October 5th, 2014 is slightly less than 3 months away. That’s the date I’m plodding the Wineglass Marathon. Marathon as in 26.2 miles. My first one ever. Things are starting to get real.

I first started thinking about doing a marathon a few months after my first half marathon. I decided to do the full marathon for the same primary reason I decided to run the first half marathon.

I signed up to remind myself that the only limitations I have are the limitations I place on myself.  I think a few people thought I was crazy for running the first half. I don’t know if this is true for others, but I have a bad habit of sometimes thinking I’m only capable of what others think I’m capable of. And of course the more ambitious something is the more doubt you’ll hear from other people. That’s generally true of running and of any goals in life I think.  So I went into my first half marathon slightly scared because I was about to try to push myself beyond the limits I still secretly thought I had. The race was scary and it was exhilarating and it AWESOME. So I ran two more and those were awesome too.  Not scary. Just plain awesome. My limits had changed. I was capable of more than I thought.  13.1 seemed so impossible last year and now 13 is just a training run.

I chose Wineglass after reading a bunch of blogs and reviews others had written on marathons they had done. I chose based on (a) time of year (I’d rather train in the heat and humidity of summer and run a fall race than the other way around), (b) location (I didn’t want to have to fly to the marathon), (c) level of difficulty of the course (Wineglass is almost flat but for a very slight downhill slope the entire way, but not trash your knees/toes downhill), and (d) scenery (not a boring repetitive loop course and not on long stretches of roads with no scenery and no spectators.)

And with that I get to the title of this blog and another very important part of Wineglass. Nikki Fleming and I both had the great wisdom to marry Fleming men which makes us cousins by marriage.  Nikki is also a runner and we both tend to go off for jogs at the annual Fleming family reunion, but have never raced together because she lives in Ohio and I live in Connecticut (soon to be New York).  Nikki also decided to run her first marathon in the fall and…. it is the Wineglass Marathon! Our first race together will be our first respective marathons.  I asked Nikki if she would write a guest blog here about why she chose to do a marathon and why she chose Wineglass and she agreed :).  You can read her blog right after mine in “Why The Wineglass Marathon?”.