St. George Marathon

We just returned from our trip to St. George.  I'm home and have now uploaded pictures from our newly-repaired camera, and I must say that I got some good ones.  The picture above is of Mark as he got to my spot 50 yards from the finish line.  He looked strong.  He was very happy with his finish of 3:07:20, which was almost 8 minutes faster than he needed to qualify for Boston.

This a 7:09 per mile average, which is faster than most people can run even one mile, forget about 26.2 miles.  That's about 4 minutes per mile faster than he was jogging when got serious about running almost 3 years ago.

He had been hoping to come in closer to 3 hours, but with the heat of St. George, he felt very good about what he had accomplished.   The picture below is from the same series but shows a different look on Mark's face.

This random picture is of the 4th place winner who is Mark's age.  His family was nearby me in the bleachers, and he is a professor at BYU who runs for fun with the cross country team.  I just love the picture of his leg muscles.

And now for Stephen's story.  Last year in Hartford, Stephen finished in 3:43, which was a great time, but still 13 minutes off of a Boston time.  And then Boston shaved 5 minutes off of the qualifying times, so he was 18 minutes from a Boston-qualifier.  Stephen worked his butt off over this past year and expected to come in close to 3:25.  I had taken pictures of Mark and was looking through the pictures on my camera, as I knew it would be about 5 minutes until Stephen was going to run by.  I almost missed him because he was so much faster than I expected him to be!  Luckily, I caught a glance of him and was able to switch the camera mode quickly enough to capture these images of him just before he finished.  He looked so fast as he finished that I thought everything was fine.  I didn't know that he was actually in the medical tent where he had to spend about 30 minutes rehydrating.  Anyway, Stephen had finished in 3:20:06, which was 5 minutes faster than he needed to to qualify for Boston.  After I called Stephen's family and my mother-in-law to tell them all the good news, I made my way over to the finisher's area to try to find these speedy brothers.

I eventually found Mark in the finisher's area, but I could not go in, so we yelled across the fence to each other.  He was standing with his friend Eric from his freshman year at BYU.  Mark was concerned because he had not found Stephen, and it was coming up on 3:50 on the race clock.  He was worried that something had gone wrong for Stephen and that he was finishing much slower than he had hoped.  I yelled to Mark that Stephen had finished at 3:20 and had qualified for Boston.

A lot of things about the marathon bring tears to my eyes, and to Mark's eyes, but the moment that I told him that Stephen got a BQ, the tears came for both of us.  Mark's emotions went from worried about his brother to pure joy that they will be able to run it together in 2013.

 
Mark and Stephen finally found each other, and I took this stalker picture of them from the 200 mm lens.  It was a happy, happy moment when they met up.

Happy, happy brothers.