Progressing to my first marathon...

After that first race, I was hooked. I checked the race schedules, watched for fliers, and tried to find other races close to home, just to see what I could do.

When I was in High School, I did a little training. For a while my younger sisters were interested in race walking, and I would go along wiht the rest of the family to hang out and watch. I even tried the walking thing for a session or two, but I didn't really get the feel for it. However, they suggested I try talking to the track coach. I started running track. Just short distances, 100m, 200m, and 400m. I've never been able to recall the reasons why that all stopped.

I found a few races locally, and started entering. I'd get a t-shirt from each one, and a timed measured course to see how my pace improved. Cool!

I started talking with co-workers about my running, and found a few others who considered themselves runners. Then the marathon came to town. In September 1997 the first ever Silicon Valley Marathon was run in San Jose, CA. None of my running friends were in any condition to tackle the full distance, but that wasn't necessary. They had a relay option. We gathered a team of 4, and each of us ran about 10km of the marathon course. We would have finished much faster, but our first runner managed to get confused at the start. He didn't start with everyone else, then he could't find the course and had to run back to the start to get some help. By the time I took over, we were on a really slow pace. Ugh! We've never let him live that one down. ;-)

So, after that race, the organizers must have shared their registration list with other groups, because in February 1998, I got a flier in the mail about marathon training. When I saw this, I laughed at it and threw it in the garbage.

In March 1998, I started a new job. This is when I met Dina. We both started at the company on the same day, and over the next couple of weeks we got to chatting about all sorts of things. One topic that came up was running. The previous year, Dina had trained for and run a marathon. I told her that I'd received the flier in the mail, and that I'd thrown in away. The more she talked about her experiences, the more I thought that running a marathon was something I might be able to do myself. Surely, it was just a matter of training and running the right distances in preparation.

I started to reconsider that training program. I spoke with my friends from the marathon relay. They'd recieved the information, too. Should we try this? Could we run the full marathon, and not just the 10k?

After many rounds of discussion, I decided the throw caution to the wind -- can several other cliches -- and I signed up for the training program. I also persuaded my friend Gary to join me.

The program was quite straight-forward. In the beggining, run 3 or 4 times during the week, for 20 to 40 minutes, then run 3 to 5 miles on the weekend. The weekday runs increased to 40 to 60 minutes, and the weekend runs slowly increased to a peak run of 21 miles, using a kind of sawtooth system, where a peak run one weekend would be followed by a week or two of shorter distance, so your muscles could recover.

I had some muscle pull problems towards the end of the program, so my marathon result wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be. I finished my first marathon in a time of 5hours and 10 minutes.

I knew I could do better, so I signed up again the following year. I improved to 4hours 40 minutes. Cool! I signed up again the following year.

As the years progressed, I became an assistant coach with the program. Initially, the responsibilities were limited to guiding groups of runners along the trail. Trying to keep a consistent pace throughout the run, and making sure that you come back with the same number of runners you took out -- the paperwork is hell, if you don't bring them all back. ;-)

I started running more and more marathons, and then moved into Ultra-marathons. How I got to that point is another story...