A race for my record book

I told Jennifer I’d be happy if I finished the 8K at Flint’s Crim Festival of Races in under 50 minutes.

That was going to average out to a 10-minute-per-mile pace. This was slower than my normal pace, but I never had run a race of this distance before. Plus, I had heard horror stories about the “Bradley hills” along this route that have challenged even the most elite of runners – of which I am not.

So, yeah, I was going to be happy if I finished the 5-mile route in 50 minutes.

Jennifer and her dad, Vic, had made it up to the finish line at about the 48-minute mark to cheer me through the chute (I always shut my iPod off when the finish line is in sight so I can hear her encouraging voice). Minutes passed by and they hadn’t seen me finish the race. Jennifer was getting worried because she’s from Flint and she knows what the Bradley hills are like.

At the 60-minute mark they started to talk about how they were going to have to be very supportive because I was going to be disappointed that I didn’t finish as well as I had hoped.

About this time, they saw me coming … up the sidewalk with my hands full of the bottles of water I got at the finish line some 14 minutes earlier. I had made it to the finish line before they did.

I finished the race in 43 minutes, 47 seconds – an average per-mile pace of 8 minutes, 49 seconds. Turns out this time placed me 9^th out of 31 runners in my age group and 166^th out of more than 750 runners in the 8K race.

And I’ve had MS for nearly a decade.

Jennifer, who like me still is beaming with pride with how well I did, asked me what I remember most about my first 8K. It wasn’t the Bradley hills, which I told her were, “A piece of cake.” Instead, I never will forget getting choked up when I turned the corner onto the bricks of the downtown Flint street and saw the blue banner stretching over the finish line: I was going to finish this race and was going to finish it in a time faster than I ever dreamed possible.

As I moved forward with everything I had left in my body, I remembered the incident earlier this year that had me running scared. How easy it would have been to give up on running (and coincidentally myself), which in turn would have given MS an undeserved victory.

With my faith, family, friends and die-hard determination, I stuck with it and kept fighting. And today, MS, victory is mine.