I ran a Marathon 26 days ago.

I decided back in October that I was finally going to train for and tackle the full marathon distance. All 26.2 miles. Asthma and all.

I ran for two charities. I helped raise $900 for Foundation for Angelman Syndrome Therapeutics. A good friend, Mary's niece has Angelman Syndrome. When Mary asked me to be an Angel Runner, I could think of nothing better than to run the marathon for others and not just myself.

I also raised over $75 for the Michael J Fox Foundation using a phone app called Charity Miles. One of my other runner friends, Lora has a dad with Parkinson's. Training for the marathon added up to over 300 miles in five months. Using the Charity Miles app a sponsor like Timex or Humana donates to a charity of my choosing 25 cents for every gps mile I log with the app. Pretty cool, huh?

I trained for the distance with a running group on Saturday mornings that organized my first half marathon back in 2008. So it was kinda kismet to train for the full distance with them. My coach wrote The Idiots Guide to Running a Marathon and is engaged to the Marathon Goddess. So again, I knew I was in good hands. The hat I'm wearing is leftovers from my first half marathon, City of Angels that my coach gave me the morning of the race.

(Blurry photo of my pace group)


The course began at Dodgers Stadium on Sunday morning of daylight savings time. Our destination was the beach in Santa Monica 26.2 miles away through Downtown LA, Chinatown, Echo Park, Silverlake, Hollywood, Beverly Hills and West LA to name some of the neighborhoods we ran through.

(Mile 6 past Echo Park Lake in my robo pants)


Here's the dirty details of my first marathon: I ran with a pacing group doing an alternating run/walk every minute or so. I felt great for the first 18 miles. My friends Hans and his wife cheered for us at Mile 9 with oranges and pretzels. At Mile 13 Lora sprayed us down with sunblock and painkiller spray (Kool n Fit - which is awesome stuff btw) and gave us more oranges and pretzels.

Somewhere in Beverly Hills past Mile 17 in the 85 degree sun, I started wheezing on a downhill. Perhaps because I was stressing out about the blisters forming on the bottom of both my feet. The blisters were a side effect, I found out later, from having water sprayed on us to cool us down during the race.

I had to walk the remaining 8 miles. My pace group walked with me. Another thing I learned later, was everyone else was exhausted from the killer heat and they were more than happy to walk with me.

This is where the race got hard. I was really tired from not getting enough oxygen, my inhaler wasn't helping and I had to keep telling myself not to nap in the luscious grass in the median but to keep going. Keep pushing myself to the finish line. To keep reaching for my goal. My group stayed with me till Mile 25. I urged them to finish without me as I needed to slow my pace even more. I had started coughing to get more air and needed to walk much slower to compensate.

I never stopped walking from Mile 22 where I had my feet bandaged at the aid tent to the finish line. Truth be told, running on the blisters felt better than walking on them. But my lungs wouldn't let me continue running.

At the finish line, my pace group was waiting to cheer for me and they all hugged me. And I started to cry. Tears of pain, tears of joy, tears of finally accomplishing the goal I had set myself to do many months ago. I cry when I get overly emotional - happy, sad, angry - it all comes out in tears and the feeling of crossing that finish line was overwhelming and powerful.

I think this picture captures that moment perfectly:







P.S. I'm running a half marathon on Saturday just one month after the LA Marathon. I bought blister resistant socks. Not gonna slow this momentum down!