The Pandemic Marathon

We live in a time in history that people will look back on and have a lot of questions about. The year 2020 started off like any other year but turned out to be anything but.

I’ve had these thoughts for about half a year but never tried to sit and write them until now. I think part of why I didn’t make myself write is because things were too fresh. On December 2019, a good friend of mine mentioned a goal she had about running the Oklahoma City Marathon. She asked me to join her in her training and the race. I was hesitant because my mind said,”You can’t do it.” However, earlier in the fall I completed my second half-marathon race and felt like I could train and just grind through the whole process. I agreed to join her on the journey to checking a major thing off her bucket list. I figured that I wasn’t going to get younger and might as well try to do a full marathon.

We started training in January 2020 and followed a full-marathon schedule that we customized from a plan we found online. We were getting up at 5AM to get our miles in. The weather in our part of the country is brutal that time of the year. We still ran. We just told ourselves to get the work in. If it rained we used our local gym’s indoor track and just ran continuous circles until we had the miles for the day completed. As things progressed our long distance runs increased substantially and all at the same time the world was changing. In the background there were stories about a deadly virus. I didn’t really pay much attention to it, but was aware of it.

After almost three months of training I got a text that read,” Can I call you?” from my training buddy and friend. I thought it was weird because we usually just text, I didn’t even reply, I just called her. She informed me that the OKC marathon that we were to run in was cancelled. My mind was spinning with thoughts and visuals of all the miles we ran, the cold, the early wake up times, the pain, everything, it was very tough to hear. During tough runs I would visualize how the day of the marathon would be, us crossing the finish line exhausted but happy because we did it, we conquered a full marathon, our work paid off, and that whole thing I saw in my head would never happen.

I went into a no run ‘depression’ if you could call it that. I just stopped running for a long time. And mentally it was not healthy for me either. Running helps my body and mind because I get to clear my head and just enjoy (yes, I said it enjoy) the peace of a long run.

Fast forward to the winter of 2020 and I started to get the running itch again. After the year we were having, I needed a release, a goal, something to look forward to, hope. My friend and I started discussing doing a half marathon in the spring of 2021. I want to thank her here for always pushing and helping me be disciplined about the runs, I know we both held each other accountable but you ‘da real MVP’ and that treadmill! As we started doing this again, we were also encouraging other friends of ours to join us. One of our friends didn’t consider herself a runner but she decided to start running and that friend has been a big inspiration to me. She put herself out there and told her self she could. She started training and went for it. (Shout out to my friend Jessica!!)

Fear is a very scary thing, no one wants to fail or get embarrassed, so we just don’t try because of the ‘what ifs’ that only live in our head. 

Once my mindset switched to,’Hey you actually can do this running thing again’ there was no way I was not going to train and get ready for our planned half-marathon. I fully knew that it could still be cancelled but just the prospect of being able to run a race again kept me in a positive spirit.

January 2021 we started training for an April 2021 half-marathon race. We took it one step at a time, ran in the cold, woke up early, took care of our bodies and a few weeks ago we did it! We completed a race, the pandemic half-marathon if you will. The best part was that we finished a very tough race, we live in Kansas and there are not many hills, however, the folks putting this race together found every hill there is in our state, it was brutal! 🙂 But we did it. Official time for me was 2 hours 3 minutes and 4 seconds, that comes out to a 9 minute and 23 second per mile pace.

The pandemic has felt like a very long, slow marathon at times but through it all, I’ve learned a lot about myself, those around me and got a different perspective on different aspects of life. The race we just completed was very challenging, there were times where my mind kept telling me,”we can’t do this, there is no end in sight, this hill keeps going up and up, the wind is brutal” but I kept moving forward.

I don’t know when this pandemic will ‘end’ but I know that I will keep moving forward, even if it doesn’t feel like we are going anywhere, we have to believe that good things are ahead.

P.S. Shoutout to my amazing wife and kids for putting up with me and all my running. Y’all inspire me everyday to be a better human, thank you, I love you.