My First Marathon...

I ran my first and so far only marathon in a very unorthodox way.

I was training for a marathon back in 2002 as a first step in training to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. I hadn't yet booked my trip to Africa but the mountain was a major goal of mine which I

wanted to complete as soon as I felt fit enough to climb it. I figured training and running a marathon was a great start to accomplishing both goals... firstly achieving running the marathon and second and more importantly to me... climbing my first Seven Summits peak...

So I was gearing up to run the marathon in the fall of 2002 when I got the phone call that would definitely change my life in the interim... I got a job onboard a cruise ship as a broadcast technician! As soon as I got the word... I quit my job selling snowboards and skis to the Toronto elite at Sign of the Skier and within 48 hours flew down to the cruise ship terminal in Miami, Florida and boarded a ship the size of the Empire State Building... geez... a life changing moment for sure!

Onboard a cruise ship as a crew member life is good... especially as a broadcast technician... I had my own cabin, 98% of crew members share with at least one other crew member, I was able to access the entire ship both crew and passenger areas with minimal (cruise ship standards not real life standards) rules enforcing where I can go, eat, relax or debark the ship. Life was grand... one big party every night and a different port of call every day! Its like nothing else... no other job can really come close to the experience one attains as a crew member onboard a major cruise line.


Back to running... As I said earlier I wasn't bound to as many rules as some other crew members were based on the position I held. Your job on a ship determines your class and is assigned strips like the navy... the Captain, Staff Captain and Chief Engineer have 4 stripes and then it goes downward to zero stripes depending on your job... I had 2.5 stripes which allowed for my own cabin, exercising in the passenger gym and in my case running around the passenger deck was permitted.

So as I began to run on the ship, I found it quite relaxing and an enjoyable activity... It gave some time to myself, which is sometimes lacking onboard a ship, I was outside running in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans... It was great... I would watch the sun come up or watch it set along the beautiful backdrop of the oceans and endless horizons. I would run around the ports.... and see a different perspective then the average tourist or crew member.

Not long after I started my tenure onboard the ships I met this great enthusiastic Vancouver girl, Ashley. We sat down in the staff mess for lunch one day and I began talking about running and training for Kilimanjaro and the marathon... She said that she'd like to run a marathon too... So we decided to motivate each other and train for a marathon that we would run onboard the ship! We had a quarter mile track which rounded the circumference of the pool deck and would therefore be an easy way to keep track of distance for training and for the actual marathon... by the way to reach 26.2 miles on a quarter mile track we ran 105 laps!

So we picked the date of March 17th, yes, St. Patrick's Day as Ashley was signing off the ship a couple of weeks later and then we began to train so we ran and ran and ran around the ship. We even ran a half marathon inside the Panama Canal on probably the hottest day ever... The nurses were suntanning and told us we were nuts and that they wouldn't help us 'when' we passed out!

So finally St. Paddy's came and Ashley and I and Ashley's boyfriend at the time, Dan woke up early on a turn around day and we began to run our St. Paddy's Day Cruise Ship Marathon with the Captain's approval making it an official run! And we did it!

It was great! We had a goal... trained really hard to meet it and we did it!!! It was amazing... I still hadn't heard of anyone else running a marathon onboard a cruise ship since or before ours on March 17th 2003.

And yes, I climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro in October 2004 which will be told in another post soon!

Have a great day and Get Out There!

El Capitan