Lacing up my shoes

What have I done? Apparently, I am running another marathon! I'm telling you this because the more people who know about it, the harder it will be for me to back out. It started out as a passing thought. I had been wanting to run another big race which would give me something to train for and work towards. The New York marathon was such an amazing experience and to this day remains one of my most challenging and rewarding experiences ever (outside of getting married and having Finn, obviously). Because of hurricane Sandy, the NYC marathon was cancelled last year and they decided not to open it up to the public this year so that race was out. Chicago seemed like a good second option. The race is in October which would give me plenty of time to train and the course is very flat. They had some kind of snafu with the registration process and as a result had to hold an online lottery to distribute the remaining 15,000 slots. I thought my chances would be slim, so why not enter. I convinced my friend and former DC neighbor, Summer, to enter with me, to have an accountability partner. Summer is amazing--she trained for and hiked Mt. Kilimanjaro  but caught a bad case of pneumonia half way up the mountain and had to be flown home. It was a big scare, but she made it home, and has recovered, thankfully. So, Summer entered with me and lo and behold, we both got in. More than 36,000 people entered for the 15,000 slots and lucky us get to run and train to run 26.2 miles. Hooray. Although, I may be regretting this in a couple of months.