Where's the Beach?

I've started this post in my head a dozen times. I'm still not entirely sure where to begin. I haven't been blogging consistently. That's obvious right? That also means I've not talked a great deal about training for the Chicago Marathon, training during a Southern summer, over-coming yet another injury, and everything else that goes along with training for a race. Do I start at the beginning or do I do the race recap while it's fresh in my mind? Do I let the race settle in my head so that I can adequately attempt to talk about it? Because I'm a Type A person, I'm going to start at the beginning. The signing up for the race and the training. If you can hang with me, we'll get to race day. And I hope you will stick with me. After my first marathon in December, I ended up with a nice stress fracture. I had a slow road to recovery. An even slower road to building back up my running - both distance and pace. I ran two half marathons and a 10k, none...

Once upon a time not too long ago (in fact when I first started this blog just 5 years ago), I did not consider myself a runner. I ran. It was typically for exercise purposes only. It was what I considered distances too short for a "real" runner. Even after I fell in love with running and found myself upping the distances, I still refused to say, "I'm a runner." Somehow I thought it was a term reserved for a special group, people who had been running much longer, people who raced often, people who seemed more dedicated somehow. Just ... other runners basically. I didn't feel that I knew all the lingo that I really walked the walk. I felt like an outsider. Honestly, I don't remember when I finally got my head out of my ass and realized that I was, in fact, a runner. I think that there was this weird notion that if I finally admitted it, then there was no going back (there kind of isn't), so what if I changed my mind suddenly (which I didn't...