Utah Valley Marathon: The Lead Up

I finished my second marathon!! It had been ten years since my first marathon.  Here is how the whole marathon hobby came about.
While a freshman in high school my volleyball coach ran a marathon and I was so impressed and told her and wrote in my journal that one day I would run one. In the spring/summer of 2005 I went to nanny in Baton Rouge, LA and then the family moved and we were right outside of Washington D.C. I didn't know anyone so after I was done working I would go out and run. I started timing my runs and would progressively run for longer and longer.  Once I finally got to running for an hour I decided to find a training plan and sign up for a marathon. I signed up for the Mesa Falls Marathon which was outside of Rexburg, ID where I was attending BYU-Idaho and was held the weekend before Fall semester started. It was awesome to be able to train in a new to me place.  I remember one long run I needed to do really early in the morning. A couple guys from the singles ward I was going to didn't want me running alone and they met me at like 4am to run l6 miles! I finished that race in 4 hours 34 minutes a 10:27 pace.  My roommate Tess wasn't running the race but ran the first 10 miles of it with me and then my mom biked the last 16 miles with me. My goal for that race was to finish in under 5 hours. For my training I didn't have any fancy GPS watch and would just run for time and estimate that for every ten minutes I probably ran a mile.
This second marathon came about because my friend and neighbor Felicia wanted to sign up for one and asked if I would like to do it with her.  I was pretty easily convinced. It was SO nice to have someone to do long training runs with. We would run twice a week together, one middle distance run on Tuesday's and then our long run together on the weekends.  The other three runs of the week we would do on our own. Our training plain was an intermediate plan and we both saw great results from it.  There were a couple of half marathon races we did while marathon training and we both PR'd by quite a bit.

Running in the snow at night

Running in a hailstorm.

Running in the heat

Morning run

Going into this training I just wanted to beat my previous marathon time. As we progressed through our training we both started to realize that we could raise the bar a bit and decided to set some different levels of goals.  #1 was to PR. #2 Break four hours. #3 Boston Qualify (3:35 finish time).
I NEVER would have thought it would be realistic to try and Boston Qualify it wasn't even on my radar.  But after running a half marathon at a 7:22/mile pace I realized that it was doable for me. To qualify for Boston my pace would need to be 8:12/mile pace.