Brian Gold waves mid-stride at last year’s Green Bay Marathon — his first 26.2-mile race.

Brian Gold hasn’t run the Chicago Marathon yet — but that makes him an ideal candidate to help others get ready for it.

Brian, a business banking officer at our Brookfield office, has been blogging for sports website SB Nation since August. A runner for about eight years now, he is sharing training tips as he gets ready for the Bank of American Chicago Marathon in October.

“I’d been wanting to write about running for a while, from a ‘middle-of-the-pack’ perspective,” says Brian. A friend who is an editor for SB Nation invited him to blog for the site. “You tend to get the elite people sharing their advice, but not everybody’s elite, and we have different needs.”

Brian just ran his first full marathon last year in Green Bay, but has run 22 half-marathons over the last few years.

“It’s kind of a funny story, how I got into it,” he says. “I had started pretty slow, and eventually was able to run an hour on a treadmill — six miles, give or take.” At Summerfest in 2005, some other runner friends were talking about doing a half-marathon. “After a few beers, they had me convinced that if I could run six miles, I could run 13.” By the time the beers wore off, he’d already committed.

He had some idea what he was in for at the Green Bay marathon, but it was still a challenge, especially thanks to a six-mile stretch that took the runners straight into a 25 to 40 mph wind. “That far into the race, it just sucked the life out of everybody,” he says. “At that point, it became, ‘Let’s just finish this thing.'”

He did finish. And he spent the rest of the day in a great mood, he says, repeating, “I can’t believe I just did that!”

Brian kicks it into high gear at the Flying Pig half-marathon in 2010.

Right now he blogs about twice a month. Around the middle of June, training for Chicago will begin in earnest, and then Brian says he plans to blog on a weekly basis, following the beginner’s training plan recommended by marathon officials. He finds training tips in Runner’s World magazine and online, and also draws on firsthand knowledge.

“A lot of it is just experience,” he says. “I had a bad time with this, and here’s how I solved it. Kinda learning from your own mistakes.” Readers send him questions and suggest topics, too.

Brian is also running in the Flying Pig Marathon in Cincinnati in May. Both that and the Chicago race will be “substantially bigger” than the Green Bay marathon, which he says he’s looking forward to. “You’re never out there by yourself,” he says. “That camaraderie is such a motivator.”

Check out Brian’s blog at http://www.sbnation.com/users/Brian%20Gold/blog.