30 for 30

It has been a little while since I have posted. Life has been crazy and even a little bit stressful but running continues to be a great outlet. Several months ago, Ben and I were talking about the fact that he is getting “old” and debated about how to celebrate it. We looked high and low for a 50k during the month of December, but had a really tough time finding one. Instead, I suggested that we do 30 miles together and invite friends to join us for parts of it.

We trained hard for months to prepare for this run and towards the middle/end of the training, Ben came face to face with an injury and decided to keep pushing through it. We spent lots of time creating and rerouting the course we were going to do and finally settled on a course that included a lot of firsts for Ben including his first ever 4.5 mile run, his first 14 mile run, his first marathon, and our most common training path.

As the day we had chosen approached, we anxiously watched the weather as a storm system developed over Denver. On the morning we had planned to run, we woke to a lot of snow and very cold weather. We decided to set out anyways and see what happened. After about 2 miles, we decided to call it for the day. Our hydration packs were freezing, which would have caused a lot of issues for hydration. Nothing had been plowed, which was fine for a short-mid distance run but would have created some very unhappy feet. Talk about a huge disappointment! It was a really really tough decision, but probably a good one in the end.

After much debate, we decided to try again the following weekend on Sunday after church. That day, Ben ended up getting sick and needing to postpone again. There was a fear that the run would never happen and that we were just going to tell people over and over that we were going to do it, only to postpone again. The week of Saturday December 17^th, we checked the weather every single day, monitored Ben’s injury, and on Thursday decided to tell people we were going to run.

The weather was better than what we could have asked for. We ran into about a mile and a half of packed snow/ice and had the occasional ice patch, but the road conditions were fantastic. We had one friend (thanks Conor!) join us from mile 7 to 15, a friend from 21 to 30 (woohoo Jeremy!) and his wife join us from 27.5ish to the end (yay Beth!). The course was as we had planned and allowed us to finish in front of our house. Along the way, we shared memories of years of our life (1-2 years old from mile 1-2, etc) which made the miles just tick away.

The end of the run was met with tears and lots of celebrating! Despite some of the bumps along the way, we had just completed our seventh marathon distance and our longest run ever to celebrate 30 years of life. We also have some amazing friends and family to be so grateful for as they supported us and cheered us on (and even made cool race bibs followed by car decals for us)!  What a way to celebrate 30 years of a such an amazing person individual!! 30 miles for 30 years!! Congrats and happy birthday Ben!

Who knows what we will do for next years birthdays…