I just hit another huge milestone in the life of my ankle. It has now been a year since my surgery and I celebrated properly by running in a relay marathon race. After I hurt my ankle over eight years ago I wasn’t able to run for more than about 25 minutes at a time; the pain would become too overwhelming. I love to run so that was a hard reality for me to accept. That’s why I was very excited to pick up running again, now that my tendon repair surgery has hopefully corrected the longstanding issues with my ankle.

Originally I had wanted to run in the Red Rock Relay at the end of this summer but, since I couldn’t find enough willing participants for this 2 day running madness, I settled for getting a team together to run the Utah Marathon Relay. In this relay race each team, consisting of 5 members, runs the equivalent of a marathon. This means each runner is responsible for a 5.2 mile stretch.

Jason and I started training for this event back in June. While 5.2 miles really isn’t an incredibly impressive distance, it’s longer than my ankle has allowed me to run in nearly a decade so I wanted to ease into it. I am extremely pleased with how my ankle handled training and the race. I generally experienced no pain during my training runs. Each time I increased the length of my run my ankle would be a little stiff and sore for a day or two, but nothing I couldn’t handle. This stiffness was such a mild inconvenience compared to the pain I had become used to over the years that I barely even noticed it.

My relay team, the Geek Streak, was comprised of me, Jason, his brother Jeremy, my brother Drew, and my friend Fran. We ran the marathon in 4 hours, 13 minutes, and 13 seconds. Yeah us! I made a goal for myself of running each mile in ten minutes or less and I met that goal exactly on race day with a 52 minute run. Jason’s brother, Jeremy, had never really run ever before he started training for this race. He trained regularly though and did a fantastic job on race day with a run time of 52 minutes and 3 seconds. I’m really proud of his perseverance! My brother Drew, unlike Jeremy, didn’t think training for this race was necessary. So we weren’t too shocked when he seemed a lot more fatigued than the rest of us after his run. His exhaustion must have made him delirious because he went the wrong way twice during his leg, but he did eventually find the finish line. Congratulations Drew on finishing even though you are apparently completely out of shape! (Little brothers need to be given a hard time. It reminds them that they are loved…and that they should run more than a few times when training for a race.)

The race was a great experience! I’m so glad I now have two ankles strong enough for running! I look forward to my next race and my next milestone.