We are in the thick of it, folks. Marathon training. I knew it was going to be hard, but this run was certainly a test of my endurance, my persistence, my commitment to the goal. I had the perfect route planned, 7.5 miles to the park and back to make my scheduled 15. I was so excited to accomplish this! And yet, it wasn’t to be. As you can see from the photo below, I encountered some flooding, and there was no way around it. This was a bridge that goes under the highway, and I’ve since been told that it floods often, because it dips so low. It could have been possible to run through it, as I saw a man on a recumbent tricycle riding right through it, but that wasn’t something I was willing to do. So I took a sad face selfie and headed back the way I came. This roadblock was only 1.5 miles away from my half way point, which meant that I had to make up 3 miles of distance to achieve my 15. So I took all the loops I could. Ran around all the cul-de-sacs in my neighborhood. Willed myself to NOT go home before I reached that 15 miles.

This run was so much slower than all of my previous runs and I’ll be honest, I was hurting for much of the last third of it. I came home happy that I had finished, but doubting myself quite a bit. Why was this one so hard? I’m nowhere near ready for 26.2, can I really do this? What have I gotten myself into? But when I got home from that run, my dear husband encouraged me and told me I could do this. Not because he knows anything about running, but because he knows ME. And he knows that when I set out to reach a goal I don’t give up.

Next week my long run is 16 miles and I’m going to try to run that same route, hoping this time there is no flooding and I am able to reach my intended half way point. With every run and every day that passes, I am getting stronger and I am so excited to some day be able to say yes, I ran a marathon. With MS. I did a hard thing, and you can too. Maybe not necessarily THIS hard thing, but something hard for you. We all have challenges we face in life, and I hope by sharing my experiences with running I inspire you to face your challenges head on. Because we truly can do hard things, we just have to decide we can and go out and do it.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.” ~Winston Churchill