4 hours 47 seconds
I don't know where to begin. I'll give you my chip finish time, in case you somehow think like I thought that marathons can be measured with stopwatches (or a little chip tied to your shoelace as the case may be).

I could start back in April when I signed up for the Marine Corps Marathon. Or I could start back in high school when the shirt "Running is my life-the rest is just details" meant what it said. I won't.

This very space has already told of months of training runs and injuries, of 20 miles and no miles and daily struggles in between. I won't cover that again. I'll start last Monday, the day negativity was all but outlawed in my head.

Negativity may have been banished, but a swirl of bacteria or viruses or black magic entered me and re-ignited a cough and possibly a rash. It was a slight cough at first, but grew quickly as I sat in my cubicle of germs. By Thursday, the pained knee that had lingered two and a half weeks was a distant memory when compared with the assault my immune system was undertaking. I hacked and coughed and blew phlegm to places I'd rather not mention. I went home from work sick. I stayed home Friday too. I don't stay home from work because I'm sick but maybe twice a year, and oh what a time for this twice to land. Saturday, I was hardly better. The afternoon rolled around, my family was off entertaining themselves because I was the host with the least. I camped out on the floor willing sickness to leave while drinking a gallon of water. These were not ideal conditions for running a marathon in 13 hours. I said my old mantra, "I feel good. I feel great. I feel wonderful." I repeated it over and over again until I felt something in my sinuses. It was as if a damn was breaking and water could flow freely again. My eyes lit up. This was it. The corner was turned. Positive thinking triumphed. I was going to be ok to race.

Move ahead 13 or hours or so. Move past the sputtering sleep and the morning vomit. Move past the jam-packed Metro ride and the near bowel catastrophe and go straight to the starting line. The mass started to move as the crowd cheered. The running had begun some 4,000 people in front of me. It would be five minutes before I ran myself, before I even crossed the starting line, but I was moving. I had begun my very own parade of pain in front of an enormous crowd.

More to come...