Luke: Why I Decided to Run a Marathon

Congratulations to Luke! As just a seventh grader, he ran his first marathon on March 8th with the Students Run LA group at Los Nietos Middle School.

Luke (left) and a supporter during the marathon.

I am Luke and I’m in seventh grade. I ran with SRLA through Los Nietos Middle School this 2019- 2020 running year. At first, I wasn’t so sure about having to run at least ten miles to a marathon, in total, every week until the middle of March. When I first started out, I could barely finish the mile at school with a C grade. And now I am able to complete a marathon in seven hours, thirty eight minutes. While this might not be the best time that I could’ve achieved, it definitely made me feel better that I finished 26.2 miles in a single day.

Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday morning, I had to be ready to run whatever was coming for me. While these experiences may have not been the best ones in my lifetime, I was able to get used to the pain and getting up at six in the morning or having to stop in the middle of an essay for language arts to go practice.  I eventually was able to take in the beauty of nature while running on the Whittier Greenway Trail and all the way up Hadley when doing our eight to sixteen mile practices on Saturday. I would say that this definitely improved my endurance and quite a bit of my speed. I was really happy knowing that I wasn’t forcing myself to think of the glass half empty while on all of my runs.

Even though the practices were pretty nice, the races were even better. I say this because of the fact that there are people constantly cheering you on throughout most of the course and, sometimes, all of it. It really does help just as much as the water stops. If people were not allowed to stand on the side of the course and cheer you on, my mind would’ve probably told me that it had enough and wanted to quit five times more than it already told me to.

Luke crossing the marathon finish line with his SRLA Leader (and mom!)

To summarize, my experience this year in SRLA was really the right choice. I now have to decide where my medal hanger should go in my room and I also have to tell people why I am limping like I have no control over my legs and why I decided to run a marathon. Now even though my responses to every question I was asked were different, they all ended with the same conclusion: I had the ability to run a Marathon, so I did. 

You can support Luke and his teammates at Los Nietos by giving at srla.org/donate.