This next weekend, we’ll be running our fourth marathon and our seventh half marathon. As I think over how unprepared I feel every time we face another race, I have to remind myself of where we’ve come from. I wrote the following blog post in April of 2011, just a few weeks after we started training for our first 5K. Hope it will encourage you in meeting your goals as it is encouraging me in meeting mine…

When I was a junior in college, I had the opportunity to travel to Egypt for the summer. While we were there, we went to Mount Sinai, where we were able to climb to the very top. I didn’t even make it a fourth of the way up. I remember feeling very foolish as I saw an elderly woman using a CANE coming back down the mountain later on that day. Surely something was wrong if I couldn’t do the very same at the age of twenty-one. But what was I going to do? That was life.

A year later, it became crystal clear that if I was going to keep up with the young students I was working with in Namibia, I would need to be more in shape than I was. Far away from the temptations of fast food and mindless hours of television (we got ONE station there in Namibia), I realized that if I was going to make a real change, this was the perfect time to do it. There was no shortage of beautiful seaside places to run, so I put on my running shoes for the first time. There were some embarrassing moments (like when I tried to run three miles with a marathon training group and was lapped several times by some of them!), but after two years of giving it my snail pace best, I could have at least hung with the eighty year old ladies climbing Mount Sinai. (However, I may have required the use of a cane to do so.)

At this point, I feel like I’m facing another Mount Sinai of sorts. I keep waiting for this whole running thing to come more naturally, but it’s work, each and every time I put on my running shoes. The temptation right now is to shrug my shoulders and say, “But what am I going to do? This is life.” But I can see, by looking at these two pictures and reading what happened in between them that I can do this and that this new goal doesn’t have to be another Mount Sinai.

This next week we’re moving up to three miles a day. Wes is already there (overachiever!), and I’ll be running right behind him… wish us luck!