Chase came to St. George the first weekend of October to run his first marathon. It is a difficult marathon - one of the qualifying marathons for the Boston Marathon. He started out so excited, and the energy in the air at the starting line was exhilarating. He started out the marathon strong, but only two miles into the 26.2 miles, his knee started hurting and continued to get worse. He pushed, and tried to keep up the pace in spite of the pain. He listened to motivating music and focused on forward movement. He was really struggling at the 13 mile mark and was getting tired of people passing him. He decided that the next person who tried to pass him would be his pace setter. It happened to be a woman named Kristen. He ran with Kristen for the next 6 miles. They talked to each other to distract them from the pain and motivated each other along the way. At around mile 19, my son realized he couldn’t keep up with her any more, so he said, “You’ve got this, Kristen”. She replied with encouragement to him, he backed off, and she ran ahead.
He continued to run and tried to keep putting one foot in front of the other trying to push through the pain. By mile 23, he called to talk to me, Tiegan and Ciera. He was too tired to talk to us, but he just wanted us to talk to him so that he could finish the race. We each took turns offering him words of encouragement such as “You can do this!” “You are so strong!” “You are amazing!” “Don’t give up!” We could hear him grunt and moan every now and then but he continued to push while we urged him forward. I told him we were going to meet him and run the last couple of miles with him. We ran up to meet him, and when he came around the corner, we ran the rest of the way in continuing to yell encouraging words to him. It was extremely emotional when he finally crossed that finish line. He was in pain and super nauseous, so it took a while for us to get him to the car and then home. I am super proud of what he accomplished!
