My Birthday Marathon

My Birthday marathon was a blast! It took place on November 29th, my 12th birthday. It was a 6.55 mile loop we ran 4 times. I was a little bit nervous because 26.2 seemed like a massive amount of miles. Since this was my first marathon, my mom would run the first half with me and my dad would run the second half with me so that I would never be alone.
   
When the marathon started everyone stayed in one group so there was plenty of things to listen to during the first lap. During the middle of the first lap I was starting to cramp up just a little bit, the idea of me cramping at mile 3 kind of annoyed me because I still had 23 miles to go.
   
When we hit the aid station I took a few pretzels and a Mountain Dew and took off. Right after that I realized that listening to some talk about races and what they have endured really helps for you to kind of ignore pain. After we made it to the turn around I felt great and was thinking that the next loop was going to go by really fast with my dad and Ed pushing me.
   
After the second lap we started flying and Ed said that our average mile was 11:06, the thought that I might get under five really helped me not to walk. I was really starting to hurt, after the turn around we did a lot of walking. When we were about .5 miles out from the aid station I started cramping a lot it kind of felt like my stomach was being tied in knots.
   
Most of the cramping went away after about a mile of running, when we were about two miles away from the aid station I saw my science teacher Mrs. Rickards jogging and that kind of gave me something to think about. When we were almost at the turn around I had to go poop and almost right after I said that Ed found three pieces of semi clean pieces of paper towel. So after a few minutes we found a good bush and well... lets just say I went.

At about the last mile Ed told me that I only had a mile to go and that I was going to get under five hours if i kept my pace, this made me run a little faster and made me a little emotional. When I saw the finish I could hardly breath because I was so excited :). In the end my finish time was 4:51, I broke 5 hours!

Thank you to everyone that came. It was the best birthday ever!