themeltons.net

Archive for May, 2007

There is now a link on the right side of the website, under charity, for our Team TSA Fundraising page.  Dawn and I are running in the Chicago Marathon in October as members of the Tourette Syndrome Association’s team.  We are trying to raise money to donate to the TSA and you can help by following the link.

I’ll post a full description of the event and what led us to make this commitment, but I wanted to get the link up sooner rather than later.

Cheers!

Saturday, 5 May 2007; a day that will live in my mind due to the extraordinary discomfort I’m feeling on Sunday, 6 May 2007. My family and I ran in the Indy Mini Marathon and I (as well as my family) am pretty sore. If you’re not sure what a mini marathon is, it is half a marathon; that is, 13.1 miles of pure torture…er, fun. According to the the Mini’s website, the Indy Mini is the largest mini marathon in the country.

From the Indy Mini Website

The 32nd Running of the OneAmerica 500 Festival Mini-Marathon takes place on Saturday, May 4, 2008. The Mini has sold-out for the past six years, with 35,000 registrants in 2007, and an additional 3,500 participants in the Finish Line 500 Festival 5K. The Mini-Marathon is the largest half-marathon in the U.S., and overall, the eighth largest running event in America. The 2007 event sold out on November 27, 2006.

Enough about the history and all the other blah, blah, blah. I had actually never run that far before…ever. I trained fairly well for it, but due to injuries and weather, had never run more than 9 miles before Saturday; that was obviously going to change. The course is pretty cool because, while the race starts and ends in downtown Indianapolis, it includes a lap around the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway!

Of course, for a guy who grew up in Indiana, this is hallowed ground. Naturally, I had to stop at the famed Yard of Bricks, and give them a big kiss! Tony Stewart and all the rest of the NASCAR guys who have won at Indy are right; those are the best tasting bricks in the world!

Anyway, I digress. We all had separate, but similar, goals in mind for the Mini. As for me, my personal goals were very simple:

1. Finish
2. Run the entire race; no walking due to injury or fatigue
3. Finish the race in two hours or less
4. If I can’t do number three, then run as close to two hours as possible.

How did I do? Pretty good. I finished the race. That sounds like a simple thing, but until you’ve tried to run or walk 13 miles, you can’t understand just how hard that goal was. I did run the entire race, minus the kissing of the bricks thing and a couple of other times when I had to stop to get water and/or Gatorade (it’s a major traffic jam at those stations; everybody is thirsty). As for the last two goals, just check this link to my 2007 results page.

Dawn did pretty well also. She trained pretty hard as well and actually ran her nine miles during training before I was able to. She ran very close to her goal of 2:30 for the race. Her results are here. It may be insanity, but she wants to run a full marathon by November 2007; I told her I won’t, I can’t, I’m not gonna…I probably will.

Braden didn’t get to train for this distance. He was running JV track and was running the mile event. The most he had run up till Saturday was about five and a half miles. He did very well considering he never trained for this distance (and the bathroom breaks). His results are here.

We are already making plans to run the Mini again next year. The experience was very cool; there were bands, bag pipers, cheerleaders, and cloggers. There were rock bands, jazz bands, gospel bands, and rap bands; some were bad, some were good, some were just loud. There were high school girls in prom dresses looking for dates (Dawn slowed down to make sure Braden didn’t stop to say, “hey”), well wishers cheering us on, and even Al Unser Jr. was watching the race at the track. All of this made the experience that much more enjoyable.