Race reports · 2022 · by Michelle
Hibiscus Half 2022: the one that made the marathon real
Neither of us had run past 8.1 miles, and I'd already put a marathon on Jay's birthday. This was where I found out whether I'd meant it.
I want to be honest about this one: I'm the reason it happened, and I wasn't sure I could do it.
In December 2021 I watched the Honolulu Marathon and told Jay we should run it the next year, for his fiftieth. It came out of my mouth at a finish line, which is the kind of place where things sound easy, and I meant it more than I'd thought it through. The longest either of us had run at that point was the Great Aloha Run, 8.1 miles, so a marathon wasn't a plan yet so much as something I'd said out loud, and I'm the kind of person who then has to go and do it.
The rule we keep is that we don't pay for the race until the long run exists, so the first job of 2022 wasn't the marathon at all, it was a half. If we could get to 13.1, I could picture December, and if we couldn't, it would slide to the next year, and I told myself that would be fine. (I'm not sure I believed that, since I'd already said it in front of Jay.)
Hibiscus is Memorial Day weekend out of Kapiolani Park, and it starts early because by 8 a.m. the heat and humidity in Honolulu are already up and they don't come back down. The course takes you around Diamond Head, a climb that looks small on a map and feels a lot bigger at mile ten when the air is that wet. It was the first half marathon for both of us, and I'd love to tell you how every mile felt, but this was before the camera and before the log, and I can't remember the pace or how the miles went. What I do remember is the part that mattered, which is that we finished! Finishing was the whole goal, and now the long run existed.
We'd signed up for the marathon back in December, two days after I said the words, and our training runs had only gone to 8.5 or 9 miles, so this was the day it started to feel possible. We ran it together and came in right around two and a half hours, with a couple hundred other people, and since the last six miles of the Hibiscus are the marathon's last six miles, we got a preview of December while we were at it. A half isn't easy, and it wasn't easy for me, but it told me the truth about the marathon we'd already paid for, and I needed to hear that from my own legs and not from a training plan.
This was the first step, and the Start here page shows where it led: December 2022 and the fiftieth birthday race, and then, a year later on this same course, a 2:12 with Jay one second behind me. It was the same Diamond Head, and I was a different runner by then.
There's no official time on this page because we don't have one in front of us, and we're not going to make one up. If you've got the official result, send it and it goes here.