For Murrah, associate professor of pathology in the medical school's Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, the opportunity to participate in the 100th running of the country's oldest and most prestigious marathon was plenty of incentive to work toward the ambitious goal of qualifying.
An uphill run
Although Murrah has been a devoted runner since her dental school days in the late 1970s, her road to the Boston Marathon, for which she qualified last month, has been a long and winding one. She ran her first marathon a mere four years ago. "When I turned 40, I decided to do my first marathon," she said. "I guess when you turn 40, you like to think that maybe you're not getting so old after all, so you do lots of different things and kind of re-evaluate where you are."
While looking through Runner's World magazine, Murrah noticed ads for a marathon at Big Sur on the California coast. "The ads showed the big rocks by the sea and the beautiful scenery," she recalled. "So I just decided to do it for my 40th year. It turns out that it was a very challenging marathon, one you probably shouldn't do for your first time. There's a two-mile run that goes almost straight uphill to the top of what they call Hurricane Point. Although it was a very difficult marathon, it inspired me to continue with marathon running. If you drive down Highway 1, which is the coastal highway the marathon is run on, you realize just what an accomplishment it is to run Big Sur."
After Big Sur, Murrah entered a number of other marathons, all of which are 26.2 miles long. She has run marathons in Alaska and North Dakota, and has set a goal of eventually running a marathon in every state.
When Murrah moved from San Antonio, Texas, to join the Emory faculty a little over a year ago, she decided to run the Atlanta Marathon held each Thanksgiving Day. "That was a tough one because of all the hills on the last five miles of the course," she recalled. "That will be a challenging run for the Olympics in the heat of the summer. Most marathoners I know like for it to be about 40 degrees. But I think I do better when it's a little warmer, in the upper 60s or around 70 degrees. I really got started running when I lived in San Antonio because you could run year round there, but that also meant running in 100-degree weather. So I think I got acclimated to the heat."
The temperature was in the 60s at a Hartford, Conn., marathon in October, where Murrah qualified for the Boston Marathon with a time of three hours, 48 minutes and 59 seconds. The Boston Marathon qualifying time for Murrah's age and gender group is three hours and 50 minutes.
Five weeks before Hartford, Murrah had come within two minutes of the required qualifying time. Her Hartford time, consequently, came as a tremendous relief, as the deadline to qualify for the Boston Marathon is Dec. 31.
The purity of running
While the competitive aspect of marathoning is undeniable, Murrah's primary motivation for running, aside from the health benefits and stress relief, is what she calls the "purity" of the sport.
"With running, you almost always get an outcome that's commensurate with the efforts you put into it," she explained. "If you don't eat right, don't rest enough and don't train properly, you're not going to have a good time in your next race. But if you do all those things, it's going to pay off."
Murrah contrasts running with other more subjectively judged sports. "In diving, skating or gymnastics, you can just love a certain competitor and think that person is just really great and you would give them a 10," she said. "Then you're disappointed to see the scores they actually get, because there's such subjectivity in the grading. A runner can never say, that judge didn't like me, or my running style is not the `in' style this year. You can have terrible form, but if you get across the finish line first, you win. That's the purity of running that I love so much."
--Dan Treadaway