Charlotte's Thunder Road Marathon - RunMarathon

Today I finished up 18 weeks of training by running the Thunder Road Marathon in Charlotte, NC – my first (of hopefully many) marathons. I won’t bore you with all the little details, but instead will give you some of the highlights:

- Since it was my first marathon, I was very conservative with my pace – I feel that I left a lot in the tank and know that I can do better in the future. The goal for today was to finish and not worry about time.

- Picking Charlotte as my first marathon had ups and downs (literally) – lot’s of hills, beautiful neighborhoods to run through, and pretty decent crowd support (although some places got pretty lonely).

- The crowds in NoDa rock – they really helped me to get through the last 6 miles and are definitely enjoying themselves!

- I don’t like the Charlotte Center City Hilton – they were overwhelmed by the runners staying there and not able to handle many of the simplest things. We had decided to stay uptown on Friday night to make life easier in the morning – in retrospect, I wish I had just stayed home in my own bed.

- Running a marathon tests your body, but I believe that it tests your mind more. There were several times when doubt kicked in and I had to remind myself that it was mind over matter. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out if I decide to do an Ironman.

- Thanks to my “fans” – people that recognized me from the Charlotte Observer story on Friday. I’m assuming it’s the big Italian nose that helped them to recognize me but it was pretty cool to hear "Hey, it's the guy from the paper!"…

- Chip time, per my GPS was 4:24:18 – 9 minutes over what I wanted to run, but – I learned a very valuable lesson – don’t stand in line during the race waiting for a port-a-jon. I’m a guy and there are plenty of wooded areas – I lost at least 10 minutes (if not more) standing around. Live and learn – that’s what they say!

- Many, many thanks to my family for the on course support – it means the world when you see your family and definitely boosts your moral. I also know that living with me when I become obsessive about something can be a hard thing to do – I appreciate all of their patience and understanding (and the fact that most of the time they hold back on the rolling of the eyes when I start talking about running).

Hobbled back to the car and headed home - a little light stretching, big use of the Stick.


On to the future – Myrtle Beach in February, waiting on the NYC Lottery in April! Once that decision is made I'll either be in NYC in November or doing my first half-iron distance - either way, I can't wait!