Freaking another SARS COV2 viral pandemic issue, the Lincoln half marathon that my daughters and I signed up for was canceled.

They declined to reimburse our money but did agree to allow us to submit virtual times for our own half marathon. We had somewhere between April 15 and May 31 to complete this half marathon and submit our times to the Lincoln run club for credit. We were told that they would send us our finisher medals and participation T-shirts.

We put it off for several weeks.

Then, over the memorial day weekend I decided that running a half marathon without training on memorial day would be a fun tribute to our men and women in arms who have died serving our country.

We have not really been training because nobody was really interested in doing a virtual 13.1 mile run. We decided to make it a walk.

We invited a couple of family friends who graciously agreed to go and socially distance with us. I monitored the weather and found that it would be raining most of the day on memorial day. I found a break in the weather around 4 PM.

I calculated that walking a 15 minute mile would be difficult for a bunch of untrained walkers and an old guy. I put our aim somewhere between 15 and 20 with an estimated four hour finish time.

If all went well we would be at the finish site by 9 PM and just before dark. We took two cars to Ta-Ha-Zouka Park and met with our guests there.

We took some appropriate socially distanced photographs and hugged and kissed our family who are staying behind as our support team. We then without fanfare head off down the trail to walk to battle Creek. It is 10 miles from our town To Battle Creek Nebraska.

Immediately after starting the journey we came across a large puddle of water that covered the entire pathway.

I was apprehensive about getting my feet wet so early in our long walk. We climbed through the bushes around the water puddle. Something I hadn’t considered was parts of the path being flooded because of the recent increased rainfall. This definitely made me nervous but at this point we weren’t going to turn around. They rain had really slowed and the weather was perfect.

It was fun to watch the boys and girls fighting back-and-forth for lead position as we continued to walk. I was happy to just continue walking.

I tried to be the walking map but at some point we came across a Y in the path. The young people were approximately 50 feet ahead of me or so. They asked what direction to go, I had them go left thinking we were further than we were. They started down the road and then stopped when they saw a private property do not enter sign. I realized my error and directed them down the other path. This allowed the girls to get back ahead and they disgruntled young men to hustle down the road.

We continued walking for the next few miles running across extremely large earthworms, normal chipmunks and baby rabbits. We got to talk to several large cows. Overall the early segment was quite nice.

We met up with our family at the 3.2 mile marker and they walked back with us back to their vehicles. This was a nice get together and regrouping up a bit for our next 7 mile stretch.

The 7 miles of Green farmland with water everywhere peeping frogs and chirping birds was absolutely mazing. I took as many opportunities as possible to enjoy the sights and smells and sounds of our journey.

At about mile nine I saw a large structure that I presume it was in the middle of battle Creek.It motivated us to continue going forward. It was pretty cool to know we have an obvious end point. Arriving into battle Creek was bittersweet. We were tired sweaty and in large amount of pain. Nobody was complaining, which was amazing but you could tell by the limping and abnormal walking but this was not fun. We saw our families were waiting in Battle Creek when we arrived. There was some quick hugging and kissing and we headed off to finish our last 3 miles of the journey.

We would have to walk 1.5 miles out and then turn around and head back to the spot we were currently at. This took a large amount of willpower because we were standing at our stop point and we had just walked 10 miles and now we were going to keep going walking about 3.1 miles. We were joined by Sophia, Kyan for this last leg of our journey.

The wind started to pick up and the temperature dropped a little bit. However, it feels like we were really being pushed to quit and we had to use our mind to overcome this.

I spent some time during our walk talking about some of the wars that our country has been involved with and the actions taken by our American service men and women.

We finally arrived at the turnaround point there was a lot of whooping with joy and we waited for everybody to get to the turnaround point before starting back.

Several people took off and sprints to begin the journey back. I was able to find some more purple flowers on the side of the path to pick for my wife before arriving back at the end point. They smelled kind of like jasmine but I have no idea what those look like. They were amazing.

When we finally finished our 13.1 miles everyone went up into their own directions to rest and recuperate. I went home had some food and some Motrin and a little muscle relaxer and went to bed.

I had a great nights sleep.

I’m not sure the next time I decide to do something like this again. I hope to train before I do something like this again. So it’s not as hard on my body.

The 2020 Covid 19 Inaugural Annual Memorial day Vigorously Embrace The Suck (IAMVETS) half marathon is complete.