A Story About A First Marathon.
Runners, have I got a treat for you!
A well know company has kindly agreed to supply gifts to some lucky runners during the month of June. Each week a winner will be picked. During that month I will be featuring a contest that you will all want to enter! Think of yummy food and think of food that we, as runners, love and that will point you in the right direction . The contest starts June 3 and runs for the entire month. There will be multiple winners!
UPDATE: The prizes will be lovely gift baskets! More info next week!
Just a reminder that we have a new sweepstakes! Go here to enter and for the rules. Good Luck!
This is a 2 part story and appears in my book, Running Forward ~ Looking Back.
A Lesson Learned
Pat McCarthy's running background started at age 27. He explained. "It had been 9 years since I finished high school and I realized I had gotten out of shape. I decided to do something about it. I started getting up early each morning and just running a short distance at a pace that seemed comfortable to me. After a while I was doing a couple of easy miles daily and beginning to see quite a difference in myself.
"I started to enjoy my morning runs and gradually increased the distance to 6 miles per day. I was quite content just doing these solitary morning runs. Browsing in a library one day I found a good running book called 'Jog, Run, Race' which was written by Joe Henderson. After studying the book, I suddenly realized for the first time that a marathon would not be totally out of the question for me.
"I began to plan for that goal by extending my weekend run by about 2 miles per week and found a marathon to focus on that was six months away. Each long run made me a bit tight and tired, but as the length increased so did my strength. I ran a 10-K near my home before the marathon and I enjoyed the people, the race and all the excitement of it.
"Also during that first year I had begun to read Runner's World magazine and bought a decent pair of running shoes for the first time. I had never had a problem just loping along in Converse All Stars, but I guess I was just lucky.
"The night before the marathon I slept very little. I got up and drove about 100 miles to the race. My family stayed home and probably thought I was a little wacky about this running stuff. I had planned to get there 2 hours early and sleep in the car. But once there, sleep was impossible!
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