Last August, I completed my 6th marathon in as many states (going for 1 in each). It was the Area 51 Extraterrestrial Full Moon Midnight Marathon, a mouthful and a lot of fun.

As far as marathons go, it can’t be any more different. A midnight start, I probably only had 3 training runs in the dark, let alone an actual race. Runners were bused from Vegas hotels to the middle of nowhere two hours away to run down the highway. (It was more like running UP the highway. The first 13 miles was a steady incline.)

I was injured and considered anything under four a hours a win. I finished 4th in my age group, 15th overall (out of a paltry 197), and wanted to die. But what an experience.

While I zigzagged across the US on a couple planes, I was so overcome with a burst of creativity energy that I had to sketch my ideas onto some Delta napkins. I polished those rough drawings and submitted a half-dozen ideas for race medals for the 2013 Midnight Marathon.

The race organizer loved my ideas and assured me she’d be in touch in the spring when it was time to get going again. That was last week, and now I can check off “design a marathon medal” from my bucket list. Quite frankly, the idea that will be this year’s finisher’s medal is so simple, I’m surprised no one’s done it before:

The logic behind the design: Quite frankly, I figured this would have been the very first medal of the ET Marathon back in whatever-the-first-year-of-the-race-was. It seems so obvious. Having received 8 finisher’s medals thus far, a common problem I’ve noticed is they are SO BUSY. Some of them work, some don’t, but in both cases, tossing in sponsor logos and a shitload of colors is never a plus. So here we have some clean simplicity, and close to a standard, classic Olympic-style medal. (I bit an Olympic gold medal in Vancouver. It belonged to a Canadian women’s hockey player.) If the produce these to glow in the dark, it will be the greatest medal of all-time.

Another of my medal concepts (my obligatory busy one) will be added to the back of the tee:

Back of tee

The logic behind the design: The road with the mountains in the distance summarizes your scenery on the race through Rachel, NV. Keep an eye on the sky, and you’ll see more than a few shooting stars. And obviously, since the race goes through Area 51, I had to include the flying saucer. Normally, I’d go with more detail for something like this, but since I designed this as a medal, I had to keep it simple. If the shirts are distressed, I think this will look pretty sweet. (I’ll post pics when I get mine.)

If you want to run the 2013 Area 51 ET Full Moon Marathon (or 51K, 10K or Half-Marathon), go here.