Photo by Glenn Moore/Our Town

After last week, it’s safe to say that 43-year-old Tracy resident Janet Kendig is one of the nation’s elite runners. But even with six marathons under her belt, Kendig said the Boston Marathon proved to be one of the most challenging experiences of her athletic life. More than once, her body begged her to give up.

A dozen or so miles into the second-largest of the 112 annual Boston Marathons: Kendig has been running for a good hour or so. It’s easy enough compared to the distances she’s run in the past, but her shoulder starts to tense up. First-Aid workers rush to help and ask if she’d like to stop.

She refuses, tempted to falter, but keeping her body’s resistance in check.

Mile 22: Kendig hits “the brick wall,” a forceful mental block that constricts her already-worn muscles. Her legs start to cramp as she runs up an incline racers dub “Heartbreak Hill.” But still, she runs.

Mile 26.2: Soaked in sweat, the runner lifts her head, straightens her posture and thrusts one leg in front of the other. The finish line seems like a mirage, she said, moving farther away the closer she got.

Then, four hours, five minutes after starting, she crosses the finish line. Her place: 17,669 out of 25,000 — impressive for anyone, not to mention a mother of three who only started seriously running a few years ago.

“It was wonderful,” she said of last week’s race. “It was so overwhelming with all these people cheering you on.”

She said she lives for that kind of mental and physical pressure.

“It’s the most rewarding thing I can imagine,” she said.

Kendig looks and carries herself like a seasoned athlete. Her tanned skin and toned muscles speak to the hours she spends in the sun and on the trails. Her daily runs average 10 miles. On weekends, she might do twice that.

“It’s natural for me at this point,” she said.

Next year, she plans to finish with a time under three hours, 30 minutes, she said.

“I think I can do that,” she said, “with enough speed work and enough training.”

Now, little more than a week after her big race, Kendig plans to run a few 5Ks, 10Ks and probably a half-marathon in October.

In the little spare time she has, Kendig trains other locals to race in marathons. She considers it a sort of community service, she said.

“I think once someone accomplishes this, they’ll feel so much better about themselves as a person,” she said from her Tracy home a week before her big race. “Yeah, it’s hard. Yeah, it takes a lot of time. But who wouldn’t want that feeling of having accomplished something like this?”

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