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When Jim Flanagan was 25 years old, he received some inspiring, yet blunt, advice from his now late uncle who was also his doctor. He simply said, “You’re getting fat and if you don’t do something about it now you’ll end up just like me.” It wasn’t exactly subtle, but it worked. Jim, president of Nuance Solutions, a Chicago-based chemical manufacturing company, has been running now for 30 years. Two years ago, at age 53, he ran his first marathon.
“I occasionally ran a 10-kilometer race, but I never tried to run a marathon because I didn’t think I could do the training that a marathon requires,” says Jim. “But, in January of 2007, I literally woke up and decided to do it. I put myself into the mind set that if I had to quit in the middle of training, at least I would have gotten in better shape.”
To train for his first marathon — the 2007 Chicago Marathon — Jim signed up for the Chicago Runners Association marathon-training program. Pre-marathon training lasted for 30 weeks, four days each week.
