Summer qualifies for the Boston Marathon!

Congratulations from everyone here!!  I was visiting CrossFitting/IronMan friends last night and we were looking your race results up on-line-so cool!!  Forgive me if I exceed my exclamation point quota, but your effort is just unbelievable.  Of course I was crying reading your description of it all and I will be in Boston in a week and will leave plenty of good vibes for you there.  Rest, recover and get back in-we miss you.  Days in high heels?  No amount of CrossFitting could make me able to do that-rock on sister.

“Yes I did Qualify for the Boston Marathon!!! Wow, I totally suprised myself. First off, I didn’t expect to use San Francisco as my qualifier because of the hills, I was waiting to do Tucson in Dec as my qualifier. Also, spending 5 days in dancing in heels for a dance festival I could barely walk without knee and back pain up to a few days before the run. Then the day before I had a bunch of wine and didn’t hydrate properly. I felt like I was doing everything wrong – wasn’t running, hadn’t had a decent workout in 10 days, was eating/drinking every bad thing in sight, getting 3 hours of sleep a night from being out dancing.

So I had three goals which were to finish in 4 hours, 4:30 if I felt bad, or just to finish no matter the time even if I had to vomit, crawl and cry to get there. So first few miles in I felt great so I decided to just keep at it. Then at mile 10 I realized that I was on track with a BQ pace. at the half way point I was way ahead of schedule. Then came mile 16 of tears and pain. my knees were killing me so much from the downhills that I thought I’d have to walk the rest of the way. This is where I really had to dig deep and at that point Jen’s image came into my head. Before I left Tucson I mentioned to her that I was going to wait and qualify in Tucson, that I didn’t think I could do it in SF. She just looked at me like I was crazy and said “what are you talking about, yeah you can.” So at that moment where I wanted to call bruce to pick me up, I thought of jen’s words. So I moved passed the pain, kicked it in and finished my last half stronger than my first. My final time was 3:35:41, which qualified me for Boston with 5 minutes to spare!

I get really emotional when I think of how my running has progressed. From being 30 lbs heavier, dropping on the couch after running my first full mile, hating every step of most runs my first few months of running and progressing to where I am now. My first marathon was close to 6 hours, I would have never dreamed of a BQ finish time.

I know for sure that I would not have done as well as I did without my crossfit works community. I truely am grateful I found this gym filled with so much encouragement and wonderful people. All those deadlifts, squats and millions of box jumps helped me to smash those hills with no problem! And at mile 16 when I was wincing and crying in pain, I thought of some CF Endurance and Pose Running that Jen and I discussed. I just leaned forward into every step and started focusing on landing on the balls of my feet and it made seriously was like night and day how the pain just disappeared.

CrossFit, and expecially our own CrossFit Works community has enhanced my life in numerous ways and I thank you all for that!! I can’t wait to get back to the gym, but I know I need to rest a little bit longer, the race was only yesterday!”