Triathlon vs. Marathon & How I got into Marathoning

I remember it as if it were yesterday. My best friend and I decided we'd start exercising to lose weight for a trip to Arizona. We would meet every other day or so at the DPS on Lamar and walk around the track. We would walk once, twice, then three times. Then we decided to jog. Once around, then let's see if we could do twice around. This continued until we got ourselves up to a couple miles. I remember being soooo proud. Bragging to coworkers, I ran 1 mile last night :)

Then one of her coworkers talked us into running the Flamingo 5K. 3/18/01, my first race, although this was before I knew anything, and I bandited the race. My best friend registered and I was too scared, because I thought these "races" were for professional REAL athletes, so I ran it with her. Then we decided to do the Austin American Statesman, 4/1/01. My chip time was 1:21:30, 13:08 min mile. I was pretty happy too :)

Fast forward to 2004. I joined the Runtex University free classes up at Runtex Gateway. Bruno was the guy that worked there that gave us our workouts. I actually met Clarence Lucas at these workouts!! There were others, and I was the caboose. I met a girl named Leslie and she asked me if I wanted to join their running team. I immediately told her, "No way... I'm not elite, I'm new and I'm not fast." She kept on, told me to go to www.teamjustin.com and just browse the website. Leslie wanted me to do the Distance Challenge with her, she said she'd run with me on the weekends for our long runs, and I looked up to her since she had previously run a couple marathons before and I had only done 5k's and 10k's.

I completed the Distance Challenge and signed up for the San Diego marathon since that was the next marathon to raise awareness and money for Team Justin. Noone else registered!!! So I went out and did it on my own, by myself. My first vacation solo. After the Austin marathon, I got curious about triathlons and this is where I was introduced to Rogue. I joined IronChicks, but didn't realize until after I had joined that Danskin was the weekend AFTER the San Diego marathon. I completed San Diego with a huge PR of 25 minutes and came back to do Danskin.

Crossing the finish line at Danskin was BLAH. I didn't get excited, no emotions, just, "Hmm.. so that's a triathlon." Then I started on the, I wonder if I could do an Olympic distance tri... a half Ironman.. etc. I completed all of those, and now I'm signed up for CdA Ironman, my first full. I've always known that I loved running more than tri's, but it wasn't until AFTER Team Rogue that I know this is exactly where my heart lies. When I think about all the triathlon finishes, I've never shed a tear, I've never been overly excited, just content with finishing, with PR'ing a few minutes here and there, but never real fullfillment. Sooooo, I'm planning to give it my all and complete my first Ironman, but after this I'm going back to what I love... and that's running. I just wanted to document for myself how this all started :)