run in the marathon...this had been my biggest concern since falling.

The next weekend was the 2nd annual event for my hometown 5K. I was feeling better and had been running in taper mode all week so I decided I would still run in it. I had no expectations and really just wanted to make sure my arm was going to feel ok during it. When I finished my first mile my GPS app told me that my pace was 7:53. WHAT? I had never ran a sub 8 minute mile, and I still had 2 more miles to go. I tried to hold back some, but apparently the adrenalin was taking over because my next mile split was just as fast. Only 1.1 miles to go at that point and I still didn't feel that bad so I just kept going. My final time was 24:18! A whole 4 minutes better that I had run this same race a year ago. I finished in first place in my age division and 3rd overall for the women that day. I was so excited, my arm felt good, and it was just the boost I needed going into marathon week.

I will save the specifics of the 2011 Chicago Marathon for another post by itself, but I did run in it and I finished. Crossing the finish line that day brought me to tears at the extreme surreal experience and accomplishment of it all. My time was 4:38:08.

And now you know the back story of this crazy journey so far. There are many miles and I'm sure many more trials and accomplishments to come in the future, because after all, I am a runner.