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High school runner keeping busy through viral challenge

With this year's track and field season canceled, Martensadle-St. Mary's sophomore Josephine Wearmouth is staying active, and breaking goals, in a unique way.

MARTENSDALE, Iowa — With COVID-19 ending the track and field season, runners have to stay in shape, and keep up their competitive spark, in other ways.  One Iowa high-schooler took to Tik Tok to go just that.

Josephine Wearmouth is a sophomore track runner at Martensdale-St. Mary's High School.  She wasn't sure what to do since she couldn't compete because of the coronavirus pandemic, but scrolling through Tik Tok, she found the 26-hour marathon challenge.

The challenge is to run one mile every hour for 26 hours.  Wearmouth says it's a great way to keep up on training.

"As you keep going it starts to get harder, it starts to get harder.  But you just keep pushing yourself," Wearmouth said.  "It feels great after you finish, because not a lot of people have done this.  I just did this, and not everybody can do it."

Her goal wasn't only to complete it, but to beat the people who'd done it before her.  She and her sister accomplished that mission, beating their time by over 10 minutes.

Josephine said she's learned something about herself through all this too, and found a way to stay positive; even in this time where that's not always easy.

"We don't have to practice right now.  But just keep training for when we do start our seasons back up and them you'll be so much better."

She says this has inspired her so much that she's now starting to train for her first full-fledged marathon: the Des Moines Marathon this fall.

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