Filed under: Dealing, Inspiration, The Race, Training Runs | Tags: good advice, Inspiration, marathon, nerves, running, short run
It’s going to be that kind of week. Working at a running store in Boston means that when April begins, you don’t slow down until a week after the Boston Marathon is over. If you’re training for a marathon yourself, that means you succumb quietly, with barely a whimper, to insanity.
(Tangent: Has anyone ever noticed – at least those who’ve been to my city – that if you tell a Bostonite you’re running a Spring race other than the Boston Marathon, people look slightly bewildered? They get that same perturbed, sort of Linus-y worried look that I imagine people had when they found out the world wasn’t flat. Ok, end of tangent.)
Anyway, I was talking to a fellow coworker and runner about marathoning today. She asked me if I had a reason for running, because it’s always the reason, the mental resolve, that gets you through the last six miles. Nothing can prepare you for what it’s really like to run the Marathon, she said, but you’ll do it because you have a reason. What’s your reason? she wanted to know.
I usually don’t share things like that with coworkers anymore. I’ve learned well and hard that keeping things separate from work, keeping your own dirty laundry and your own secrets, your own emotional highs, middles, and lows, protects you in some way. You’re not as vulnerable. You’re not as open to judgment. But something made me tell her, at least a very brief and spare version.
“I just got chills,” she said. ”You know how I know you’ll finish? Because no matter how hard it is, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much you want to stop running, you’ll remember that what you’re feeling during those last six miles is nothing compared to what you’ve already lived through. You’ve already survived something far harder than a marathon. Let that thought take you to the end.”
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