Crystal Ball: Marathon?

I've been thinking a lot about running lately, but never has the thought come into my head that I would like to run a marathon. Well, that's not really true. It's come into my head before, most often when I hear about friends running them. It's also sort of been one of my life goals that I'd like to check off sometime; I think a lot of people, even non-runners have that one. But I've never really seriously considered the thought that it might be possible in the nearish future until TODAY.

Naturally, due to my lack of patience, I have already researched this year's marathons by location (Midwest, in case we're here this fall, Utah, in case I were to go home to do one, and Europe, in case we were to be there in the fall.) I found a few interesting ones, but nothing that felt really right enough to decide that one was The One for The First One.

I do have some fairly specific requirements in mind for myself whenever I decide to tackle Project Marathon. One of those goals is that I would want to/have to run it in less than 4 hours. Lofty for a first time? Maybe, but I think with proper training, it wouldn't be out of the question. There's also that little part of me that someday wants to qualify for Boston, even if I don't ever run Boston, (a 3:40 for my age group) but no, I don't plan on doing that my first time around.

My FIRST time around. See? I'm even considering making a habit of the crazy distance. After just one day of entertaining the idea of running one.

My thoughts this evening are perhaps more sane/realistic. I want to run a marathon, yes, and I want to do it soonish, yes, but I think that I might be happier with the experience if I have a lot of training under me by the time I undertake it. Yes, I could train adequately perhaps in four or five months to run a sub 4 marathon this fall, but I'm not sure it would be super fun to do things that way. Instead, as I am an injury prone runner, I think I should spend some time building up some base miles (I'm still at a pathetic 14 miles per week and I've been training since March. Sheesh.) and adding some speed work and just doing little races here and there this year. Next year, I'm thinking, I won't have stopped running (I really hope) over the winter and I will be able to do more serious training for a more serious time.