Marathon Success & Notes on Life

It has been a little bit since my last update and the first thing that I want to share is my feeling of accomplishment with the marathon results earlier this month. I beat my official goal of 3 hours and 45 minutes and even my unofficial goal of 3:38. I ended up setting a PR by almost 31 minutes from my first marathon last year! I ran the whole time even though the last five miles or so were incredibly hard and felt slow since I had "hit the wall." I did not give up and told myself that I wasn't going to walk, and I finished. All the work on pacing did pay off and even though I felt like I could have been a bit more consistent throughout the race, you can see how I did by comparing the pictures of the 2024 and 2025 maps with my running pace/speed on them. Next year, I hope to go even faster, and my official goal is to go 3:25 or under!

I should give a shout out to my daughter, Yena, who ran the half-marathon in under 2 hours at about 1:56. That is very good for a first half-marathon and I am proud of her for that! She had a friend's dad coaching and encouraging her the whole time, which I think made a big difference!

I am still waiting to see if my third novel, which I have titled Clark's Legacy, is going to win, make the shortlist or longlist for the contest that I submitted it to. I was hoping to hear and I think the publishing company was wanting to announce the results by now too, but I got an email last week that said because of the number of excellent manuscripts sent in and the small staff that it probably won't be until mid-January now. It is okay, but I am hoping that my novel is still in the discussion or at least made it past the first round, but I will probably never know unless I hear some fantastic news, which would truly be fantastic!

There is a lot more that I could write about but will keep this post short and sweet!