Marathon Man

This was the year Shaggy decided to train for and run in his first marathon ever.

Yeah, this year. . . which has been crazier than all the years we've been together.  It's been completely crammed full of craziness from start to finish.  (I'm just assuming the craziness will continue through December since so far it shows no signs of abating.)

When he first brought it up, I believe I raised my eyebrows and asked if he remembered we were about to have another baby.  Sometimes he gets an idea in his head and it SEEMS like a good idea, but it's only because he has temporarily forgotten about most of his other responsibilities.  Tunnel vision.  He has a true gift for tunnel vision.

But, he made it work.  Thanks in large part to his fabulous wife who was ALWAYS around to care for the kids during his extremely long and frequent training runs.  Yes, I have to pat myself on the back for this because, honestly, I don't think he could have accomplished his goal if he'd had to pull his five little ducklings along behind him.

But enough about me.  He is the marathon man.

He logged lots and lots of training runs with his faithful running buddy Charger.  He ate much healthier and skipped tons of desserts.  And though he underestimated his running time by about an hour, he finished the marathon.  We're all very proud of him.

Here he is looking all chipper when I dropped him off at the starting line.

In our family, we have three rules.  1) Don't panic.  2) Never quit/never surrender.  3) Always survive.  Before leaving him to start the race, I told him in no uncertain terms that in this instance, rule #3 totally trumps rule #2.  And since he has bradycardia, I figure that was pretty good advice.

The kids were all looking for him near the finish line.  R was looking especially hard--she couldn't even be coaxed to turn around for a photo.  But, of course, we were an hour early.  We were beginning to think he had finished way ahead of his estimated time and we had missed him altogether.

So we inched our way closer to the finish line to look for him.  B wasn't really all that interested in finding Daddy, so she took a snooze.  Thankfully.

Because it let me catch a shot of Shaggy running.  I had told him earlier that if he saw me, he should slow waaaay down so that I could get more than just a blur as he ran by.  Turns out I didn't need to say anything about speed.  Because by the time we saw him . . . he wasn't going very fast at all.

In fact, he said it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other.  Around mile 20, he came up with the oh-so witty, "Next time Troy falls, send someone else!"

But he managed a big smile as he saw us.  The kids were so excited to actually see him finish the race.  And for him, it seemed to put just a little spring back into his stride seeing his whole family lined up to cheer him on.

We were all really impressed that he ran a marathon.  Well, except for baby B, who really just wanted some milk.  She didn't even find his shiny medal all that interesting.

But seeing their dad achieve such a big goal after putting in so much time and effort, made a big impact on K and S.  They even joined him on a run once his body finally stopped aching.