This isn’t even the half of it. Just good song after good song.

I don’t love thinking about the Wilmington Marathon I ran in 2023.

When I ran the Wilmington Half in 2022 it was in between my two Boston Marathons. I was in pretty good shape, and I ran an incredible half marathon.

After I ran my second Boston, I had the marathon bug and figured, hey, why not try my luck in Wilmington and see if I can break 5 hours there.

And it rained the night before the race, and the morning of the race, and I panicked about what to wear and I put on too many layers and I overheated and I never really recovered.

I wore a long sleeve t-shirt over a hooded rain jacket and by mile 6 there was definitely no more rain and by mile 10 it was getting hot and I took off the jacket but kept on the long sleeves, and by the halfway point (which was somewhat near where I was staying) I dropped the jacket under a bench by the side of the road and then I don’t know how I got through those last 13 miles - there was a lot of walking.

My legs were in a lot of pain.

I trained pretty well for that marathon. It wasn’t my best training session, but it was good enough that I was able to struggle my way to the finish line rather than a DNF.

But the reason I’m telling you all this is because I wasn’t sure what to expect crowd-wise in Wilmington since I was coming off two Boston Marathons which were very exciting.

So I made a playlist that clocks in at almost 3 and a half hours. I figured once the energy on the course ran a little dry I’d pop it on for the final 3.5 hours of my hopefully sub-5 run.

Unfortunately it ended up filling a lot of the time I was staggering through the second half of the marathon, but not quite covering my entire run. (The crowd was pretty good throughout, incidentally.)

And there in my Spotify Library has sat my “Wilmington” playlist, rarely touched in two and a half years. (I can’t believe I ran this race in February 2023. It feels like much longer ago.)

But lately I’ve been all caught up on podcasts by the time I do my long runs on Saturday, so rather than spending a long time thinking about what to listen to I’ve just popped on that playlist.

And it. is. GREAT.

I mean, I knew it’d be music I enjoy because I made it. I know my tastes. But I have another playlist - it’s songs I clicked ‘like’ on during Peloton workouts, and some of those songs I got a little click-happy. They’re songs I like and they’re pretty good songs to work out to, but I get tired of them. I’ve used that playlist and get to a point where I want to skip songs.

None of these Wilmington playlist songs make me want to hit skip.

So that’s nice.

I worried I was going to have bad flashbacks by listening to that playlist.

I have a very good place and sound memory. Like, I can see a podcast title and remember the exact street I was running on when I heard that podcast episode.

But I guess these songs don’t have the same singular resonance with me - they are songs I listened to in Wilmington but I guess they are songs that my brain can associate with other things too.

And as time goes by I feel less disappointed in what happened in Wilmington.

It wasn’t all bad.

I take pride in having finished what I hope will go down as my worst marathon.

I got my medal, which is always a fun thing for me.

And after the race Kevin and I walked back to our hotel and while I waited (bad, achy legs) he went over to that bench to see if my jacket was still there.

And guess what.

I got my jacket back.