Mere Mortal Marathon Podcast

Welcome to the Mere Mortal Marathon podcast, where you'll hear what it's like to train for and run your first marathon. I’m Duane France, and each week I'll be joined by coach Morgon Latimore and together we're going to share the week-by-week training journey. That will take me just a regular guy and a mere mortal to the finish line of my first marathon.
And if I can do it, you can too.

Thanks again for joining us for the Mere Mortal Marathon podcast. Have you ever thought about running a marathon then dismiss the idea? That it was too far out of reach for you, or something only super talented athletes do. Maybe you've been running for a while, or maybe it's something that you picked up recently. Either way, you’re probably like me, just a regular person that enjoys to run. For whatever reason we do this. Like me, you're a regular person doing your best to get along in the world. You may not consider yourself an athlete. You don't think you'll ever be on the cover of a running magazine, or don't plan on getting endorsed by a running brand. We're mere mortals, nothing special in the sports department, but here's the secret: Mere mortals can run marathons too. They do it every day. There's runners of all shapes, sizes, ages, and abilities, and they finish marathons all the time and love it.

During this podcast, you're going to listen to as I train for my first marathon. I've partnered with the endurance Coach Morgon Latimore, the peoples' coach to give you a glimpse of what it's like to receive coaching for a mere mortal.

I've been in enough leadership positions to know that having a coach and mentor can be valuable at any stage in life for anything that you do, and this is no different. So, when I finally committed to running my first marathon, 17 years after lacing up my running shoes for the first time, more on that later. I decided to do it with a coach and let you hear it. We'll be sharing our coaching calls, posting my running plan, talking about the weekly runs and talking about some other running stuff along the way. Hopefully, this will inspire you to train for your big race 5K, 10K, half, full, or ultra. Because amazing things are what mere mortals do.

This is the introductory episode, where you hear a bit more about me, why we're doing this, and where we go from here? So take a listen, and then we'll come back afterwards to share some final thoughts.

So everyone loves an origin story, right? That's the thing about running, you see people on those magazines or on social media and think there's no way that I can get there. But you don't know their origin story. You're not with them during the times that suck.

Well, I'm sure you're going to see some of that for me in the coming months. So I figured I would share a bit about me, my running journey, and why we're doing this. I'm a 49-year-old retired Army Noncommissioned Officer combat veteran, and clinical mental health counselor. I'm currently the co-director of a technical assistance center funded by the substance abuse and mental health services administration. Where I co-lead a team that provides strategic planning support for states, territories, and communities that are working to develop mental health, wellness, and suicide prevention coalitions that support service members, veterans, and their families.
That's a lot packed into that short phrase that sums up a half century of life, but pretty much encompasses who I am. I'm also a husband and a father to two young adults.

And being a veteran plays into all this as well. After my 22 years of military service, I've dedicated my second career to improving the mental health and wellness of those who served and those who care for them. So that's what I do for a day job. Where does running fit in?

Growing up, my father, who's a Vietnam Veteran by the way, along with three of his brothers, was a long-distance runner. I looked back at that time with nostalgia and probably not a whole lot of reality. I was really young when we were going to races and I always thought it was cool.
While he was running, whoever's watching my sister and I, while he was out on the race, usually took us to McDonald’s. But with him being a long-distance runner in the early eighties, I had memories of my father training and running races.

One thing he told me was that a runner has to run a marathon twice in their life. One to realize that they hate it, and the second to make sure. My father did run a marathon twice. He dropped out of his first one at mile 18, then finished the second one, the 1983 St. Louis marathon. True to his word, he never ran another one after that.

Like many mere mortals, I didn't run during school, wasn't on the track or cross-country team. Running was the thing that my dad did, but it wasn't for me. He did get me to run a 5k with them during my senior year in high school. I remember that it sucked. I don't think I trained at all. I got nothing from it. I didn't hold onto the bib, don’t know where the t-shirt is, couldn’t tell you my finishing time if I had to.

Fast forward about 10 years after that. I was in the Army and running was something that you do in the military, but it's usually running in a formation singing cadence, and you make sure that it's over as quickly as you can. It was a chore, another military function, no enjoyment, just mechanical.

But in 2005, I was stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland and was working with a group of colleagues on an early version of an online community of practice for Army Noncommissioned Officers. I came up with a bright idea of running the 2005 Army 10 miler as a group, and in my recollection, a number of my colleagues agreed. So I started running.

The army 10 miler is an annual run in Washington, DC that was started in 1985. Along with races like the Marine Corps marathon, it’s a well-known military sponsored race that's open to the public. I figured it was a morale thing to do this with my team, sort of a one and done. It was going to be a novelty.

So after training for a month or so, I checked in with my group on how their training was going and they said training for what? They had ditched me. I was the only one that had signed up for the 10 miler. No matter I was in it now, so I was going to do it. Endless loops around the Fort Meade golf course, which no longer exists by the way. Got me to the 21st annual army, 10 miler in October of 2005.

It was a great race. If you've never run in the nation's capital, the city was built to be impressive, and it is. I was having a great time until about mile seven or so. I hadn't even run a race longer than a 5k, so I didn't know what to expect, but from what I remembered about the course, they seem to be sending us off in a different direction. It turns out that halfway through the race, there was a suspicious package found on the bridge back over the Potomac just before mile eight. Remember this was only four years after nine 11 and security and tensions were very high.
So everyone from the middle of the pack back was rerouted to last three miles of a race that had no planned aid stations or mile markers. This being 2005 and my first time running, I had no Garmin to track pace and distance. I'm pretty sure I was running with an iPod shuffle or something like that.

I remember very clearly slowing for a walk over the Arlington Memorial Bridge feeling discouraged, not realizing that I had already passed the 10-mile mark. Because it was rerouted, the Army 10 miler ended up being 11.2 miles that year.

And I figured, well I just ran 11.2 miles, a couple more than that and I’m at a half marathon, and just like that I was hooked.

Shortly after that race, my family and I moved to Fort Carson, Colorado, just south of Colorado Springs. We didn't know it, but we were starting the final stage of my military career and the place that I would ultimately retire and where I live today. We did know that it would include an upcoming deployment to Iraq. One thing about Colorado is, it's at a whole lot higher elevation than Maryland. We went from just over 400 feet above sea level to just over 6,000 feet above sea level. I went on a run with my new unit a week after I got there and the altitude kicked me in the face, which was another motivating factor. I mean, I had just run the Army 10 miler three months ago, and now I can't run two miles. I got to do something about this. So I signed up for and ran my first half marathon in October of 2006. What follows was consecutive years of deployments and half marathons. My goal was to run a half marathon every year with the eventual goal of running a marathon, given my father's advice from years before. But deployment cycles, aren't conducive to marathon training and the military is hard on your body.

There wasn't a year between 2006 and 2013 that I wasn't gone for part of, or the entire year. 15 months in Iraq, 12-month tour in Afghanistan, another 9-month tour in Afghanistan, a 3-month stint in north Africa at the end of my career.

I would run a half marathon, deploy, run as much as I could while on deployment, redeploy, train, run a half again and deploy again.

I consistently re-injured my left foot and ankle both during the long Iraq deployment, and again during the first Afghanistan deployment. Due to the nature of the work, of course, it never properly healed, but I still ran until October of 2012.

The Army in its infinite wisdom, decided to give me what I'd been wanting since the late nineties, the opportunity to jump out of airplanes again. Back then I spent three years in the 82nd Airborne Division and loved every minute of it. If the wheels got off the ground, I would jump out of it. I jumped something like 12 times in the last seven months I was in North Carolina, and I had the stress fractures to prove it. But jumping out of airplanes when you're 37 is a lot different than jumping out of airplanes when you're 25. Especially when you've already got a bad wheel and you're on the other side of three combat deployments. I re-aggravated my longstanding injury in October 2012, and it was the beginning of the end. I deployed again, injured, of course, and then in true Army fashion ignored the injury so much that I had to jump out of airplanes twice more just to lock it in good and tight.

At that point, I was headed towards retirement anyway. It looked like my running days were over, so I did what all good paratroopers do, slipped off into the sunset.

I left the Army and started my career as a mental health professional. Many may not know this, but post-military life can be a struggle for a lot of different reasons, and the loss of fitness can be one of them. Between the injury, graduate school, starting a new career that was pretty much sitting in a chair talking to people all day.

I started to describe myself as a former long-distance runner. Looking back on it now, I not only lost my military identity, but my identity as a runner. I was enjoying the work that I did both as an individual therapist, and as someone who helped build mental health and suicide prevention coalitions in my local community.

Running was something that I used to do, now I do this other thing. Then the pandemic hit. I stepped on the scale in June of 2020 after avoiding it for a very long time and found that I was knocking on the door 300 pounds. It was embarrassing. I used to jump out of airplanes and ruck march with the best of them, and now I’m the heaviest that I've ever been in my life. So my wife and I decided to make some lifestyle changes and I started a medically supervised weight loss program. I was successful. I dropped over 80 pounds to get back to my army weight. I was never a slim guy; I’ve got Spanish genetics from my father's side and Eastern European genetics from my mother's side. But what I lacked in speed, I made up for in endurance.

And many people say that they start running to lose weight, but honestly, for me, I lost weight so that I could run again. I started the second stage of my running journey in the fall of 2021 with the local 5k. And made it a goal to run one race a month in 2022 to get back to running, culminating in my first half marathon in 10 years in December of 2022.

So here we are. I'm running at a decent distance and pace, better than I did when I was in the Army as a matter of fact. Since my 2022 half marathon was a PR by over five minutes. I'm a solid middle of the pack runner. I miss breaking two hours by only a couple of minutes, but I figured if I could approve this much on my own, what would it be like to have a coach? And since the 2022 goal was one race a month, what was the 2023 goal going to be?

This is finally the year of the first marathon. So, if you're joining me on this journey, I've signed up for the 2023 Denver Colfax marathon on Sunday, May 21st. It's a great race. The Colfax half marathon was my last half marathon before my final injury that put a 10 year pause on my running.
It's Denver Colorado's marathon and it's been the one that I've always said to myself, if I'm ever going to do a marathon, it's going to be that one. I've got enough time to train most first-time marathon training plans range from 16 weeks to 20 weeks, and Coach Morgon is going to be developing a training plan for me that's going to get me across the finish line. I've never been coached before, but Coach Morgon has coached a lot of athletes to meet their goals. In upcoming episode you're going to meet him and learn about what he does and you're going to hear our coaching calls. I'm not sure where this journey is going to take us, but it's going to be interesting and hopefully beneficial for you as you consider training for your big race.

So make sure to follow the show on your podcast player of choice and listen to every week to hear how it's going.

Thanks again for joining us in the Mere Mortal Marathon podcast where you can listen in as I train for the 2023 Denver Colfax marathon. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear from you. You can reach out to me at duane@veteranmentalhealth.com. If you want to support a great cause, I'm a charity partner with the Second Wind fund, a Colorado organization that focuses on improving access and delivery of suicide prevention care for children and youth at risk for suicide. You can donate to the cause by going to www.thesecondwindfund.org. If you want to reach out to Coach Morgon, to show appreciation for the excellent work that he does, or sign up for The People's Coach newsletter, you can find him www.morgonlatimore.com . All of these links are in your show notes. So, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Mere Mortal Marathon podcast. And just remember mere mortals can do amazing things.