I can’t control the weather, but I’m bummed. There are supposed to be terrible storms. Even if it just rains, part of the reason I picked this race was because of the awesome crowd support! I want hundreds of cheering people lining the streets! My friends will be troupers, of course, but I feel a little guilty for asking them to stand outside in the rain. I don’t anticipate this being as fun for everyone as I had hoped.
I did meet the chair of the Flying Pig board of directors at a cafe today! He used to live in Boston, and gave me his card in case I needed anything. They’ll never cancel the race, he assured me, as 28,000 runners from every state and 11 other countries are here to run. They’ve set up shelters in case the storms get dangerous, but it simply looks like everyone is going to get very, very wet.
Tonight, my friends start to trickle in. We have dinner planned at a French restaurant. I’ll be attempting to go to bed fairly early in preparation for the following night’s early bedtime and early – obscenely early – rise. Heh – it’ll be just like Disney, bad weather and all! At least I’m prepared.
I have a feeling things will get busy, and I don’t know how much blogging will happen before Sunday. I thought I would have a lot more to say in this last-ish, pre-race entry, but I think I may have already said it.
I re-watched Spirit of the Marathon yesterday and today. “Sometimes, the moments that challenge us the most define us.” It’s the first line of the movie. On Sunday, I’ll find out how this distance will define me. I’ll find out what kind of physical strength I have. I’ll find out how much mental fortitude lies in my mind, hidden, waiting. I’ll find out what, exactly, I am made of.
The Expo just opened down the block. I’m going to get my bib number and race packet now, and then I’m going to spend time with my beautiful girlfriends and my dedicated family, and then I’m going to eat a lot and sleep a lot.
And then I’m going to run a marathon.
Filed under: Uncategorized
What does it mean to be healed? That you don’t hurt anymore? That you’ve moved on? That you feel happy all the time? That you’re in a different place? That you know yourself? That you can laugh?
People say crossing the finish line at your first marathon changes you. I wonder what that means. I wonder what I will write, how I will feel, in four days. Not worry; wonder.
I have a two-mile run tomorrow. It’s the last run of my taper: the last grain of sand, sliding through the hourglass. Plink.
Tomorrow brings a full day of work and an early bedtime. The next morning I will be on an airplane to Cincinnati. I will see my friends and family. I will take every hill and every ache and every obsessive moment of my training, and then I will run.
For some strange reason, I merely want to sleep. Curl up and make it go away. Put it off a little bit longer. I don’t know why; perhaps I am tired. Perhaps it’s another manifestation of nerves. The feeling just started today, and I’m hoping it’ll be gone when I wake up.
The house is oddly silent. My heartbeat marches in a forward line. There’s no turning back now.
Filed under: The Race, Training Runs | Tags: days off, dreams, gu, long run, marathon, nerves, Rest Days, running, shoes, short run, Taper
I purchased new shorts and a lovely blue lightweight tech shirt for the race. I tried the shorts out on my last “long” run – eight miles – and, disappointingly, they rode up a little. Most shorts do that when I run, but with a predicted temperature of seventy-three degrees (most runners dress for temperatures twenty degrees warmer than the actual, so do the math on that one), I’m going to go with my capris. I don’t want to be picking cloth away from myself for nearly five hours.
My Asics should be broken in enough. I was thinking of using my Guides, but I’ve done my last three weeks of running in these shoes, so Asics it will be.
I’m having anxiety dreams: I fly to the wrong city. I wake up too late. I get injured at the start of the course. I’ve forgotten my running sneakers.
Lists are beginning to form in my mind: Gu packets. Shoes and clothes. Body glide. Ibuprofen. Socks. Ponytail holders. Headband. (I can’t find my stupid headband!) Course map for friends and family. Watch. Sunblock. Camera.
There are other things I can’t control that I must make myself stop worrying about. Weather’s a big one. I haven’t run in hot weather at all. Worse than that, though, is the idea of a race cancellation. The ten-day weather forecast predicts scattered thundershowers all weekend. I’ve seen those Midwestern storms, and I’ve seen that lightning. It’s out of my hands, I know, but please, please let there be decent weather. I don’t know what I would do if these nine months were all for nothing.
I’ve gotten myself worked up, though, so it’s time to calm down. That’s what the Taper is for: recovery, relaxation, mental preparation. You hardly run, you eat a lot, you try not to obsess.
Six days.
Filed under: Dealing, Inspiration | Tags: family, fight, friends, healing, marathon
I didn’t run the Boston Marathon, obviously, but I did pace C for the last three miles. As a thank you gift, she got me a color-changing mug with pigs on it, and a bottle of jam under the label, “When Pigs Fly.”
I should have written this entry sooner, but one of the big events of this coming weekend (oh. mygosh.), besides the marathon, of course, is the five-year reunion of my closest group of college girlfriends. We’ve all kept in touch through the years, but not until now will we all be in one room again. Some of us are married. Some of us have babies. All of us have changed. But they’re coming, and they’re coming because I asked them to, flying from California and New York and New Jersey and Texas and Indiana to be there for me at the finish line, there for whatever change will happen in my life, big or small, after running this race.
I’ve said that running saved my life, and it has, but the people who really saved me were – and are – my friends and family. They’ve spent as many hours on the phone with me as I’ve spent in my old Asics. They’ve cried with me, hugged me, sent me cards and gifts, distracted me with trips and activities, talked when I needed them to talk and said nothing when I didn’t want to hear it. They’ve donated money to my charity. One of them is even running with me for the last six miles of the race.
When your heart breaks, nothing and no one can take away the pain. It’s like a deep, black ocean, squeezing and churning, wave after towering wave breaking upon you, unending. But even in the darkest of times, when even breathing hurt because of the sadness, they were there, the people that love me, a life buoy in the wrenching expanse, floating through the dark, and I held on for dear life. And I did not sink.
I did not sink.
Filed under: Longest Run Ever, The Race, Training Runs | Tags: fight, long run, marathon, running, running routes, struggle
….also known as the longest run before the marathon. Done. Check. Complete. Twenty miles. I ran…twenty miles. I RAN TWENTY MILES. Remember that line in Lord of the Rings when Sam asks, “How far to the nearest crossing?” and Merry replies, “Brandywine Bridge! Twenty miles!” and you breathe this sigh of relief, because you know they’re safe for a little while. Well guess what I RAN THAT today.
I also ran it sick, and I ran it on five hours of sleep. I had a late gig the night before, but I set my clock for five AM, pulled on my clothes, ate my usual pre-run snack, and was out the door at 6 AM. It took me a while. I was slower than I intended, doing a loop from my house, around the entire Charles River path, an extra mini-loop, and back. It took nearly four hours, though I actually added a half mile by accident (twenty POINT FIVE! OH!) and I stopped to use a porta-potty, so that added a few minutes.
Over twenty-four hours have passed, and I’m still sick and still tired – my nose is so stuffed up that I’m breathing through my mouth – but I want to write about this before the feelings become stale. I want to remember everything about it. The solitude of the morning, the sound of feet padding steadily along the path, pigeons cooing, water rippling. The gradual rise and bustling of the city, and the appearance of more runners on the path, some doing long runs, some just out for their morning jogs. The changing scenery, slowly – trees to low houses to college campuses to tall, downtown skyscrapers and then back again. The utter relief of seeing the last mile. The last stop sign. The last hill. The last block.
I think it was when I did my first 15-miler that I first experienced a strange sensation of wanting to cry during a run. Once again I felt it, and I still couldn’t tell you what it was. Exhaustion? Emotion? Both? I don’t know. I just know that I think it was mile 19 and I felt an overwhelming rush of…something. As if the physical and emotional sides to my body had melded together into one inseparable thing. It wasn’t a physical battle, though. It was a mental one. One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. And things hurt, but not unhealthily, not badly.
And now it’s done. The longest run before the marathon. A forty-mile week. My training is at its end. This week begins my first taper, with a 12-mile long run, and then an 8-mile long run the next week. I still have to be vigilant, obviously. Eat right. Sleep right. Put in the shorter runs. Buy the stupid plane ticket, already.
Nine months have nearly passed. There is a question lurking. But I can’t answer it yet. Not until it’s done.
3 weeks until twenty-six-point-two.
