My Story

My running story started on March 7, 2013, when my wife Carmen talked me into signing up for Peteys 5K and we started the couch to 5K. I remember that very first couch to 5K session where we just had to get through 1 minute of jogging before we could walk for 2 minutes.

Later that month we went on a Caribbean cruise from Houston and I had worked myself up to running a full mile and then on March 31, 2013, I ran a trial 5K for my first run over a mile since gym class in the late 1970's.

On April 6, 2013, I ran my very first race finishing Peteys 5K in 31:19.  I remember sprinting to the finish line.  My timing chip had fell off my shoe, luckily someone turned it in so I didn't have to cough up $20 to the Nashville Striders.

Next, my wife and I wanted to tackle 10K, so we committed to the Hendersonville Classic. On April 20, 2013, I went to see if I could run 10K on a training run.  After I reached the 10K distance I was feeling pretty good, even though it was raining, and I went another 5K to knock out 9.3 miles at a pace of 11:23.  Later that weekend I saw that there was the Country Music race the following weekend.  I got the calculator out and saw that I just needed 3.8 miles more to do a half marathon.  So having just had a few runs, I signed up for the Country Music half marathon.  It rained the entire race and I felt pretty good finishing in 2:22:57, just under 11 minutes per mile.

I ran a few times the next week before needing to rest a week from the soreness that I was experiencing from the half marathon.  But then my regular running started on May 13, 2013.

I had been reading about the local runner, Scott Wietecha, who won the Country Music Marathon and also lived here in Hendersonville.  I found his blog and saw that he had some openings for runners to coach. I emailed Scott on May 21, 2013, and he began coaching me on May 27, 2013.

My first plan was to get ready for my first marathon - the Twin Cities Marathon on October 6, 2013.   After a couple months of training, my target became to run a sub 4 hour marathon.  8 days before the marathon, I had to take a day off from a sore left hamstring after running 99 consecutive days.  But on marathon day, I was feeling fine and finished in 3:59:33.

Two months later I chipped away at that time, finishing the Rocket City Marathon in 3:51:10.

By now thoughts of a BQ (Boston Qualifier) started getting into my head.  At this time, I thought the 2017 race would be my best chance when I would get 10 more minutes and would need to run in under 3:40.

In January of 2014, I did the crazy Goofy Challenge at Disney World where I ran a half marathon on Saturday and came back the next day to run a full marathon.

After that, the training began to work on speed.  Going into the Tom King Half Marathon on March 8th, 2014, my PR was down to 1:52:49.  I finished Tom King in 1:42:05 beating my PR  by over 10 minutes. I entered that into the race prediction website and it was coming up with a marathon time of 3:33:37, within 4 minutes of my Boston Qualifier requirement of 3:30.  That was the first time I thought I could move up the timetable from a 2017 Boston Race to 2015.  The next month I went lower yet, finishing the Derby Half Marathon in 1:38:46, which now had the race prediction software predicting a 3:26:44 marathon.  The training now shifted to running a sub 3:30 at Grandmas Marathon, which was still over 2 months away.

May of 2014 had some BQ specific long runs where I would target sub 8 on the second half of the long run.  We ended up going on a 7-day cruise from Seattle late in May and this was a critical week in the training cycle.  I couldn't sit back and relax and gain weight on vacation.  I ran 72 miles on the 7-day cruise while losing 2 pounds. 3 weeks later, I ran 3:26:21 at Grandma's Marathon and I had crushed my PR of 3:51:10 and was well under the BQ requirement of 3:30.

In September, I was accepted by the Boston Athletic Association to run Boston in April of 2015.