Scott Wietecha 'I won three Music City Marathons in a row.”
Hendersonville's Scott Wietecha is a lifelong runner but didn't complete his first marathon until 2010. Three years later, he won his firstthat year's Country Music Marathon. He went on to win the next two in a row, becoming the first-ever three-time champ in the race's 15-year history. Not bad for an elementary school PE teacher.
"It's definitely a cool experience to be a part of something that the community comes together to celebrate."
I was an all-American a couple times in college, but then I got mononucleosis my senior year, which pretty much ended my hopes of being a pro runner. By the time I graduated with a teaching degree and ended up teaching sixth grade in West Virginia, the busy-ness of life had mentally burned me out.
Then, eight years ago, I moved to Tennessee. I was dating (long distance, ironically) the woman who I'd eventually marry. Half as a way to kill all of my free time and half for fun, I volunteered as a running coach at Beech High School in Hendersonville. I began running with my kids a couple days a week, just for fun. Over time, I started seeing my times decrease.
About a year later, I decided to enter my first marathon, the Rocket City Marathon in Huntsville, Alabama. That was 2010. The main goal there was just to finish and get the marathon off my bucket list. Because as a runner, telling people I hadn't done a marathon always made me a little self-conscious. As my workouts went on and I saw my times get even lower, all that positive reinforcement started sucking me back into the competitive nature of the sport. At Rocket City, I was trying to run a 2:30 and ended up running a 2:27. My times went down from there every year after that. As I got faster, I craved more and more speed. It was only a few years later, in 2013, that I won my first one.
In 2013, I picked up an injury as I was training for the Boston Marathon. So after a couple weeks of rehab, I did the Country Music Marathon kind of for fun. It turned out that my work for Boston ended up being enough, and I found myself with a winner's medal.
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I had an injured hip going into the 2014 race. It was only a couple weeks before the big day that I was able to just start jogging, so I was going to do the half. But a week before the race, I thought about my school kids and how much they enjoyed me being in the full, so I switched. I ended up winning that year too.
I wanted to win the third one because it's not officially a streak until you win three in a row! And in 2015 the field was better than ever, which made winning it even sweeter.
After the race, on Monday morning, I had to be right back out there at 6:30 a.m. for car drop-off duty. I got a lot of honks and a lot of waves. A few parents brought me donuts. It's definitely a cool experience to be a part of something that the community comes together to celebrate. (After my first win, a lot of the people in my neighborhood who'd gotten mad at me for running in the road were smiling and waving.)
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I love what I do, but when I'm in heavy training, I'm running 120, 130 miles a week. That's at least two hours a dayI definitely wouldn't be able to do that without my wife, who also does the single-mom thing when I go out of town for races. Running a marathon is hard. But I tell my students to try to make a better youespecially if they're not doing too well compared to their peers, they get frustrated from comparing themselves. Eventually, if you keep working hard, you'll catch those other people anyway.