Good morning everyone!

To all who are interested in my running journey thus far, I have a couple of exciting updates you might be interested in!

Also, remember, all these posts are collectible! If you collect this post today, you will not only have a chance to win a free custom airdrop for this post, but you will be an official sponsor of my running where you can appear on my custom jersey in my upcoming November marathon!

First, let me level set you on what my running goals are, what the plan was, and what the plan is going to be.

To be clear, my goal of running in the Boston Marathon hasn’t changed.

My goal of eventually running in all 6 marathon majors hasn’t changed either.

But we are actually going to fast-track some of it a little.

Let me explain…

My original plan was to debut my marathon in March 2024 in the Asheville Marathon. This was going to be the race I’d qualify for Boston 2025 with.

If there is one thing I’ve learned about all these marathon majors races it’s that you have to sign up like a year in advance, and they are all tricky to get into.

So the cutoff to run in the Boston 2024 isn’t closed per se, but it opened in April and I think it would be tight to try and get in for 2024.

That being said, since I would love to run in all 6 marathon majors I thought perhaps 2024 would be a good year to get in one of the other majors.

What are the marathon majors, you may be asking?

Well, they are as follows:

• Tokyo Marathon

• London Marathon

• Boston Marathon

• Berlin Marathon

• Chicago Marathon

• New York Marathon

Rumor has it they will be adding a 7th to the line-up in 2025 in Cape Town, South Africa too!

Running in all these races would be an awesome challenge for me, but it would also include some really amazing places in the world that Taylor and I would love to travel to. So it’s a win-win!

Anyways…my new plan is…

To run in the Chicago Marathon in 2024.

The Chicago Marathon is always run in the Fall and so planning ahead, this means their deadline for sign-up is this November!

Here is another fun detail about all these major races…they aren’t easy to get into.

Boston and London are the special ones:

• Boston is the only one that requires a qualifying time. That’s why I’m training so much to qualify for the Boston.

• London is the only one that solely does a lottery system.

The rest of them do both.

However, entering via the lottery system gives you like a 5% chance of entry. Buuut, if you run a qualifying time, then you are guaranteed a spot!

That’s my ticket in.

For Chicago, the qualifying time for a guaranteed spot is 3:05 which is actually slower than the time I need to qualify for Boston.

But I have to do it before November 17th.

So a marathon debut in March won’t cut it.

Therefore, Taylor and I did some searching around and I found my first marathon…

The Outer Banks Marathon!

It is held the second weekend in November, which will give me about 5 days to sign up for the Chicago Marathon if I qualify.

As you can tell, trying to plan out doing these races takes more thought than I realized, haha!

I do still plan to run the Asheville marathon for my Boston qualifier, though.

Why?

Well, Boston has this “cool” policy where even if you make the qualifying time, it doesn’t guarantee you a spot.

See, just because they don’t do a lottery system doesn’t mean they don’t have limited spots.

They do have limited spots.

I don’t remember the numbers but it’s like 30,000 or something.

So if they have 40,000 people with qualifying times sign-up, they start shifting the qualifying times down until they hit 30,000.

This means that if I ran a qualifying time of 2:59 (my age group needs sub 3 hours), they might end up sliding the qualifying time down to 2:55 and I’d be kicked out.

Chicago is not like that. If I run the Outer Banks Marathon in 3:04 (right below the 3:05 qualifying time) then I’m guaranteed a spot no matter what.

This makes the training and pressure for Outer Banks less. But it also means that I might need to train a good bit more going into the Asheville Marathon so I can aim more for the 2:49 range instead of 2:59.

Ok, ok, I know…that was an information overload.

Let me summarize:

• My main running goals: run in all 6 marathon majors, mainly including the Boston Marathon

• My 2023 goal: run in the Outer Banks Marathon to qualify for a guaranteed spot in the Chicago Marathon

• My 2024 goal: run in the Asheville Marathon to qualify for the Boston Marathon

• My other 2024 goal: run in the Chicago Marathon, one of the 6 marathon majors

• My 2025 goal: run in the Boston Marathon, also one of the 6 marathon majors

Before I let you go, I have 2 more things to mention!

I promised weekly videos a while ago. Truth be told, that was a bit ambitious. So we’re going to change that, haha!

Apologies.

I have been posting when I can on TikTok (@theMeyerPerspective) and YouTube (@theMeyerPerspective) so you can follow those accounts to get any of the short clips I post.

As for my longer videos, I plan to do these on a monthly basis.

I really want to learn and grow as a video content creator, but as I mentioned some time ago, my truer passion is still in writing.

You can definitely count on me continuing to document my running journey, the things I learn, how I’m training, how I’m eating, etc etc. Just mainly in written form, and then once a month in a longer video.

Last but not least, I have a fun new idea. I haven’t laid all the details out yet, but I got excited about this one so I couldn’t wait to share it.

As many of you know, I’m also heavily interested and involved in this web3 space. I have been brainstorming how to involve my new running passion into the space as well, and I think I have an interesting idea.

There are several platforms in the web3 space right now for writing. Two of the biggest are Mirror and Paragraph.

Mirror is like Medium if you’ve ever used that. It’s mainly just a blogging site.

Paragraph is literally just a web3 version of Substack. Substack is for newsletters and powers the newsletter you’re reading right this second (if you didn’t know).

Both of these platforms allow you to turn your free-to-read articles into collectible NFTs.

I haven’t decided how this will all work yet, but my plan is to start minting any of my running journey articles as NFTs for people to collect.

Then, leading into the Outer Banks Marathon, I’ll do a tally of my top collectors/sponsors.

Then I’ll take their social handles, name, business, or whatever they want to promote and get a custom jersey made for the race that will include all my top collectors/sponsors/supporters.

I think this will be a fun initiative that combines my passion for writing, web3, and running. We’ll see how it turns out!

Remember if you collect this article you will have a chance of getting a one of a kind airdrop NFT of this article!