Running Through Heartbreak

Well, it wasn’t as warm as I would have liked in Florida, and I didn’t go as slow as I would have liked. I did, however, have a great time and a strong finish, about 2 hours and 12 minutes. Instead of writing a long-winded play-by-play, let me regale you with a list of memorable moments:

• I met a lot of other runners in the Orlando airport.  My day job allows me to talk to runners all the time, but I’m continually gratified by the connection everyone has to one another.  We might have been “racing,” but one got a sense that we were all in it together.  I imagine that  it might be different for the elite runners, just as an undertone of competition often runs through the friendships of some professional musicians, but I enjoyed the continuity and the shared sense of accomplishment.
• My friend’s family got a large hotel suite at one of the Disney World resorts.  We cooked ourselves a nice big pasta dinner the night before the race, went to bed at 8 PM, and woke up at 3 AM for an early, frigid start.
• I don’t think I’ve ever been so cold in my life as I was before and after that race.  That includes all the time I’ve spent in upstate New York and Boston.  Instead of getting warm, tropical Florida, we got sleet that poured down on us all day.  I may be used to running in the cold, but I’m certainly not used to standing in it, when all I’m wearing is a pair of thermal tights and a couple of top layers.  Let me tell you, those things are only effective when you’re actually running.  Even wrapped in a mylar blanket post-race, the cold and wet penetrated my bones so deeply that I couldn’t get rid of the chill until the next morning.
• The cold does make you run faster.  Even doing 10:10 minute miles, I could have run faster – or farther.
• I wasn’t quite prepared for all the public urination.  There must’ve been scores of porta-johns, but people were standing at the woodside practically every twenty feet before the start.  Also notable was the unfortunate soul who gave everyone a full frontal underneath a street lamp in his haste to, erm, relieve himself.  I guess it was an emergency.
• There were some great costumes, but two deserve acknowledgment: A)The woman who braved the twenty-degree weather, wind, and sleet in a tiny little Wonder Woman outfit, and B)The man with the custom CWX compression pants, the $200 kind, made with American Flag-patterned tech fabric.
• The race itself really was awesome.  My friend said the cold might have driven away some spectators, but I didn’t notice.  There were certainly plenty of people cheering, plenty of high school marching bands playing, and more than enough Disney characters to go around.  Running through the parks in the dark was by far one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.  To my surprise, I almost started crying when the fireworks burst into the sky to signify the start of the race.  I couldn’t explain why, but I knew, as the wind and sleet whipped into my face, as I pulled my hat low over my ears, as the people around me began to walk faster, then to jog, and then to run, that I was doing something good and right, that I was privileged, that I had been given some great and wonderful gift.

I slept like a log that night.  After seeing my friend off for the marathon, I dropped back to sleep for a couple of hours before the flight home, and then I had a dream.

I dreamed I was in a large house, a house I’d been before.  In fact, I knew I had dreamed of this house more than once, perhaps multiple times.  I walked in, and a friend of mine – at first it was the friend who was running with me, but then I wasn’t sure – had moved into a new room in the house.  I walked in and it was enormous.  It was painted a deep olive green, and it was full of angles decorated with thick ebony beams.  White patterns were stenciled onto the walls.  The room was old and lush.  I exclaimed at its beauty and its size, as it seemed to keep going and going as I explored it.   I would turn a corner and there would be more of it.  There were multiple beds of all sizes, some small enough for children.  I went into a bathroom, and it was strangely set up and not very clean.  The toilet was behind a curtain in what looked like a bathtub.  The bathtub itself was the size of a hot tub, a deep tank that you couldn’t get into unless you climbed down a ladder.  I had memories of that tub from previous dreams of house.

I remembered that the last time I had been in this place, I had found a secret passageway that led up to an attic, and that part of the path led to the basement.  I had explored these parts of the house in previous dreams.  The attic was a little girl’s room, I remembered, small and unused, with a little bed and a doll.  The basement was a series of long wooden steps that led into a catacomb of old stairs and tunnels and concrete.  I decided to find the passageways again.  I didn’t want to go to the  basement, but I did want to see that attic room again.

The passages were closed.  They had been built over with marble.  I think it was a shower stall.  I felt along it with my hands, knocking, hoping I could pull it apart, but I couldn’t.  The surface was cold, and the marble was thick and strong.  I knew I would never get to that little girl’s room again.