Since today is a rest day for my upcoming half-marathon Saturday and a way to give my nagging groin a few extra days to recover, I will blog about things other than training for the LA and Boston Marathons.

As of today I have completed 30 marathons, over 100 half marathons and tons of 10k's (I really don't do 5K's they are too short, too fast , and too painful). YOu might be thinking that is OK or average, but if you read the first few posts you would know that I lost over 100 pounds and was never, ever a runner. In fact I quit football in high school because they made us run a 2 lap warm up each day. Back then I was allergic to running. However, once I started losing weight and started actually being able to run for longer than a few minutes, I wanted to see how far I could run. I remember I was finishing a longer run (only 8 miles) and thought "Hey how far can I run?" The best option for me was to sign up for the LA Marathon and see how far I could go. I figured that way I could run until I couldn't run any further and then I could walk to the end r worse, have the medics take me there. Either way it was better than running from my house and not knowing how I was going to get back home from the place I stopped running. Sounded logical at the time.

To keep this short, at mile 18 I was still going and didn't feel the need to stop. So there I was going into LA looking at mile 2o, still strong. Then mile 21 passed, and 22, and 23. I was still running. Was I actually going to pull this off? Finally, I got to mile 25, paused for a quick cup of Gatorade and then finished the last 1.2 miles still running. I had completed (RAN) an entire marathon! I was in so much pain since the longest training (if you could call it that) run I did was 10 miles and my body wasn't used to this, the whole thing cramped up.

Four days later I was still so sore and vowed to my mom I would never do that again. Six days later, astonished by my accomplishment and still basking in it's glory, I signed up for another marathon that November.

So here I am today, a former fatty who accidentally became a marathon maniac. Hope others will join me!