Alison is wearing the white t-shirt I am in the grey tank.

* There were 467 finishers in my age group and 3785 total finishers. My overall finish place was 2093, your age group finish place was 122 and my gender finish place was 672. Your chip time was 4:21:18 and your pace was 09:12 per mile.

The marathon experience was amazing… we started in corral 3 so the time on the clock is based on corral 1 runners.. which is why it is a couple of minutes off from our time… we wear a chip on our shoe and when it crosses the start time the computer starts to track us.

There were thousands of other runners participating in the marathon and our husbands, friends and Alison’s parents were at all of the race fan party stops… mile 7… mile 13… and mile 19.. we looked forward to their smiling faces and got a little boost at each of those stops… we were “feeling good” our mantra for so many of our long runs leading up to the big event… Alison and I trained for four months and there we were running the streets of Richmond… parts of the race were surreal… there were so many people along the race route cheering on runners they didn’t know and probably would never actually meet…

I think there is a reason the Richmond Marathon has been referred to as the “Friendliest Marathon” 

Once we hit mile 20… I started to “hit my wall”  my left knee started to hurt on the outside… I thought… ooooh where did that come from?  I tried to stop and walk at the next drink stop… walking was the worst thing I could have done… after about 50 yards we started running again and my left knee felt like a lawnmower that had been in storage all winter… I could barely get it fired back up… I mean it took some serious effort to make it move… I felt awful… I was starting to slow us down… I told Alison to go ahead if she felt good… I would not be at all offended or upset… she simply said, “We trained together..we’ll finish together…” I get tears in my eyes just thinking about it… that gave me a spark to keep going…

Then… my knee started to feel better - I thought I had made it through the wall… nope… because after a mile the pain came back only with a bit of a vengeance.. there were a few downhill moments that absolutely killed me… so painful…

Mentally I was starting to break a little bit - I look at Alison and said - we’re about to come up on 25 right? (I had psyched myself up for another 1.5 miles) - she said “24”—I groaned - out loud!!!  She was like my coach… I think I would have stopped if I had not had her encouraging me to continue…

We both wore VT hats… both of us went to school there and learned that the Hokie Nation is vast… so many people would yell out “Go Hokies!!!”

The signs were very entertaining.. one of them read “Your feet hurt because you are kicking so much a—.”  Another one simply said, “Don’t Suck” - while that may not seem encouraging after mile 25 it became my mantra… and got me through to the end.

Thanks for all of the well wishes - and without Alison, Matt, Laura, Pete, Charley and Mr. and Mrs. Cordell the day would not have been the same!!  Laura was our race fan party coordinator and made sure everyone got to the different fan stops… I told her.. she could take that talent pro.