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.
1 Comment so far
Leave a comment
Hi… You don’t know me, but I’m a fellow runner and I’ve been reading your blog. I just wanted to say that I hope you have a wonderful eperience and that it’s all that you want it to be. The marathon is such a mental challenge, and I think that you are more than up to it. Keep running!
Comment by Joanne Nolan April 24, 2010 @ 5:34 pm