One Day to the Portland Marathon

As of right now, the marathon is on (for me). And I’m going to (try to) run it. Here’s why:

1. Earlier in the week I was telling my boss that I was going to try to walk a marathon. She said, “No you’re not, you runners are all the same. You’re just going to run it no matter what.” I realized that this is true. I might have to end up walking, but I can’t even kind of imagine myself starting out walking and doing the whole thing that way.
2. On Thursday after work I went to Elephant’s Deli and got the best roast beef sandwich ever. At the same time, I ran into our friends the Oken-Bergs. I told Jake how I was going back and forth in my head about whether or not to do the run, and he suggested doing a minute or two of recovery walking between every 8-10 minutes of running. This gives injuries time to subside before they emerge – the trick is to be sure you do it from the start, before things start hurting. Stopping to walk for a minute every mile or so sounds hard too, but more feasible than walking the whole way.
3. Yesterday I rode my bike over to the downtown Hilton, where the race expo was. This is where you get your bib number and your pre-race t-shirt (for some reason they think you need two shirts for one race, which is wrong), and then a bunch of stores/companies come and display their running-related goods and a lot of them are on sale. On my way in, I ran into my friend Kamran, a fellow hasher and member of the Apple Fritter Avengers HTC team. This isn’t really a reason for deciding to run the marathon, but it felt fortuitous to run into a friend. This feeling was amplified when I parted ways with Kamran and immediately saw my friend Dillon while I was unlocking my bike, and then minutes later saw my dad. I should hang out on Salmon & 6th more; apparently everyone I know passes through that area (I know three people).
4. At the expo some guy showed me all about a fancy strap that I can put around my IT band to pin it in place and keep it from rubbing around and getting agitated. Then he told me to go over to the other side of the expo and buy it from somebody else for cheaper. It saved me over $5! Who knows if it will work – the important thing is that I got a deal.

That’s what the strap looks like. Remember how puffy my feet got last time I did a marathon? I’m excited to see if it will happen again. Check back tomorrow (or the next day) to see if it does happen. Or to see if I ran the marathon at all, or if I didn’t end up going because I slept through my 5:45AM alarm (I’m legitimately worried about this).