The time has finally come, the first marathon, the Air Force Marathon, for the US Armed Forces Series challenge is this week, Saturday to be exact. Training has been quite a challenge with everything going on in life, and I believe I made about 115 miles of the 500+ miles Runna planned for me. Yikes!

In any case, I’ve made it 15 miles, and several people have said if you can run 15 miles, you can run a marathon. So, this should be a piece of cake.

I had mentioned previously that my goal was to create some sort of tracker while I run. Well, the plan in my head didn’t pan out. I had hoped to have this interactive timeline that showed wars and battles that occurred that were being honored for each racing segment. While I didn’t get to complete that, I was able to create a type of tracker, and you can find it at the Honor Run page.

I’ll continue to work on it a little until race day, maybe I can get it up to what I had intended. As for tracking the races, I’m not sure how I’ll do the other four, but luckily the Air Force Marathon uses Race Penguin, so I can use their system to track my run instead of hoping for some crazy setup with a running app like Garmin, Strava, or Runna. Whether or not it will work is another story, as we haven’t done any tests yet.

For the other races, I’ll still have to figure something out. In case you were wondering, these are all the race dates:

Now, you might be wondering why on earth I decided to do all of this in one year. After all, the Series Challenge doesn’t even require it. The reason I did this was because this year marks the 250th anniversary of our armed forces. Almost a year before our country declared itself independent, the U.S. Armed forces were established.

  • The Continental Army was established on June 14, 1775
  • The Continental Navy was established on October 13, 1775
  • The Continental Marines was established on November 11, 1775

The other branches would be established after the American Revolution had concluded. While the Coast Guard wasn’t officially established until January 28, 1915, it’s predecessors, the U.S. Revenue Cutter service (August 4, 1790) and the U.S. Life Saving Service (1878), had already been established for a while.

The U.S. Air Force was established on September 18, 1947 following the second world war, and the U.S. Space Force was established on December 20, 2019.

Honoring the First Run

As we mentioned previously, this is our first marathon. For this race, we’ll be honoring those who gave their life from 1775-1862. This will include conflicts such as the American Revolution, the Barbary Wars, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the first two years of the American Civil War. In total, we’ll be honoring 143,424 casualties.