When Navy lightweight rower Blake Carter decided to run a marathon, he mapped out a route in tribute to his Navy lightweight rowing squad, spelling out N150 in giant letters and bigger miles in the streets of his San Francisco hometown. row2k talked to Blake about the idea, the effort, and the dog he jumped over last week.

What inspired you to do an N150 marathon?

Blake Carter: One of the rowers on Georgetown Women's Lightweight Rowing team decided to run out a 2.3 mile "G130" using their local streets. They challenged the Navy Lightweights - the N150s - and a few others programs to do the same thing.

Were you already planning to do a marathon distance, or did you do it just do it for this effort?

Carter: Up until this point, the longest I had run in the past few months was a half marathon, and the maximum I had ever gone was just under 18 miles. I realized 26.2 miles would be a pretty big step up, but I also thought "why not? There's always a first for everything!"

Carter in stroke seat at the 2019 Navy Day Regatta

Had you been training to run this kind of distance?

Carter: This run was my first marathon and I hadn't really thought about doing this route or anything of this distance anytime soon. However, once I mapped it out, it seemed like something fun to do!

How did you plan it out? What was the hardest part to figure out?

Carter: When I was making the route, my main interest was making the design as large as possible. When planning this out, I realized that there were only certain segments of my city that had long and straight enough streets to make my desired letters and numbers. I spent an hour or so experimenting with routes using my local streets using Strava's online route creator until I finally settled on the one I used.

On a side note, Strava automatically orients to North, so I tried to plan my route in a way that would properly show up on Strava.

The route planning map

Were you tracking it in real time to make sure it was working?

Carter: I printed out the route I made beforehand, and I referenced those directions throughout the run. I had no real-time way to check to make sure I was doing things correctly, but luckily it turned out okay once I finished!

What is going on at the top of the map; were you adding to the run to get the distance to work out?

Carter: Exactly! Completing the N150 fell a bit short of the full marathon distance I was aiming for, so I decided to just continue running until I reached the full marathon length.

Did you hit any snags while out on the run? Did anything story-worthy happen during the run?

Carter: The run was surprisingly straightforward, though at one point a dog ran across the sidewalk from behind a car and I had to jump over it.

It looks like you have done another marathon since; how did that go?

Carter: Yes, this past weekend I thought it would be fun to get another big run in, so I spent a few hours running in the mountains of Sonoma. The weather was great and the trails were empty and perfect for social distancing. I saw only two other people on the trails!

Carter (left) in the 2019 Occoquan Chase