From episode: Journey to the Finish Line: Angel Cona's Resilient Pursuit of Marathons
Today we are talking to Angel Kona. Let's dive in to Angel's running journey. Welcome to the show, Angel. It's nice to have you here. Hey, thank you, it's nice to be here. So how did you get started running? Tell me your backstory. Well, it was the end of 2019, and I was turning 30, and I was like, you know, I should get in better shape, and so I signed up for the local writing 4K, which is actually coming up again here this month. And I was running the 4K, and it was going pretty well, and I thought, you know, I should run a marathon. So I went home and signed up for a marathon, and then COVID hit, so the marathon got cancelled, so I stopped training. And then another marathon came up, and I signed up for it, but I figured it would get cancelled, so of course I didn't train for it. So, yeah, I've ran my first marathon with not really any training, and never really ran any distance before that, so it's interesting. Yeah, most people don't go from 5K to marathon, and definitely not no training to marathon. But you finished your first one? Yeah, it took a while, and I did run some in the meantime, but nothing even up to a half marathon. Now when was that that you finished the first marathon? That was September of 2020. Okay. All right. And you said you ran a local 5K, what's local for you? Where are you from? Here in Anchorage, Anchorage, Alaska. Most of the races I've run are in Anchorage area, although my first marathon was actually Kenai, which is about a three hour drive south. Okay. Very cool. How was that, the drive, and then I'm sure you stayed over, right? Yeah, I stayed over the night before, and the drive was nice. September is usually a pretty good time of year. It's pretty because all the leaves are mostly yellow, and there's not really any snow most of the time. Okay. But the marathon itself, I assume that running, I'd run a little bit longer distances, maybe nine miles or so, and I got to the halfway point of the marathon, and I thought, this is going pretty well. I'm doing okay. And what I didn't realize is the halfway point of a marathon isn't 13 .1 miles, it's about 20 miles. So the second half did not feel like the first half, and I was a little surprised by that, but it went okay. I remember thinking that from my first marathon too, I'm like, it felt really bad, the second half, my very first time too, so I'm right there with you. Now have you run? It's definitely not the same distance. I ran that, and then I ran my first half 13 days after that. And I really didn't think I was going to come back to running after that. I took about six months off running. Yeah, that's a quick turnaround. Wow. Yeah, that was overkill. Wow. But I haven't learned my lesson really. So you are still running? Yeah, I came back to running the beginning of 2021 because it was COVID, and I was bored, and there was a free local running group over at Skinny Raven Sports, which is, they do a lot of the running events here, and I ended up meeting some people there that made really good friends, and they're pretty much my family up here now. So even if I wanted to stop running, I can't, because that's where all my friends
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