berlin marathon qualification

 

People rarely share the toughest moments of their lives on social media. I am no exception. I was running the marathon of my life back in December 2019 in Huntsville, Alabama when a small group of us took a wrong turn because a volunteer who should have been directing us at an intersection abandoned her post due to the cold weather. I ended up with a 2:47:19 that day instead of the 2:43:12 that I felt like I rightfully earned. This might seem trivial to most, but it was more important to me than I could hope to explain. I was devastated but vowed to run even faster on the next race. The COVID outbreak had other plans and cancelled my April 2020 marathon in Carmel, Indiana and the December 2020 marathon back at Huntsville. I spiraled downward, vowed to never race again, and took up cycling to distract me from what had happened. I was 41 by that point and had no allusions that I could ever gain that level of fitness again, especially without knowing when another marathon would come around again. I eventually picked running back up just to stay more active, slowly increased my mileage, and avoided ever thinking about a comeback to preserve my mental health. 

 

When the Carmel marathon rolled around again in April 2021, I helped pace a friend of mine to his personal record and inadvertently found myself reasonably close to my former condition. I improved enough over the next few months to convince myself that the larger regret would be to live without trying one more time. I restarted serious training and decided to return to Huntsville in December 2021, only for the race to be cancelled at the last minute by a freak thunderstorm. My next chance would then be Carmel in April 2022, exactly 28 months since the wrong turn, but would I still have enough left to get the job done at age 43? After putting in over 8000 miles during that 28-month window, the answer was yes. Yesterday I set a new personal record of 2:42:26 at the Carmel Marathon, won the 40+ age division, qualified for the most elite of the world major marathons (Berlin), and finished 16 seconds faster than the all-time record set in 1989 for the fastest marathon ever run in Tennessee by a 43-year-old Tennessean (except I’m obviously ineligible for that title since my race was in Indiana). An enormous weight is now off my shoulders – and legs.