Oklahoma City Marathon

DEREK IS A MARATHONER! While he's been a runner for over 20 years Derek has only done half marathons and always had it in the back of his mind that he might do a full. I did my first one a decade ago and always felt my time didn't reflect how hard I worked for months and kinda wanted to redeem myself someday. Welp, somehow this December it came up. And before you know it the research was done and we were booked for OKC. It's a fairly flat course and one that both Texas and Kansas families could easily get to. It's in April which meant great training months for down in Texas and we were both pumped. We trained for FOUR months. Every week we ran a long run together and then ran 2 other times during the week. With the help of chatGPT we put together lifting and stretching and massage gun schedules to do this without injury. We had minimal alcohol, ate right and did it as a team. Our longest training run was 20 miles and that was tough making me a bit nervous for the race but the time was here. 

First up was the Expo to pick up packets and see all the things...

Then we headed to the hotel to enjoy some time with my family and Derek's parents. My brother flew in from Tampa to lug the kiddos around to see us several locations as well as drive us back from OKC to DFW so that we wouldn't have to drive after. But the best surprise was the both Derek's sister (and her spouse) and brother were able to come down and surprise him! It was so nice having everyone together! 

We got a separate room for the children so that Derek and I could pop a melatonin early and hit the hay by 8:30pm. Then it was go time! Alarms went off at 4:30 am and we popped right out of bed with all the adrenaline helping. Cal offered to drive us to the start line at 5:30am which was SUPER nice of him. 

There was NOT enough bathrooms at the start line but the weather was amazing and the 168 seconds of silence before the race was crazy powerful. We started right by the memorial and it was quite special. 

Derek's brother is a photographer and luckily snapped some photos for us along the route and after! Almost everything that looks professional was courtesy of him which was SUPER thoughtful. 

Because we couldn't take hydration packs we were limited on what we could have on us for the race. I had to package 3 fuel bags for Drew to hand off to us at each of the 3 stops we saw family. We planned it quite well knowing what our pace would be and it worked out so well!

We finished in 5 hours and 34 minutes. Although I had to hit up the bathroom four times and was only planning on 2, we still had a decently good race. Miles 1-15 were easy, 15-20 were kinda cool as we got to run through some amazing neighborhoods. The crowd support was awesome almost the entire race. Mile 20-23ish were a long straight stretch with a slight uphill where we had BRUTAL winds. I coudln't even hear derek and there's no way we could listen to music. We got through it and were in the home stretch. The last few miles Derek wanted to walk a ton so we pushed each other to keep running once in a while. When we knew I was going to shave off quite a chunk from my last marathon it gave us a little surge. I wanted to then shave 30 minutes meaning we had to not walk quite as much. We did it though and I'm so so proud of us. 

We were both recovered by day 5 after the race and then about a week after I get a text from Derek saying he's 90% sure we'll do another one in our lifetime. This made me smile and giggle and tear up as that's so exciting. How many other couples do 4 months of training together AND then run a marathon together? Not many and we feel effing proud about that. SUPER proud.