Jerry Nairn's blog

Lately I've had several people ask me how many marathons I've run. I'm always a little unsure of my answer. I can quickly say that I've run 42 marathons. However, if you count ultra-marathons as a kiind of marathon, then I have actually run 44. If you count a 50K fun run as a marathon, the number is 45.

Saturday's run was questionable. I don't have a problem with rain, but I'm not crazy about lightning. It was just drizzling a bit, threatening to rain, but there was lightning in the distance when I started running on the canal with some friends in Team D.

This past week Scott Jurek did an interview in which he complained a little about the media attention given to Dean Karnazes. This was quite predictably followed by another flurry of Dean-bashing and Dean-worship on running forums across the web. It didn't seem to hit here. (Perhaps until now. :-)

After the Tucson Marathon last year, some friends and I were talking about how little the runners were talking to each other out on the course. We had all had those experiences in previous marathons where we made friends while covering the miles. But it seemed like people in marathons were talking to each other less and less.

We speculated on why that was, and the topic turned to headphones and earbuds.

In April I had the pleasure of running my first Boston Marathon, and was amazed by the crowds braving a Nor'easter to cheer, with incredible enthusiasm and energy, us marathoners.

Recently I ran a leg in the Big Sur Marathon Relay. I've run the full marathon at Big Sur twice, and the Relay four times. It's one of my favorite events.

Leading up to the marathon, all of the talk for those of us planning to go to Boston was about the weather. The forecasts gradually got worse and worse as the day approached, until flood warnings were out for the eastern seaboard and we were looking at the worst weather in the 110 year history of the Boston Marathon.

Storms. Rain. Freezing rain. 25 mph headwinds with gusts up to 50 mph.

I took a red eye flight to Boston on Friday night, arriving Saturday morning with very little sleep. Then I walked around the marathon expo with friends most of the day Saturday.

By the time I got checked into my hotel and got a shower, it was time for me to go to a dinner held by one of the founders of a company called AgaMatrix. The main product of AgaMatrix is a blood glucose meter. The dinner was a benefit for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund, and I was one of several diabetic runners participating in the Boston Marathon who were invited as guests of honor.

When I came to Arizona I didn't know any local runners. I knew that it helped me run more consistently to do scheduled runs with a group, so I started going to a local running store, the Foothills Running Company, for their Wednesday night group run.

Most people there were relative beginners, slower even than I was. However, one runner, Jennifer, was running at my pace or faster. We both entered the Foothills store's training program for the 2005 Rock 'N' Roll Arizona Marathon.

We had a lot in common, a similar pace and things to talk about on long runs. We became and remain training partners and friends. The R'N'R AZ Marathon produced similar results to those Jennifer and I have had at several marathons since. Jennifer stuck very well to the program and ran a better marathon than I did.

Grover Cleveland was president when the first Boston Marathon was run. Utah had just become the 45th state. Women couldn't vote, let alone run in the race.

The Boston Marathon is one of the oldest, most famous, continuously run annual athletic events in the world.

But before 1999, I didn't care about running the Boston marathon.

In 1997, I'd been a distance runner for many years, and probably like most people who have run over a mile, the marathon was something I wondered about. I may have been a little more reluctant than most distance runners to try a marathon because of my diabetes.