Weldon :
Instead of hearing people cheering for Khalid Khannouchi, Paula Radcliffe or Catherine Ndereba, all I could hear were the 2 loudest voices in the crowd yelling, “LetsRun.com, yeah LetsRun.com”.
The marathon is a lot more enjoyable when you can jog it home. Once I started jogging, I began to wonder how slow I’d run it. For I figured if I had gone this far, I might as well get under the Olympic Trials “A” qualifying time of 2:20:00, but I wasn’t going to pick it up from my jog. The only good thing is after you’ve run 25 miles at 5:15 pace, a “jog” apparently is around 6 minute pace. So I finished in 2:18:10 and got a marathon pr to boot.
As for my own “race”, or whatever you want to call it, it was definitely the highlight of my year for 2 reasons. First, 2002 had been very frustrating for me in terms of my own running and I thought my comeback from injury was progressing very slowly.
But I was surprised with how good I felt during the marathon, and ended up even setting a pr.
It confirmed to me that I can run a lot faster in the marathon. (Unfortunately, wejo was WRONG because he NEVER ran a faster marathon. Oh well.)
And secondly Chicago was a highlight of my year, because I got to do my little part to help make history. Paula Radcliffe is simple an amazing athlete.
It’s almost like she doesn’t even get tired during the marathon. (ha ha ha)
I don’t doubt for a second that she could have set the world record without any male escorts, that’s how good she is.
But nonetheless, after the race, her and her husband Gary must have thanked me a THOUSAND times for doing what the race had paid me to do.
That meant a lot to me.