Many brides spend the week before their wedding tending to last-minute details and imagining the moment they’ll finally walk down the aisle.
Kelly Hudson has a different vision for her big day: She and fiancé Lucas Woodward expect to spend about six hours running "down the aisle" – 26.2 miles through the streets of Detroit – before meeting up with family, friends and an officiant at the end.
Hudson, 34, and Woodward, 33, plan to exchange vows shortly after crossing the finish line of the Detroit Free Press Marathon, Oct. 18.
“We’re going to finish ugly,” Hudson joked, while noting the goal is to run together, finish together, exchange vows and begin married life the same way they ran the race – side by side. “I’m going to be sweaty and a mess,
and I know I’ll want to reach for a banana before I reach for a pen to sign my marriage license.”
Now in its 49th year, the Detroit Free Press Marathon will draw 30,000 runners across eight races this year with a course that winds through Detroit and Windsor, crossing the international border via the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel.
Hudson and Woodward are calling it “Marriage-thon.”
How long-distance dating runs brought the couple together
Long before they began running side by side, Hudson and Woodward were finding ways to run together from hundreds of miles apart.
The two met through mutual friends in 2018, when Hudson, a Westland native, and Woodward, who grew up in Maine, were both living in Boston and working in the city’s beer industry.
The friendship continued after Hudson returned to Michigan, and eventually grew into a long-distance romantic relationship – and one in which Woodward introduced Hudson to his love of long-distance running.
“I was not a runner,” Hudson said. “I was like, ‘Isn’t that what crazy people do?”
But Woodward, who’d run competitively in high school, convinced her to give it a shot, and together they signed up for the Dexter-Ann Arbor Half Marathon.
Training for the race became a way to spend time together while hundreds of miles apart. On designated evenings, they’d lace up their shoes and head out to hit the pavement at the same time.
"It was sort of a long-distance date night,” Woodward said. “We'd send each other before and after pics – me from my front step before, and then exhausted afterward.”
Hudson said the training gave them a way to work toward a mutual goal, even while they were apart.
“We realized what a great way it was to stay connected,” she said. “We’d say, ‘How far did you run today? Where did you run? How was the weather?’ It just became this thing we did together.”
Then, after nearly two years of long-distance dating, the duo began talking about the possibility of Woodward moving to Michigan.
Woodward had one condition.
“He said, ‘All right, but if I move out to Michigan, I’m going to marry you,’” Hudson said.
Her response? “When can we pick up the U-Haul?”
Woodward moved to Michigan in early 2025, and the couple now lives in Canton. Hudson is a patient care coordinator at a dental office in Northville, while Woodward works in logistics for an autonomous vehicle company in Ann Arbor.
Why run the Free Press Marathon on your wedding day?
After the move, Hudson and Woodward decided they wanted to get married this year and also decided that they wanted to run the Detroit Free Press Marathon.
But the idea of preparing for both at the same time seemed daunting.
“I can't remember who floated the idea first, but we were like, ‘Wouldn't it be fun if we just got married at the marathon?’” Hudson said. “And then one of us said, 'Marriage-thon?'" And from that moment on, we never looked back.”
Friends and Family enthusiastically embraced the idea, she said, offering reactions like, “What mile marker do you want us at? How can we be involved? Are we doing a carb-load dinner the night before?”
“Not one person batted an eyelash,” Hudson said. “Because they know I love Lucas so much, they were like, 'Yeah, we're going to do what it takes to get you down a very, very, very long aisle.'"
For her wedding day, Hudson plans to dress in traditional white: tennis skirt and tank top, sunglasses, ball cap and running shoes. Woodward says he’ll be clad in all-black running gear – shorts, shirt and shoes – his version of a tuxedo.
Race bibs, they say, will identify them as “Bride to Be” and “Groom to Be.”
The race will be Hudson’s first-ever full marathon, although she’s run several half marathons and 5Ks with Woodward.
They plan to stay together throughout the race, anticipating a finishing time of about five hours and 45 minutes.
Once they cross the finish line, the couple plans to meet family and friends nearby to exchange their vows. A close friend will serve as the officiant.
Two rings and two proposals
While running helped bring Hudson and Woodward closer together, their connection runs deeper than the miles they’ve logged.
“Lucas is just the funniest, wittiest, just most kind and caring person,” Hudson said. “This man would give you the shirt off of his back, no matter what he is personally going through. I have never seen a mean bone in his body.”
His thoughtfulness, she noted, showed up in not one, but two marriage proposals.
The first came during a trip to Boston, where the couple attended a Halloween party with longtime friends. Hudson suspected Woodward would propose and told coworkers she expected to be engaged by the time she got back to work.
When the party came and went without a proposal, she was disappointed, but agreed when Woodward suggested visiting the Boston Museum of Science the following day.
They’d previously visited the museum as friends – but decided at the time that the photo booth seemed like something a couple would do, so they skipped it.
This time, Woodward pulled her into the booth and proposed with his grandmother’s engagement ring, which fit Hudson perfectly.
She was thrilled, so the second proposal at a Carter Vail concert in Grand Rapids was completely unexpected.
Hudson had been nervous about wearing his grandmother’s ring to a crowded venue, so Woodward encouraged her to leave it at home.
During her favorite song, “Harder to Kill,” Woodward dropped to one knee as the crowd cheered, this time with a ring he’d chosen especially for her.
“He wanted me to have something that was entirely my own and wasn’t someone else’s ring ... just entirely my own,” she said.
Later, when Hudson was devastated to learn her best friend, Emily, couldn’t attend “Marriage-thon” because she was getting married herself two weeks later, Woodward quietly arranged and paid for her travel so she could be there.
“I don’t know how I got so lucky, but he is really one of a kind,” she said.
A shared understanding of love, life and loss
Woodward said what he loves about Hudson goes beyond their shared interests.
Both, he noted, have experienced significant losses in their families – Woodward lost both parents, and Hudson’s mother died while she was in college – giving them a shared understanding of the fragility of life.
“Kelly and I have both watched a lot of people die, unfortunately,” he said. “I can see myself in her. We both appreciate what we have left and the life that we have.”
He also appreciates Hudson’s ability to pull him out of his own thoughts and into the present, and her understanding of what he calls his “darker” side.
“That’s not a very romantic thing to say, I realize, but it matters a lot to me that we line up in that way,” he said.
Woodward said his late father used to joke that nothing would ever bring him back to the Midwest.
Now, having moved to Michigan for Hudson, he appreciates the irony and finds comfort knowing his father would have approved of the woman he’s marrying.
“With partners in the past, I’ve thought, ‘Would my dad have liked this woman?’ And with Kelly, there is a resounding yes to that, which I value quite highly.”
‘We’re not going to stop’
As they approach Marriage-thon Day, the couple sees a fitting metaphor for marriage.
“You don’t really run a marathon all in one day,” Hudson said. “It’s taken a really long time to get up to the point where we can run 26 miles, and it’s about showing up on days when it’s not easy.”
They don’t expect their wedding day to be perfect, and that’s fine with them, as long as they finish together.
“We’re slow, but we’re not going to stop,” Hudson said.
Contact reporter Laura Colvin: lcolvin@freepress.com
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Couple running 26 miles to the alter at Detroit Free Press marathon
