A marathon weekend

We had a marathon weekend. In  more ways than one.

First, Jared turned 15. Oh yeah.

Here he is with the Jazz jersey he specifically asked for. Except it's not the Jazz. A Jazz jersey was not to be found. But a Utes shirt isn't anything to sneeze at. Oh no.

This is actually a HOGS indoor remote controlled helicopter, can't you tell? (Until I saw the price tag on one of those). Instead he got this airplane set with 35 parts which he can use to build and rebuild different types of airplanes. And they fly. He loves it.

After all of the substitute birthday gifts, we headed off to Happy Valley. Otherwise known as Provo. (Although at approximately 10 am on Saturday it ceased to be Happy for one of us). We swam in the Marriott pool and thoroughly enjoyed Guy Fieri on the Food Network. Specifically Diners, Drive-Throughs and Dives. I never knew a deep fried hamburger existed. Trust me on this.

After a few hours minutes of sleep, Jeff was up bright & early at 2:45am to get ready for his marathon. Here he is putting on a few layers and packing up his bag.

Here is his pre-marathon breakfast. Enjoyed at precisely 3am. If it were me running the marathon, I'm quite sure I would not have been able to eat any of this!

Fast forward to about 10am. We are a couple of miles from the mouth of Provo Canyon, about mile 22, waiting for Jeff to come along. We had been waiting since 9:30, when he told us he expected to get to that point. Soon it's 10:30 and still no sign of him. I am constantly worrying, "Did we miss him? Where is he?" Finally at almost 11 we caught sight of him. Here he is above with the kids cheering him on. Turns out that about mile 15 he started feeling blisters on his feet, and by mile 16 one BIG one had popped, and his feet were so painful he couldn't run anymore. He'd been walking for the last 6 miles. And it was pretty easy to tell by the way he was walking that something wasn't right.

If you know Jeff, you know he didn't give up, although he needed Nicole's support. She walked with him for the remaining 4 miles, reaching the finish in another 50 minutes or so. Even walking the last TEN MILES on swollen, blistered feet no less (which I shudder to think about), he finished that dang marathon within the time limit. So you know that his first 16 miles were going pretty darn great. Stupid blisters. He had never had them before, even on long training runs (18+ miles) so he doesn't know for sure why he had them that day.

Is he awesome or what?! I am one lucky woman.