marathon

After the Race

For the past few months, my mom and I have been looking forward to this week. On Tuesday, she got a new hip. On Sunday, I will run my first marathon.

There are staples running along her right side, but she’s doing fine and can still wax metaphysically.  When I visited her yesterday, she said, “I had March 22 in my head for so long, I’m not really sure what comes next.”

I feel the same way. For the past 18 weeks, this race has entered my head one way or another. And two days following the race, I’m going to Portland for a week. I must have thought I would just fall off the calendar after the marathon and my trip, because the rest of spring feels distant. Plans for mid-April feel a dream.

Until spring feels real, I recommend the Haruki Murakami short story “U.F.O. in Kushiro,” reprinted in this week’s New Yorker and also available in the short story collection After the Quake.

Patience, Humility, Fortitude

There are a lot of things about marathon training, but one that is especially frustrating is that there’s no one run that makes a difference. It’s a cumulative experience of long runs, pace runs, and runs that once seemed long but are now just 8 miles. There’s no way to cram for a marathon.

My first marathon is in ten days, and Hal Higdon has told me to rest. This makes me anxious.

I’m so used to running structuring my time, getting me into Prospect Park and clearing my head, I’m not sure what to do with myself. I feel all this energy building up in my legs, and I have to store it up for a week and a half.

The other thing about racing is that unless you’re fast, and I mean superhuman fast, it doesn’t matter at all. On my last long run, I literally ran into a friend (I suppose literally is too strong—we didn’t hit each other, but we were both running and we saw each other) and then ran with him for an hour. I was talking about the race, and to check myself, I said something about how it doesn’t really matter. I’m not an Olympic athlete; I’m just some chick who likes long term goals and fresh air. But my impromptu running buddy reminded me that even a local elite runner, whose goal is to finish about 90 minutes ahead of me, would still finish about 20 minutes behind the real runners. Even for the very fast, it doesn’t matter.

It’s hard to admit to caring about something with no greater purpose and it’s hard to run 20 miles and not get a t-shirt for your effort. And until March 27, it’s hard to wait with nothing certain but more waiting.