Northeast Ohio Runners

I received a email yesterday from the Cleveland Marathon asking me if I would like to be one of their "official bloggers."  I thought about it for awhile and decided that I would share the rest of my marathon journey with the fellow marathoners participating in the race.  Once I sent my reply, I could feel the pressure building to come up with something inspirational to say.  For those of you who are new to my blog, I'm the one the call Beal.  A local cyclist who is attempting to impersonate a runner by completing my first ever marathon in Cleveland on 5/15 and my second in Buffalo two weeks later.  Some of you may know me as @Beal88 on Twitter and even a few of you may actually know me personally.  For the new people, I will keep it short.  I was born in raised in Akron, Ohio.  Was fortunate enough to be a college baseball player, but unfortunately suffered a career ending injury in college.  I found comfort in eating through my twenties and ballooned to over 300 lbs.  Got my life back on track after a near death experience by choosing a healthy lifestyle.  Through cycling and running over the past 26 months, I have lost over a hundred pounds.  I continue to challenge myself physically by doing things that I never thought were possible.  For example, running a marathon and competing in a Triathlon this year.

Ok, so enough about me.  How about something inspirational.....

I spent a fair amount of time today trying to think about something inspirational to say today.  I was at loss all day too until it hit me on today's run.

Most of us running the Cleveland Marathon will be from Ohio and this spring can only be described as terrible.   During our training runs we've been snowed on, rained on, sleeted on, and hailed on.  We've ran through thunderstorms. We've ran head first into 40 mph head winds.  We've ran in sub zero temperatures and I think it was even sunny once.  We've had to survive it all this Spring.  All in hopes that it would be nice one day.  If you are anything like me, you are at your wits end.  A tired runner who has been beaten down repeatedly by mother nature only to head back out the next day to do it again.

For those of us running this marathon, this is our last hard week and our last significant long run will be this weekend.  By looking at our weather forecast, mother nature is going to fight us all week long with chilly temps and rain everyday  As the weekend draws closer, it's looking more likely that this long run will be done in the rain.  This has been troubling me a lot this week, until I was running in the rain today.  It came to me that:

I live in Northeast Ohio.  I was born in this weather.  I grew up in this weather.  I live in this weather.  I am a Northeast Ohioan and I will run in this weather.

So, no matter what Mother Nature has us on 5/15.  It won't be anything worse than what we have trained in already.  And when they put that finishers medal around necks.  Take a brief moment to think about how hard we fought to get to that moment.

BEAL