St. John’s Bridge, Portland

Last Sunday I ran marathon number six. Finish time: 4:21:16, which isn’t my fastest time, but not my worst, either (best: 3:59:01, worst 4:45 and some change). I came away a little disappointed, not in myself, precisely, but in my performance. In what the day brought. Most of the summer my training was pretty solid, and on my last long run I felt great at the 20-mile mark. Then I came down with a bad cold that sidelined me for most of the remaining 3 weeks and barely ran at all until the marathon. Come race day I still wasn’t 100% recovered, plus the normal stress of cross-country travel, meant that I wasn’t at my best. We started out at a strong pace (it helped that my running partner-in-crime is a Boston-qualifier), but by mile 13 I could already tell it was going to be a tough race. I have this theory that you always know by mile 13 how it’s going to go. Even if you don”t admit it to yourself until 18, deep down, you know. I do, at least. At mile 18 we were still on pace to come in under 4:10, but I could feel myself flagging and Jacqueline pushing ahead. At 20 I convinced her to go on without me, which was easier since we’d scooped up Ben at that point so she didn’t feel like she was abandoning me. Jacqueline and I are just alike* when it comes to racing: we might walk up to the starting line with no goal except to finish and have fun, but as soon as the starter pistol goes off, we start running time and pace calculations in our heads and pushing ourselves.

Between 20 and 26, I dropped from a sub-4:10 to a 4:20. I walked up sad little inclines too gradual to be called hills. I paused to stretch tendons that were threatening to rebel. A muscle just above my knee started to twitch uncontrollably. My shoulders and neck got so tight that it restricted my breathing. Ben stayed by my side. He told jokes. He talked me through the remaining distances.

Before I ran my first marathon, a seasoned runner told me to be sure to really remember the last mile of my first marathon. That despite the pain, I should make sure I drink in the crowds, the accomplishment, the emotion of the moment and of the past 9 months of training. It was a wonderful piece of advice and one that I try to pass on to other first-timer marathoners.

The truth is that every marathon changes you. The first one is profound, the latter ones increasingly less so, but each one leaves its mark. You walk away a different person than you were when you crossed the starting line. I’m often asked ‘why marathons?’ and while I usually offer a flippant answer like ‘so I can keep eating all the cookies I want,’ deep down, this is the actual reason. At some point in every marathon you have to go to a deep dark place, and you have to go there alone. And when you get there you’re ready for it, you don’t recoil from it but rather but you slog through it, you are Zen, you are in it, and as long as you keep putting one foot in front of the other, eventually you come out on the other side to a finish chute lined with perfect strangers shouting for you.

Marathoning is chock full of good life lessons. You can do all the training right, and you still don’t know what race day will bring. No amount of training promises you a good race. Marathoning is not a meritocracy any more than the rest of life is.

I love coaching and cheerleading friends through marathons (or whatever distance is their
‘marathon’), but I would never dream of trying to convince someone to run one. The reason to run a marathon might start in one place and morph through others over the course of the training and the course of the race, but in the end everyone faces something by themselves and everyone finishes by themselves. In a crowd full of people, but we finish alone.

*except for the obvious, that she’s like 20 minutes faster than me!