Praying and Running

On November 9th, 2019 I ran the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon (IMM). The short report is that I whined a lot during the build up and incessantly complained that I had gotten fat and slow but on race day, a semblance of my old self showed up and ran 1 hell of a race crushing my stated goal of 2:57 by nearly 4 minutes. The long report follows. I really had kind of given up on ever running a fast marathon again. After my back issues last year I just never got going full steam again. Instead I had gotten fat and slow because I let my diet slide and put on about 15 pounds and I was trying to run without fully committing to the work of marathon training. This summer I had decided to just maybe, kind of run the IMM for fun and not really lose my summer to training for it. But then Chad, a friend of mine who runs with a group on Sundays that I sometimes go to, asked my if I wanted to do my long runs for IMM together. I reluctantly agreed. Chad and I put up a couple of solid long