On December 1st I crossed off an item on my bucket list for lack of a better term. I ran cross country in high school and since then have wanted to run a full marathon. For one reason or another I didn't run for the last 20 or so years. In 2005 I signed up and walked the Disney half marathon with Team in Training, the leukemia and lymphoma society group. I started running after that and signed up for the Lewis and Clark full in 2008. The morning of the race, Hurricane Ike made a detour through the St Louis region. I think about half of the people signed up for the race still started. The course was flooding so the course for both the full and the half marathon were shortened to 10 miles. Very disappointing but who can boss mother nature around? Ha. I developed a wonderful case of plantar fasciitis in training and spent way too much time working through that. But finally started running again this year. We signed up for the St Jude's marathon in June. A week later I sprained my ankle pretty badly and spent the next month sitting. So training wasn't going quite as well as I hoped. A good friend of mine and I planned to run together. She was having IT band issues so hadn't run in the last month or so. So the race was pretty questionable for both of us. With her wonderful help, some gel packets and bit of craziness, both she and I and my husband completed our first full marathon. A wonderful experience and we were all able to walk the next day. Ha!