Choosing A Marathon
(NOTE: This post describes events that occurred between March 28th and March 31st)
I’ve written briefly about this in an earlier post, but I thought I’d spend a little more time on it here.
When I decided to run a marathon, at first, it was a little nebulous. Ok, I’ll run one someday. Well, when is someday? We’ve been wrestling with some potential major changes (currently under wraps) at home lately, and so I was kind of putting of selecting a particular race based on the conclusion of those issues. As it became clearer that there weren’t necessarily going to be hard answers anytime soon, I decided to choose a race now. I’ll just figure it out later if anything complicates my choice. The time to choose was now.
I wanted a race that was reasonably close to home, but not too far away. I need at least 6 months to train and I live in the Pacific Northwest. It’s March. That means running the race October or November. Another important factor to me was that the race be (or seem) legitimate in the wider world of distance running. There are a few local marathons that average under 100 participants annually. Those weren’t for me. I set as my criteria that the race be certified as a qualifying course for the Boston Marathon Scooby-Doo! and the Monster of Mexico psp
. I was only able to verify that one marathon met all of those needs — the Portland Marathon. The Portland Marathon will be run this year on Sunday, October 9th. The Seattle Marathon is a little over a month later on November 27th. While the Seattle race is geographically closer to my home in Bellingam, WA Capone psp Channels full movie The Pink Panther Strikes Again , it is run a little too late in the year for my liking and
I wasn’t able to confirm easily that it is certified for Boston Marathon qualifying. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect to come even close Love & Sex movie Billy Jack
to qualifying for the Boston Marathon (a 3 hour and 10 minute finish for my age group), but I thought that would be a good criteria to ensure that I was in a race that I was proud to finish. I’m sure other, smaller races are excellent, and I intend to check some out in the future. One other advantage to running in Portland is that I won’t have to spend two hours in the car driving home after the race. I’ll be staying with my Grandparents who live just south of town.
One other benefit is that I can now say, “I’m running the Portland Marathon.” This helps to make my goal real and provide some accountability for my training, which I definitely need.
This discussion is now closed.