Megan Walks the North Olympic Discovery Marathon

I trained for a marathon, starting back a few months before the marathon, which was on June 7th in Port Angeles, WA. I trained with my good friend Emily and we had fun training and doing the whole thing! We did not train to run it, we trained to walk it, there was a special start time two hours prior to the runners start for people who would finish in over 5 hours. If you started at that time and finished in under 5 hours, you were disqualified. Some people walked/jogged, some only walked, etc. Anyway, we went up to Port Angeles the night before, picked up our cool shirts and marathon registration packets with our bibs and chips that we had to wear around our ankles, then we went and had a nice good meal, went to bed, and then got up early to catch the bus to the starting line in the next town over. The trail was part of the Olympic Discovery Trail, and it was really beautiful. I had never even attended any type of event like this, and it was fun to see the type of characters that are at these things. A lot of really in shape people, that's who! :) But everyone was really encouraging and people always said "good job!" and cheered for people around them, and the aid station volunteers were great. Emily and I did really well, the hardest part was, well, how hard the trail was. Literally. It wasn't difficult at all in almost every way, it was just hard like rocks are hard. Paved. We had been training mainly on soft trails in the forest, and the pavement was killing my feet by about mile 20. Wow what a difference. But, there was no way I was going to stop or anything, so I just got over it and kept going. :) We crossed the finish line in 7 hours, 8 minutes. 26.2 miles of straight walking. I went to the bathroom twice but that was the only time we stopped. I was pretty proud of myself for doing the marathon, it was pretty cool. I was very impressed with all the people who did the marathon, there were people who were old enough to be my grandfather/grandmother who ran the whole thing, and the guy that won passed us at 10:08am when we were already past mile 12, when we had started at 7am and he had started 2 HOURS later than we did at 9am and he looked cool as could be. Amazing. He ended up finishing in 2 hours, 36 minutes. Anyway, here are a few photos!

Cool bridge along the trail

Mile 17, woo hoo

20 miles, my feet were starting to hurt :)

We finished!

On the bus to the starting line at 6am