Tricky Dad / Never Say Never

It all started with my father... The tricky bastard... He tricked me, and a lot of people of my family actually..., into running, and not just running for fun or health or something, noooooo he tricked us into running MARATHONS !

How was I personnally tricked into running a marathon, considering all the previously mentioned issues ?
Easy : I am very fond of music and reading a fantastic book for the first time a while back, 3 years ago actually. It is called Please Kill Me, by Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain, and it is about the beginning of punk rock in New York City.
So obviously, at a casual Sunday lunch with my folks (which was about to change my life for at least 6 months...), I half-joking/half-not asked my dad about a trip to New York. Let me put this in a Q&A type of thing :

me ' Dad how about we go to New York soon ? I was so young when I went with you guys : ( ! ' (yes I was lucky enough to already have been there, but I was like 12, how about punk rock/party New York ?!)

dad ' Yeah right pfff '

me ' come on daddy, it could an amazing trip, we said we should visit more capital cities !'

then I saw kind of a spark in my beloved father's eyes, on which I definitely should have focused on more...

dad ' well actually, we could go to New York City, if you decided to run the New York City marathon... '

me ' Yeah right pfff '

me ' well after all, why not, I would have a year to get ready and it cannot be THAT difficult... Ok deal '

Oh dear was I wrong... Anyway we started looking for dates and all the practical things and realised that the 2008 marathon was already sold out. So, on 14 August 2008 (yes daddy I remember precisely the too infamous date...), there we went to sign in for the 2009 edition of the most well-known of all the marathons.

And on January the second or third, we learnt that we were indeed signed in (there is a whole bunch of luck in this, cause there are too many people who want to do it. Can you believe THAT ? ! Paying to suffer... Oh just the thought hurts.. )

That is when began the guilt that was going to shadow me for the next eleven months...