Ok so its on! I am officially registered and paid for 2018 Chicago Marathon and I have been accepted on to team AFSP as an official runner! To donate to the AFSP / my campaign check out the link below!
https://afsp.donordrive.com/participant/Jonathan-Kinne_chicagomarathon
So let me address the main question, Why the hell would I do this to myself again?
In Mile 23 of NYC I said, to myself that this was probably it. I don’t ever want to feel like this ever again. Shortly after the race I said the opposite but throwing marathon training on top of my currently pretty packed life was a complicated decision. So I put it up on the shelf for a while.
I love reading books about bettering yourself and studying the human experience. After reading a great book, which I highly, highly recommend, Design Your Future by an old Ramsey friend Dominick Quartuccio,
here he is looking very Dawson’s Creek- esque 😉
I am trying to apply the concepts and methods he lays out in the book to my daily life.
Buy the book- http://www.dominickq.com/book-design-future/
Here is more about Dom too http://www.dominickq.com/
He gives great advice about challenging yourself and how to do it with the goal of living the happiest and most productive life possible. I keep this book on my night stand and as I was reflecting on it one day I asked my self, “when did I feel I was at my best?” I realized that the answer was when I was working toward the goal of running a marathon and consequently (with a lot of help from a lot of people) helped make the world a little bit of a better place. I got in great shape, dealt with the trauma of loosing a close friend, started a blog, was able to participate in two marathons including the NYC Marathon, which is top three best days of my life (for real!) So I ran a couple of Half Marathons this fall and though about Chicago.
Training for a marathon is half awesome and half awful. You get in great shape mentally and physically but the weeks with multiple long runs are very taxing in the same way, on top of real life.
That being said, I don’t know how many more marathons I have in me. So if Im going to run 26.2 Miles I want to go BIG! My buddy Eric and I decided about a year ago after NYC that we would take a year off from marathons and sign up for Chicago 2018. (Even though I believe he did two more, Philly and Boston, right after saying that 🙂
not my best pic…
I checked out the dates about a month ago and saw the lottery opened up on 10/31. So I checked with Eric to see if he was still up for it. (I knew he was in, I was using one of Dom’s techniques about basically letting other people in on your goals so you basically cant back out of them)
So, The registration just went up the other day and we both signed up for charity runs. I’m very proud to be running on the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention team again. Initially I was thinking of choosing to get in on the lottery or pick another charity but my buddy Griff has been “showing up” a lot lately, so Ill take the hint 😉
(Griff had a “colorful” sense of humor to say the least, so trust me when I say he would love the above)
Ok one more!
miss ya buddy:-)
Any way, I feel invigorated and excited to take on this challenge once again. The race is October 7th 2018 so I’v got some time to get ready and raise money. I am very excited to get the blog going again! I promise as many mundane adventures as I can and some new insights. I am going to bench the word and Unicorn of the day to make room for new (currently unknown) blog features.
Thanks all!
Quote of the Day from a hero of mine:
