13.1 in dublin

Happy Thursday! How are you doing? Are you taking time to check-in with yourself and give yourself the care, love, and attention you need? If you didn’t get a chance to read yesterday’s post - “local celeb sighting” - you can click here to read all about the time I got to meet Mattress Mick in Dublin. Also, if you didn’t get the chance to cast your free daily vote for me to be the next #MaximCoverGirl, you can click here to vote or click here to read about why it’s important to me (and then vote!). You can vote once every twenty-four hours for free, and I am so grateful for your support! I'm still in the running and in the top 10 of my group! Voting for round 4 ends tonight June 25th and will see 5 more women eliminated from my group, so I’d love your support and votes to make it through to the next round and stay in the top 5!

After I did my USA cross-country road trip two summers ago and decided to make the move to Dublin to get my Masters, I signed myself up for the Dublin Half Marathon. It was such an amazing event, running through Phoenix Park with crowds of Irish people cheering on all the runners. If you’ve never participated in a large organized race like the Dublin Half Marathon or the Barcelona Marathon, there is something incredibly special about not just the actual training and running, but also the sense of community one feels with thousands of total strangers. The Dublin Half Marathon was not my first Half, but it was my first organized running event with thousands of people participating. It was such an amazing experience from start to finish: waking up early and taking the bus to the event, seeing thousands of people buzzing with anticipatory excitement and some anxiety, jamming out to the Hamilton soundtrack for 13.1 miles, and finishing at a faster time than my first half marathon.

I’ll admit that it was a difficult thing to do alone on the day. No one trains and runs marathons without the help and support of their loved ones, and I wished I could’ve had someone at the finish line waiting for me. My dad ended up being at the finish line for my first full marathon finish in Barcelona, and both my parents were there to cheer me on in my Wexford Marathon finish, but for the Dublin Half Marathon, I found happiness in the shared solitude of finishing an individual goal with all the other people around me who were all so excited to finish, too.

Have you ever spent time reflecting on the joy of seeing a journey through to completion and accomplishing a goal? It could be running a half-marathon, completing a work assignment, nailing the yoga pose you’ve been working on for awhile, or even finishing a book you promised yourself you’d finish. I’d love to hear about your successes and also your failures because you can’t have one without the other! Let me know! Subscribe in the e-mail submission box below and reach out, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and reach out to me on the “contact” page. I’m so happy you're here and that I’ve been receiving a lot of really incredible stories, questions, and feedback from a community all over the globe! Other people’s stories that I’ve gotten to read via e-mail, text, tweet, DM, etc. recently bring me such smiles, and I am so grateful for all of it! I hope I get to hear all about whatever stories you’ve been thinking about as we’ve been on this virtual journey together! Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you have any restaurants/eateries/pubs/coffee shops/ice cream joints you would recommend in other countries or even in your current home town or city, I'm absolutely 100% all ears!! I couldn’t do this without you! So THANK YOU! From the bottom of my heart, truly, thank you.

And please, if you have 10-15 seconds to spare, I would really appreciate your daily vote for me to be Maxim Cover Girl 2020. Click here to vote! Voting for round four ends this coming Thursday June 25th, and I would really appreciate your help and support as I continue to try and become the next #MaximCoverGirl by moving ahead into round 5/the top 5 of my group! Thanks for your support! Click here or on the photo above to vote!

Sincerely,

Johny

P.S. - If you want to catch up from the beginning on this series of adventures, here's a cheat sheet to the posts (in order in which they were published):

1. Won't you join me?

2. grateful for starbucks and sandymount strand

3. Once Upon a December in the National Gallery

4. plant a smooch for that gift of gab

5. may the 4th be with you: Dingle style

6. cinco de mayo: the best Mexican food in Dublin

7. pizza in roma

8. mussolini’s window and the philosophers’ metro stop

9. father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife

10. it's the vatican, not the vatican't

11. spoiler alert: i did not lose my hand

12. more pizza and gelato and Neptune, oh my