Running your first marathon after divorce

Before she was married, Holly was very into working out. However, marriage and a baby meant no time for exercise. Holly says her husband would say, ‘You can’t go to the gym because I’ll have to watch our son.’ Going to the gym became a constant battle.  Divorced now for nine years, Holly is rediscovering the exercise bug.

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Health, activity and exercise are a huge part of my life. I’ve been training for a marathon for about nine months and I’m going to run in the Denver marathon in October. It’s the first marathon I’ve ever run and I’ve been running for less than a year!

I started running last October and found a really good running training program by Jeff Galloway. It’s good, healthy and low impact. I just started running these distances I never thought I could run so I thought, ‘I’m going to try and run a marathon.’ I just want to see if I can do it. I’ve been told you can’t do this so many times, I was in this mode of I want to tell myself I can do something.

I’m a very very slow runner – I thought marathons were for other people when in reality you can really do it. I did my longest run recently – I ran 20 miles. I got up at 5:30 in the morning to do it because otherwise it takes me so long that it’s going to be too hot by the time I’m done. It took me five hours to run 20 miles but I couldn’t believe I did it.

I have a run/walk ration that I do – it’s so doable. It really is. I am not an athlete so for me to be able to do it goes to tell you that other people can too. Once I started even thinking about doing a marathon I kept bumping into people I knew, these regular every day people who I work with, and friends who’d say, “oh yeah, I ran a marathon.’ There’s a billion people out there who have run marathons and if Oprah can run one why can’t I?

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I do believe I have a body that was simply not designed to run so anyone who starts running later in life and is prepared to tackle a marathon has my full admiration. I have a friend who recently completed her first sprint triathlon and in her email sharing the news that she’d finished she shared how one T-shirt she saw really motivated her. It said something along the lines of ‘It isn’t strength I had to finish but the courage I had to start.’ There’s much about life after divorce that phrase could apply to – what have you had the courage to start after your divorce?

P.S. Oprah ran the Marine Corps marathon in D.C. in 1996.