John's 1st Marathon St. George 10/4/08

Last spring John started talking about running a marathon. He looked into running the St. George marathon, because it is where is mom lives and because it is supposed to be a lot of downhill running. In April, he put his name into the lottery (they have 10,000 runners apply to the lottery and accept 7,000). In May we found out that he was in! He has worked so hard to train and we were all excited for race day...

I dropped him off at the bus pick up at 4 am. The race started at 6:45am. His goal was to finish in 3 hrs and 30 min. or about 10:15 am.

It began to rain about an hour before the start of the race and continued all morning. I wasn't sure if that would make John run slower or not so we headed to the finish line at 9:45am and planned on waiting until he finished whether or not he was running to his goal or slower. Imagine our great surprise when he came trucking by at 3hrs and 20 minutes! We had a blast cheering him on the last 100 yards.

Nothing tastes better than in ice-cream cone after running 26.2 miles!

While John was running his marathon the kids and I did the mayor's 2.2 mile fun walk! Caleb was so excited to run his "marathon". It rained the whole way but the kids and I had a great time taking in a part of the spirit of the day.

We couldn't be more proud of our favorite runners!