Woman Accidentally Wins a Marathon, Will Make You Feel Lazy As You Sit At Your Computer

Or maybe I’m just projecting with the lazy part. I can jog for about five minutes before I have to pull back, gasping, to a brisk walk. But not Meredith Fitzmaurice. She started running a half-marathon, missed the turn that would’ve split her away from the full marathoners, and then thought to herself “Hmm. Well. I’ll just run the whole 26.2 miles. What was I doing today anyway?”

Fitzmaurice was in the zone, participating in the Run for Heroes half-marathon in Amherstburg, Ontario, when it started to occur to her that she’d been running an awful long time. Via the Ottawa Citizen:

“I just run with my watch, so I was watching my time since I planned to do my half in under 1:28,” she said. “I was doing the race as training for my first full marathon in Detroit. But I’m looking at the time and wondering where the finish line is.”

Fitzmaurice, 34, asked one of the bike officials on the course where the turn was for the half-marathon, although she admits by that point she had her suspicions.

“Once I realized what I had done, I figured, well I’ll just run 20 miles and use it as a long run and call it a day,” she said.

She’d never even run a marathon before. After confirming with a race official that her time could be used to qualify her for the Boston Marathon even though she’d only intended on running a half-marathon with lesser mortals, Fitzmaurice decided, yeah, she’d go ahead and smoke the competition. She won the Women’s Division and was only the tenth person overall to cross the finish line. “I thought I was only running a half-marathon so I really gave it out there,” said Fitzmaurice. “If I knew I was going to be running the full marathon I probably wouldn’t have ran so fast. So maybe it was a good thing.”

…Or maybe it was a superhero origin story. You know, average person discovers they have powers. It’s a lot less tragic than origin stories often are. I like it.

(Ottawa Citizen, via Neatorama, picture by akiwitz)

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