10%

2016 Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon

"It's no longer a race about a Goal, it's a race about Strength for me." - Jay Mayabb

By Greg Sisengrath

April 25^th, 2016

On Saturday, the family made a quick trip up to Oklahoma City. This would give us the opportunity to visit family in the area and spectate, cheer and pace for Jay’s first road marathon. Jay came to me in January with an ambitious goal to run a sub-4 hour marathon on his hometown course. At the time, I wasn’t aware that Jay and his father were actually working in downtown OKC when the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building occurred on April 19, 1995. Jay wrote a powerful Facebook post about his emotional experience and the deeper meaning that the race had for him. Please read his post if you can.

We had originally planned to meet Jay at a few points along the course. Unfortunately, we were unable to get out of the half-marathon course loop to make it to the middle miles of the marathon course. We would see Jay at mile 5-6 and would not see him again until mile 20. By this mark, Jay had already fought wind gusts up to 35 miles per hour for several miles and had fallen off pace. I would have the honor of running with Jay for the last 6 miles of his race. He showed incredible strength and resilience pushing on when he was obviously hurting. I handed Jay off to his wonderful family to run him in the last bit of the race. He would finish in 4:19:36, a PR of 1 hour and 26 minutes off his first marathon at Brazos Bend 5 months earlier.