Last month I ran my very first marathon… in Hawai'i. Let me back up to April of 2013. My LDS stake was doing a Stake Wellness 5k in Lehi, which I had committed to run. I had already been looking at running another 5k that morning as well for a sick little boy's benefit. I had decided not to run it since I was already running another 5k that morning. However, the night before I was hanging out with one of my best friends, Quinn. Quinn was running a 5k the next morning as well to support a friend who had organized a 5k over by Provo Lake. He somehow managed to convince me to run the next morning with him as well. I think it had something to do with timing and that his 5k was taking place about 1.5-2 hours before mine was supposed to start. I did end up running both 5k's that morning.
Quinn and I were talking a few days later and we both mentioned that the 5k had been fun and decided we should do another one and then we did another one and then another one… Ultimately, that weekend in April is what kicked off Quinn and I being running buddies for the next few months. We ran a 5k together pretty much every weekend after that. We tried to make sure that the races we ran were benefiting some kind of awareness whether it was rape, the food bank, cancer, etc… Over time, the 5k's morphed into 8k's and 10k's.
Over the course of the summer and with all the running we were doing, we started talking about running a half marathon and possibly a marathon. We did our first half marathon in August and ran the Little Cottonwood Canyon Half Marathon. I finished faster and in better condition than Quinn. I think I ended up with 1 blister versus Quinn who was bleeding, had at least 5 blisters, and ruined a toe nail. For some odd reason, I could not convince him to run the Big Cottonwood Canyon Half Marathon with me the next month. Weird, huh? I continued on running and running a half marathon each month. I was able to convince him to run the Baker's Dozen Half Marathon with me in December down in St. George though. Amongst all of this, we had also been talking about running a marathon in January and had found one in Hawai'i and it had turned into me running the marathon and him possibly running the half marathon or one of the other shorter distances. It ended up being Hawai'i because I had never been and because if I was going to run a marathon in January, it sure was NOT going to be in the snow AT ALL!
In addition to this, I had started working a second full-time night job in April and wasn't getting a lot of sleep in addition to all the running and then deciding to start training for a marathon. Who in their right mind does that?
