So in October I logged onto the LA Marathon site to register for the marathon and I noticed that the website had changed. Most importantly to me, the sentence that started “Participants who cross the finish line after…” had changed.

When I decided to enter the LA Marathon that sentence had read “Participants who cross the finish line after 8:00:00 are not guaranteed to be recognized as Official Finishers and are not guaranteed a medal or finishing time.”

The sentence as it appeared that morning in October read “Participants who cross the finish line after 6:30:00 are not guaranteed to be recognized as Official Finishers and are not guaranteed a medal or finishing time.”

I had set a goal to finish the LA Marathon in 7:30:00, an hour faster than I had trained to finish Seattle. Now I would have to take another hour off my time in 8 months, and considering how much I do well and truly suck at running, that seemed unlikely.

This created a weird situation since, by that point, I was involved in my IRONMAN training (in fact, the idea to do the IM came from some audiobooks that I was listening to trying to psych myself up to do this marathon.)

I’ve been working to increase my speed but it has become clear that it would be very touch and go as to whether or not I would be able to finish in 6.5 hours, and I have no desire to DNF a marathon I don’t have to do.

So I’m definitely doing another marathon before the IM, but it’s not going to be LA this year. At this point I’m not sure which one, I’m looking at options and working with my coach – there is a lot to take into account including location and travel, my race schedule leading up to the IM, do I want to find one with a longer time limit sooner, or give myself more time to pick up my pace etc.

Meanwhile I’m happy that I’m making really good progress on the spin bike, and my first attempt at swimming laps went way better than I had hoped! The running is still by far the most difficult thing for me, but I’ll get there. I’m sad not to run the LA marathon this year but I’m excited to finish a marathon, an IM, and everything in between.

Since the marathon training is getting swept up into the IM training, I’m going to move all of the updates to the IronFat blog, so if you are interested in keeping up with my progress you can check out (and even subscribe if you want) www.IronFat.com. Thanks to everyone for your continued well wishes and support, it really does mean the world to me!

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