it is often said that there are as many reasons for running a marathon as there are participants. Nevertheless, for me the following three stand out head and shoulders above the rest...

Reason 1 The sheer experience... If you're the type that has always wanted to squeeze every drop out of life, to let no day go by before getting something valuable from it, then a marathon might just be for you. Because when you've finished a marathon, you look back and feel you've had a lifetime's worth of experiences in just a few hours! Not only do you travel all over the physical landscape of a city, you travel all over your own emotional landscape as well - the initial enthusiasm, the settled early part of the race, the despair, the euphoria at the finish... there's enough there to write a small novel about. As well, depending on the marathon you're running, there could be thousands of other people just like you out there, all with their own challenges to face, and added to that the hundreds of volunteers out there helping with the race and the crowds out there clapping and cheering you on - there is a real shared community feeling out there that just pulls you along.

Reason 2
To learn the art of the possible.

We all know the excuses for not running - bad for your knees, I wasn't built for running, ect, ect. To be frank, many of these excuses are mere stones in a wall of limitation we are apt to build around ourselves. If we listen to our thoughts sometimes, we can see we spend more time telling ourselves what we can't do than what we can do! But just think of this - do you think all the people that run marathons took their first steps thinking of that distance? Of course not. Many of them were at one time also saying to themselves 'No way, I'd never be able to run that'. And then maybe they did a 10k race or ran one day just a bit longer than they intended to, and all of a sudden that marathon goal beckoned on the horizon, within reach with just a bit of training...

Finishing a marathon makes you look around at the rest of your life and ask - what else am I limiting myself in? I always enjoy listening to a good friend of mine, Arpan DeAngelo, talk about his running experiences. Thirty years ago, he was pretty much doing a mile every time he went out running, and he remembered he used to look at friends who ran four or five miles and think 'How could they do that?'. But then gradually he gained confidence in his capacity, ran longer distances, and ended up doing the marathon. In fact, to date he has done almost 200 of them. But that's not all. Soon he started thinking 'What's next?' and saw that people were running longer distances - 47 mile races, 100k races, 24 hour races... so he thought, well, maybe he could do that too. In fact, three years ago, he completed the 3100 Mile Race, the longest road race in the world.

Reason 3:
To find out what you are truly made of.

Our mental state is truly the difference that determines whether our marathon experience will be an enjoyable one - or a never-to-be-repeated ordeal. In daily life we can afford to indulge our mind's complaining or moaning - it might get us down, but we generally manage to avoid grinding to a halt. But when things get tough during a marathon, you just have to silence that complaining voice in your head and keep going. In fact, what happens is you end up going deep inside yourself and drawing on an inner strength that you might have never known even existed. And once discovered, that inner strength doesn't just disappear once the race is ended - you find yourself drawing on it every time you face challenging situations in your daily life, too. Running marathons make you a better person, which is possibly the most compelling reason of all.