75th Marathon: Coast to Coast Challenge!

Though I just got my recap of last weekend up yesterday, tonight kicks off another busy and exciting weekend. It all began when I finally took the time to tally up my marathons (in an Excel worksheet, obviously) and realized that I was starting to approach the 75 mark. With our decimal number system that has 75 as a big important number (it’s 3/4 of the way to 100!), I wanted to do something exciting for my 75th marathon.

At first, I planned to run the Yonkers Marathon in early September as my 74th marathon, which would then allow Wineglass to be my 75th. But then I got ridiculously sick and had to cancel all my plans that weekend – which meant that Wineglass now would only be my 74th marathon. Bummer! I had thought it would be great to do my 75th while introducing two of my best friends to their first.

I started scouting around for other cool marathon opportunities to mark my 75th, and then I found it. Thanks to Yurbuds, I was invited to do the Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco on Sunday. That alone would have been a neat 75th marathon (you get a Tiffany’s necklace instead of a finisher’s medal – how cool!), but then I happened to notice that the Rockaway Marathon was being held here in New York on Saturday. If I could work out the logistics to do both, I’d get to run two marathons, on two coasts (Rockaway is literally on the boardwalk next to the Atlantic), in two days! Fabulous.

I’m not going to lie: I’m a little bit nervous about how this will go. I haven’t been running very many marathons this year (at least compared to when I was doing them every weekend or two), so I’m not quite sure how my body is going to hold up to a double. Furthermore, the logistics are a bit crazy, as I’ll have to go straight from Rockaway Beach to JFK airport for my flight to San Francisco, and then from SFO airport straight to the Nike expo to get my bib and packet. But I am also really psyching myself up with the idea that I can eat a ridiculous amount of yummy food tomorrow night as I try to very quickly refuel for a second marathon. I keep thinking about how I accidentally ate an entire pizza the night between the New Hampshire and Maine marathons a few years ago, and I would like to repeat that experience! Getting to indulge on some delicious food and wine in San Francisco will be a pretty great reward 🙂

With my recent PR, I feel like I ought to set a time goal for these races. When I thought about it, though, the best “round number” goal would be to finish both marathons in a combined total of less than 10 hours. But 10 hours is kind of sandbagging it – it would be unlikely for me to take more than 5 hours for both races (though I’m sure my time on Sunday won’t be too stellar). Instead, I’ll put my goal as just having fun! I am really looking forward to meeting some other Fitfluential ambassadors in San Francisco for the first time, and I have a few friends in the area as well. Plus, I think it will just be so exciting to run along the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday and the Pacific Ocean on Sunday! Kind of a neat way to sum up my 50 state marathon journey by running on both coasts to celebrate my 75th marathon.

Now – time to start carbing up. I have a lot of miles to run before Monday!