When we were finishing up dinner and everyone was making plans for afterwards, I said I needed to go home because I was running in the morning. My non-runner friends know I’ve started running, and they know I have run a half marathon (or two) but I don’t think they really know what that means. I know I didn’t, until I did.

My friend Jaclyn ran the Huntsville marathon in December of 2010 (her first) and I was at my heaviest. I knew a marathon was a big achievement, but I thought marathon runners were born, not trained. I figured you needed to be a natural runner, and it just sort of happened. Like some people have brown hair, and some have blonde, I thought some people were runners and some weren’t. And the ones that were runners ran a marathon. I didn’t know that everyone has to train. 

I didn’t realize how far I’ve gone down this path of running until tonight at dinner. Someone asked how far I was running tomorrow and I said ‘9 miles’. I got the jaw dropped stare and Amy said “I couldn’t walk 9 miles”. My response was something along the lines of “it’s not that big of a deal, it will only take maybe an hour and 45 minutes”. 

I don’t know when this happened, but this is my new normal. I didn’t realize how crazy it is to a lot of my friends. I see people on Tumblr doing long runs all the time. And Casey is training for the NOLA marathon, so we talk about runs a lot. She’s doing 12 tomorrow. I brought Google Maps printouts to lunch today and we talked routes. This is my new normal.