Anniversary

Yesterday was the four-year anniversary of my first marathon. I cannot believe how much has happened between then and now. Truthfully, it was overly ambitious for me to sign up and run that race. I had not trained in a fashion that was nearly adequate to run 26 miles, but fortunately twenty year old bodies are springy and malleable and withstand much more regular abuse than long-distance running. 

The marathon had always intrigued and intimidated me, in particular because training would usually require running in either extreme heat and humidity or extreme cold in Massachusetts. During that time in 2009, I was living in Honolulu for my year of exchange, and though I had not been running far, I had been running consistently for many, many months. I paid my entry fee, and race day came quickly. I don’t think that I had run farther than sixteen miles, and even runs of comparable distance had been rare. Ahhhh, well!

I showed up at the start of the race with another girl who was on exchange, and we came across a huge group of people doing a strange organized warm-up. We joined in, thinking that it was being put on by race management, and it was about fifteen minutes before we realized that we were actually in the middle of a large Japanese tour group that had come to run the marathon. (Japan Airlines sponsors the race, and there is a huge percentage of the participants that come in from Japan.)

The marathon started with fireworks, traveled through a Christmas-decorated Chinatown with a huge Hawaiian Santa Claus, and continued alongside the ocean. We passed Diamond Head and even continued even farther west before looping back and finishing next to the zoo and Waikiki Beach in Kapiolani Park. It was beautiful all the way, and it was a great first. I was so happy to have checked “run a marathon” off my list.

Four years later and several hundred (thousand?) miles behind me, here I am, still looking down the long road (trail?) ahead.