Grandma's Marathon

After getting a stress fracture last year I was determined to run a marathon this year. In Northern Minnesota there is a popular marathon called Grandma's Marathon. It runs along the shore of Lake Superior from Two Harbors to Duluth. My past training partner wanted to sit out training for this race, but my husband decided he would train with me! I later found out that he only agreed to it because he thought we would not actually do it. After a while we both enjoyed running together and we were both excited for our big race. 

Now for a funny story: All of the hotels within 50 miles of Duluth were sold out. This left college dorms as being the only option to have a place to spend the night. Shirley was awesome enough to come out and watch the kids. So back to the dorm. One of the beds was set up really high and Ryan wanted it lower. So he attempted to lower it and broke the bed. After my stomach hurt from laughing at him trying to fix it he ended up throwing the mattress on the floor. 

The race itself was a lot of fun. At the start of the race it was 44 degrees and foggy. The fog stuck around for most of the race, which was nice because we could only see about half a mile ahead of us. 26.2 miles is a long way to run, but it was totally worth it. Ryan and I ran with each other for most of the race, but eventually we got separated and I kicked his trash by 2 minutes. We have already decided that we will be running this one again next year if possible.

Here we are surrounded by people and tons of porto-potties. I guess runners pee a lot.

A few minutes before the start and we were feeling good.

We survived. It felt great to accomplish this together. My husband is such a hunk. ;)

After the race most runners would relax and recover. Shirley brought the kids up to see the end of the race, so we needed to have some fun after the 3 hour drive they made. We had lots of fun with seagulls that would take food out of our hands.

We had fun hiking a little bit around the lake and throwing rocks in. The fog was still sticking around so the view was not the best, but it was still beautiful.

We even went to an awesome waterfall that required Ryan and me to walk down too many steps, but it was worth it to see our kids smile.