*Full Marathon, run as a relay with 4 people.
Gotcha! Hey, maybe there will always be an asterisk behind my accomplishments...maybe two, one for each of my reconstructed ankles.
Today, I ran a full marathon with my family. My mom and dad have only ever done a 5k, and my brother has done up to a half marathon. I am the only one in my family to have run a full marathon before, but that was before my surgeries. As an exercise physiologist, I always look for fun ways to keep my family active. Our Thanksgiving Day 5k tradition is always fun, so I thought it was time to up our game.
It was a really cold day and tough for me personally coming off of my swim meet yesterday. Run training has been going well, I'm doing 2-3 runs per week. My "long run" is about 1 hour 15 mins, and then I do up to 2, 30 min runs otherwise, ~8-10 miles per week max. My pace varies with how I feel; I run all off of feeling now.
For the marathon, I ran about 7 miles of it and averaged 11-12 minute miles. The relay format was a little under a 2 mile loop repeated until we reached 26.2! We could switch off at the end of each lap when we wanted. It was easy for my feet to handle the shortened repeated runs compared to running 7 straight, however my feet got tight and cooled down after each run while waiting for my turn, so getting started again was tough. This is the longest I have run on a single day since my surgeries. It was really great to cross the finish line of another race!
Maybe it's not the full marathon I'm used to running by myself, but it sure was fun getting my family involved and accomplishing the task together...
