Ooops, I Did It Again - The Marine Corps Marathon

Remember that time I didn’t really want to sign up for the Marine Corps Marathon but did it anyway?

Yeah, that would be today.

Some of you may remember this statement I made on Facebook back in January, about an hour after my Disney Marathon was over:

Umm, I left out the comments under that status update in which every person I know called me a liar. Cause what do they know?

I hadn’t planned to sign up for the Marine Corps Marathon (MCM) when I woke up this morning, although the MCM is great. It’s nick-named “The People’s Marathon” (because it’s open to all runners; requiring no qualifying times), is well-known for supportive crowds, and runs through the heart of our Nation’s Capital. Some gorgeous running scenery, that.

And last year registration for the race sold out online in about two hours.

But you may wonder how does one “accidentally” sign up for a marathon?  It’s not a pretty tale…

I see on Facebook that a good running buddy, Heather, had been trying register for the MCM for an hour with no success.

What’s that, Heather? You need someone to help you waste time doing something on a computer? I’m your gal.

So I, along with other of her friends, got online to hit refresh over and over at the overwhelmed race registration site, trying  to get to the screen that would allow us to register Heather for the race.  No luck for nearly an hour.  We were about to give up hope when one of us was able to get into the registration page and sign Heather up.

But… did I stop hitting refresh after Heather had been registered?

We all know the answer to that question.

Basically, I allowed a “please try again” message on a website to goad me into running another marathon. Because all I know is that somewhere between the 3,000 and 4,000^th time I hit refresh it became my life-long goal to run the MCM. My passion in life. The one-thing I was put on this earth to do.  And I knew my time was running out. The marathon would sell-out soon.

Refresh, refresh, refresh. I could not allow a computer registration system to stop me from my life's mission!

I didn’t let myself think about the 20+ mile training runs required for a marathon, or how I had just said to a good friend that I was done with training and competitive running, or that my husband was probably going to leave me when I told him I was running another marathon.

All I could think of was how important this Marine Corps Marathon was to me. Even though I hadn’t even known about it three hours before.

How the story ends: I got through (barely, it sold out just minutes afterwards). I got registered. I will be running another marathon in October. Plus the 500 training miles required in the months leading up to the race.

A day may come when I am not ridiculously stupid, but it is not this day.