Marathon Dreams

This morning I awoke early, ate a little breakfast and headed up to Sun Prairie High School to run 6 x 800 meter repeats on the track.

Not long after we got the referral for Ian, I was out on a run and thought it would be a great experience to run in Korea when we picked him up. I found a marathon, the JoonAng Marathon (marathon.joins.com) on Nov. 4th. It's a huge race, with over 30,000 runners and is run south of the Han river not all that far from where we'd be staying to pick up Ian.

In early September, I was optimistic that we might be traveling by that time so I started training for a marathon. Normally, I train for approximately 16 weeks, but I had about 7. So I've been concentrating on long runs and some tempo runs and speedwork during the week with more rest days than a normal plan in hopes that I can avoid overdoing it and getting injured. My goal is not to run a PR (personal record), but to finish the race.

As October started to drag on and the big brown envelope hadn't yet arrived, it became evident that we weren't going to be traveling in time for the JoonAng marathon. So I started to look a little further out. I found the SportsSeoul marathon (marathon.sportsseoul.com) on Nov. 18th. But the whole site was in Korean. And even though the kids and I have been taking Korean classes, I only know a few words - not enough to register for a marathon. So I asked my Korean teacher for a little help. We attempted to register for the race (only 40,000 won - about $45), but I'm not entirely sure my registration went through. My credit card has not been charged and I have not received an e-mail confirmation. The registration deadline was yesterday, so I do not know my fate. And who knows if we'll be in Korea that day or not. AIAA (our international agency) says that we should be traveling in early to mid-December. I'm optimistic it will be earlier, but it's really in God's hands.

So I'm still training as though I'll race on Nov. 18th, but it may all just be a dream. Hopefully I'll be able to do some sort of race while we're in Korea, but we'll address that when the time comes.