Marathon Book

Awhile ago I saw this post on one of the blogs I read about how she organizes her race bibs each year.  I loved the idea and always see coupon codes for free or discounted photo books online.  I wanted to do a race book myself, but it was in October that I decided to make a book and I hadn’t taken photos at each race I had done.   Then I thought about doing a “Journey to my first marathon” photo book off all the races I had completed since I started training for my marathon in June.

I had played around with what I wanted as the front of the book, originally not having a picture at all, but then I fell in love with my finishers medal and I had to feature it.  I added the quote from my marathon t-shirt “Don’t Limit Your Challenges, Challenge Your Limits” to the top, and added wrote ‘Journey to My First Marathon’ at the bottom along with my name.

When you open the front cover I added a picture of my medal rack with all my medals hanging on it, along with the name and date of each race that I had done since getting accepted to the marathon.

I hadn’t taken pictures of all my races so I had to get creative with pictures of those races, but otherwise I just chose a few pictures from each race.  I basically copied the Meals and Miles photo book that she had created for herself to create my own book.  On one side of the book I had the race logo and some pictures from the race, then on the other side I had left it blank so I could tape my bib in it.  I made sure to rotate the race photos to the opposite side so when I taped the bib to the page, it wouldn’t get the other side of the page all crinkly and mess up the pictures.  Each page either had front and back of photos or front and back of bibs.  At the bottom of each photo page I wrote the date, name of the event, and my finish time for the race so I would always remember how I did.

The last page had a group picture of all the people I trained with in my marathon training group, Gotta Run Katy, along with a 26.2 sticker that we were all supposed to get (which I still have not gotten!).

The back cover was the marathon route that I endured for 5 hours, 45 minutes.  I thought it deserved its own page!

My Publisher

I ordered the photo book through My Publisher since I got a $10 coupon through Living Social.  I don’t know that I will use My Publisher again because it really didn’t give me too many options for page layouts.  They had backgrounds, but a lot of them didn’t really apply to what I was doing so I didn’t have a lot of options besides plain colored backgrounds.  I heard other companies (like Snapfish) have lots of options and borders you could use.  I really wanted to add a cute box around my text or a cute border but I couldn’t figure out where they had that option.  I had to pay shipping, tax, and I got two extra pages so my $10 book ended up costing me around $30. I do like my book, I just wish I could have had more options to design it.  I need to make one soon for a gift, so I will probably try another company.