Somewhere past mile 14 of the Land Between the Lakes Marathon, I am on the ground, and I am completely broken. When I crashed headlong onto the trail moments ago, I landed on my nose, and I both felt and heard it break. It's been gushing blood like crazy for a while now, and lots of kind strangers have stopped and offered help, but other than providing me with a stash of napkins to staunch the flow, there's not much to do but wait for the shock to wear off a bit. I realize as I sit on the side of the trail that my streak of 57 consecutive marathon finishes without a DNF will be broken now, too. There's no way that I can get up and run again, and I've lost the will to go on. Broken nose, broken streak; these don't really concern me that much. Even now, as I sit on the ground with a bloody napkin under my nose, it's my broken heart that hurts the most.
My heartbreak was my Valentine's gift this year from The Doctor. After close to two years together, he announced that he wants to be alone. He did not call it a breakup, but I don't get what else it is. He took me home, dropped me off, then quit calling or emailing. In the following weeks, I saw him once, briefly, and that was that. This has devastated me beyond any previous breakup. One day I thought that we were going to spend the rest of our lives together, and the next day - no fights, no disagreements, no shouting matches, nada - it seems that I'll be spending the rest of my life alone. For days on end, I've done little but sit at my desk and, between conference calls, cry my eyes out.
Benji and Amie and I had talked about making a road trip out of this marathon, but we had all waffled. A long drive, iffy weather, a trail marathon, and just the problem of actually feeling prepared for a race of marathon distance. But after Valentine's Day, it seemed the perfect escape; something that would get me outside myself. And that's what it's been: a perfect escape. The three of us have traveled together before, quite companionably, and it works that way for this trip also. We cross eastern Colorado and Kansas and get halfway across Missouri on our first day. That leaves us just roughly five or so hours on Friday to cross the rest of Missouri and a southern slice of Illinois (including a stop in Metropolis for photos at the giant Superman statue) before we reach Grand Rivers, Kentucky.
After picking up our packets, we head off in search of the trail, wanting a sneak preview before tomorrow morning's race. We look for but don't find the point where the race enters the trail, but we then trip upon a stretch of trail further up the road, and stop to do a test run. The test run leaves us all a bit apprehensive - there's quite a lot of mud and water on the trail, and it's much more technical and hilly than we've been expecting. It will turn out that this particular stretch of trail is more muddy than most of it, and the hills are among the biggest we'll encounter. But for now, I have a sense of foreboding for the race tomorrow.
A sense of foreboding is exactly what I had last year on Labor Day weekend. Life with The Doctor had been good, and it just kept getting better. Early in 2010, we went to Hawaii together, and then in July we went to France. We had gotten along so well at home, and now it turned out that we traveled well together as well. We came home from France, and then had an epic month of bicycle riding in August. Life seemed almost too good to be true. And then in the course of an afternoon, it started to fall apart. The Doctor's son, we learned that weekend, was hooked on some serious drugs. Heroin. Narcotics. You name it, he was using. The Doctor yanked him out of college and sent him to rehab. But as the son started his withdrawal from drugs, The Doctor started his withdrawal from life. I saw it, little by little, but couldn't quite comprehend. Or maybe I handled The Doctor's withdrawal the same way that he handled his son's drug habit: seeing it but not really knowing for sure, and not wanting it to be true, because then you have to deal with it.
On race morning, it's time to just deal with the trail. It will be what it will be.
Benji and Amie and I get to the starting area early, listening to NPR in the dark in the warm van while waiting for the sun to come up and the wind to die down. There's little pomp and circumstance at the start of the race, and then we're running. The race configuration is a lollipop, where the first and last 1.75 miles are on the same asphalt stretch of road before we hit the loop of trail that we'll run two laps on. Amie takes off and is soon a few steps in front of me, but then as we climb the first of two not insubstantial hills, we're together again. We stay together and chat about how these hills are going to look at the end of the race, and then we hit the trail, and I watch as Amie takes off in front of me. I'm happy with this, since I know that I really need to run the trail myself. It's too easy to fall if you're not completely concentrating.
It's easy to fall off the wagon, also, and that's the elephant that sits in every room when the son comes home from rehab in early December. He's drug-free and sober, ready to lead a clean life. He says all the right things, shows the right attitude. He goes to his daily meetings. He gets a job, says he just wants to work and ski for the rest of the winter. It all seems good.
The trail is booby-trapped with rocks and roots, but I manage to stay on my feet. People are passing me like I'm standing still. In principle, I'm okay with this; I have no delusions of finishing this thing fast at all. In practice, the passing starts to get to me. The problem is that I like a margin of at least five or six feet between me and the person in front of me so I can see what's coming. But when people go around me, one after another after another, it blocks my vision and destroys my comfort zone. Twice, I stumble and fall - just little falls, a skinned knee, nothing major. It's a big distraction, though, so I decide to start just stepping off the trail and waiting while people pass me. It's not efficient, but it's better than going down.
But then, I go down hard. It hurts. It's a full-on body plant, and I'm not even sure what happened. The odd thing is that it happens when I'm entirely alone. I take a moment to get up, brush myself off, and then I'm running again, a little more skinned up, a little worse for wear, but not damaged badly. I think that I really need to be more careful. An aid station comes up, and I like the chance to stop for a moment, take a gel, drink a cup or two of water, and then start to run again. Really, how much more can I fall?
But falling is easy to do. In only a week or so, the son starts skipping meetings, claiming that he doesn't have time. He gets a second job, this one in a restaurant, and we start to think, uh-oh, not a good environment. We see him on a Sunday in early January, though, and he seems good - vibrant, happy, alive. Laughing. But appearances are so deceptive. Just two days later comes the call: he's using again, and has been using since a week after he got home from rehab. He's shooting up heroin again, there's cocaine, who knows what else.
So The Doctor does what he has said he would do: tells the son he's done rescuing him, and he walks away. He walks away entirely. Tough love, the ultimate. Everyone says it's the right thing to do, but "everyone" doesn't have to deal with the emotional aftermath. On the surface, The Doctor seems to be dealing with things, but underneath, who knows what is going on?
After the aid station at the visitor center where we were yesterday, we run onto the muddy and hilly part that we pre-ran yesterday. I get through this part just fine, and I think I'm home free. But the trail becomes covered with leaves, and the leaves hide the rocks and roots, and soon, I've done a second full-body plant. Oh Lord, it hurts. Somebody not far behind me sees me go down and helps me up, and makes excuses on my behalf - it's the hidden rocks and roots. I just think I'm inept, but I appreciate the concern and the absolution.
For the next month, I feel The Doctor moving away, withdrawing, becoming more sad and more alone and more removed, and there is nothing I can do or say to reverse the trend. I think this is his primal scream, his way of dealing with his ultimate loss. His son is gone. Physically, the son is back in rehab once again, but he's lost to his father. No matter what, the father-son relationship they had is forever gone, to be replaced by what? And it's while I'm worrying about him, trying to help him, suffering with him, that he pushes me away and says "I want to be alone". Which, of course, means that suddenly I'm alone, too.
Just when I think I've got it under control - I'm taking it *so* easy - I go down hard a third time. It's almost an exact replay of the second fall, only it hurts that much more this time. Again, somebody helps me up; again, somebody points to the leaf-covered trail. The good Samaritan offers to stay with me, but I assure him I'm okay, that I just need to walk a moment. So I get up and start walking, and then it all hits me: the loneliness, the sense of failure, the pain of it all. Out of nowhere and everywhere comes a deep sob, and suddenly I'm stopped on the side of the trail, crying so hard that I'm barely able to breathe. I wonder what the hell it is I'm doing out here, and I'm afraid of the miles ahead, and I want to quit. I don't know if I can go another lap on these trails. I'm afraid of hurting myself badly; I'm afraid that I'm already hurting too badly, emotionally, spiritually, to go on. But there is no easy way out, and only trail in front of me and trail behind me, so I gingerly set out again. This time, I am outrageously careful of the leaf-strewn path, and I slow to a walk through any thing that looks like gnarly roots or rocks. Little by little, I get my head back in the game, and pretty soon I'm at the start of the second lap, and I think, yes, I can do this.
In The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz tells us "Don't take things personally". I've been trying to do that with The Doctor and his disappearance from my life, but it's hard. When you're in a relationship, and the other person takes off, how can it not be at least a little bit about you? So instead of being a good new-ager and taking this advice to heart, I've been thinking negative thoughts, and coming up short. I'm unloved, and probably unlovable. Why else would The Doctor leave me precisely at the time when you would think he would need someone the most?
So now that I've been alone much of the time on this trail, I've picked up a party, and it's a personal pity party. It's a potluck, which means that anything and everything is fodder for this mental feeding frenzy. There's barely room on the trail for everyone who comes: the father I didn't have growing up, the boyfriends I didn't have in high school or college, my first love - who turned out to be a cheating bastard, the girlfriends who were once BFFs but who disappeared from my life without so much as a goodbye, the husband who abandoned me for his car clubs, the babies I never got to have, the grandchildren I'll never hold on my lap, and finally the guy I thought I might marry and spend the rest of my life with but who disappeared down his own rabbit hole after his son broke his heart. It takes a lot of energy to entertain a party of this size. There's not really much energy left over to watch for rocks and roots.
And then I'm down. Hard. A total face plant. I didn't see it coming: how could I? I was too busy with the pity party. But clearly the racing gods are unhappy that my head is not in this race, and they've offered the ultimate comeuppance. I'm certain that my nose is broken, and suddenly, nothing much else matters. The party has scattered, and there's just Renee - the angel who was behind me when I went down - and me, sitting on the side of the trail, waiting for help to arrive.
But help doesn't magically appear, and after twenty minutes or so, we decide to get up and try to walk to the nearest aid station. I feel bad for ruining this woman's race, but she is exceedingly kind, and I need this kindness right now. Oddly, as we walk along, I no longer trip and stumble over the trail. It no longer scares me. I'm intent on keeping my nose from bleeding too much, and still I'm doing a better job of staying on my feet.
Eventually, Renee says, "you know, it's only 9:30 in the morning", and then "we could walk the rest of this thing and still be done before the cutoff". As I grow more steady on my feet, the idea takes hold. I think about my 50 states goal and how few options there are for Kentucky marathons. I think about coming all this way to go home without a finisher's medal. I think about how I'm actually seeing the scenery now that I'm walking.
By the time we reach the next aid station, at mile 16, there are only 10 miles to go, and I've made up my mind. Renee takes off at a run. The folks at the aid station give me a Ziploc full of ice and a handful of ibuprofen and a new batch of paper towels for my still-bleeding nose. I ask them to send word to Benji and Amie, who will be waiting a long time for me at the finish line, and I head off to complete the thing. The pity party is gone. Twirling thoughts of The Doctor and his son: gone. Just me and the trail.
Just me and the trail and all the good people who encourage me as they pass me. They all exclaim as they go by, and many of them say "I saw all that blood on the trail back there!" (It must have been a prodigious amount.) Around mile 18 or 19, Lee falls in step behind me, and keeps me company until we get off the trail with less than two miles to go. The miles have flown by; I am not all that tired, nothing like a marathon that I've run, and nothing like a marathon with this many hills. I'm just moving forward.
The racing gods aren't done with me yet, though, as I find on the final stretch to the finish. Once we hit the asphalt, I've decided to run again, just to get this thing done. At some point, I look down to my Garmin to see how many miles I've covered, and in so doing I step off the pavement, twist my ankle, and fall. It's the ultimate of adding insult to injury. I had protected my hands from scrapes by keeping my gloves on even when it got warm, and finally took them off when I hit the pavement. So now, on my final approach to the finish, I've scraped my hands to smithereens, too. Sigh. There's no pride left, though, just a need to get up and finish. So I get up and start running again.
Amie is waiting at the finish line. There's very little hoopla, just a narrow chute, a modest medal, and a short walk to the community center where I can wash up and get some post-race food and drink. We hang around long enough so that I can thank Lee properly for his company, and then we're on our way home, where I'll start the process of healing all that's broken.
In the end, it turns out that dealing with a broken heart is a lot like dealing with a broken nose. At first, you have to stop and sit by the side of things and just let the blood and tears flow. They will subside, eventually, even though at first the torrents seem completely unstoppable. When you finally start to move again, it will be with baby steps, much slower and more cautiously than you're used to, but this is okay. It's what feels right, just now, if anything feels "right". You'll quit thinking, and you'll just let the pain wash over you, because you know that you can't heal until you've accepted the pain. You believe that at some point you'll feel like getting on with things again, but for right now, you'll accept the kindness of friends and strangers alike. It's how you get moving again.
I asked a friend once, not long ago, when I first saw The Doctor moving away from me, "how many times can you get your heart broken?", and she replied, "as many times as you're willing to risk it". That's a lot like running marathons. When you finish one, you are tired and hurting and you think you can't possibly ever do this again. But when you get a little distance from the pain, and you give your broken self a little time to heal, you know that you'll get through it, and at some time you'll be willing to risk it again. It helps to be able to laugh at yourself a little along the way, and with a nose like Bozo's that's not so hard to do.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Saturday, December 04, 2010
We Are Marshall
It's Sunday, November 7th, and I'm at mile 20 of the Huntington Marshall University Marathon in Huntington, West Virginia. Mile 20 is that place where you have to start to really dig deep, and you know that it's all mind over matter. It has turned out to be a perfect marathon day: I've seen a few time and temperature displays in the last few miles, and they have varied from 40 degrees to 44 and back to 42. The sun is shining bright in a cloudless sky, and there is absolutely no wind. I'm having an okay day, although I'm a bit disappointed with my pace right now - but I'll get to that. The tough thing is that I'm struggling to find the motivation to pick it up for these last six miles. And then I remember: the football. I've been looking forward to the football for months, ever since I read about it on the race website. And with that thought, I know I'm going to finish this thing strong.
But....let's start back at the beginning. And to start back at the beginning takes us back to Friday night, with Leann picking me up at the oddly remote little airport in Charleston, the capitol of West Virginia. It has taken me, quite literally, all day to get here. And we still have an hour's drive to Huntington.
The hour goes by quickly, though, as does pretty much all time spent with Leann. We laugh, tell stories, and laugh some more. Then we get down to business and start to look for food, which is more of a challenge than you might think. We get off the freeway in Barboursville, just a bit east of Huntington, as we've spotted the signs of the ubiquitous chains: Applebees, Chilis, Ruby Tuesday, etc. Surely we can find something decent to eat at one of these places. Surely, that is, if any of these places were still open. After many circuitous laps of the maze that is the roadway around this shopping center area, we settle on dinner at IHOP. At first I'm thrilled: breakfast! Then I realize that we'll most likely be back here for real breakfast in about 12 hours, so I decide I should have dinner food instead of pancakes and eggs. As I eat the bland turkey sandwich, I think: first mistake of the weekend. There's a reason IHOP is known for breakfast food, and not dinners.
But the weekend company more than makes up for the food disappointment. Leann and I continue on to Huntington, and then across the river into Ohio where our Comfort Suites hotel room awaits. It's late when we arrive - midnight or so - and Melissa arrives moments later. It's a slumber party!
Saturday morning arrives, and there's just no other way to put it: it's cold. Really cold. The sky is dark and cloudy, and the wind is whipping around, and it's cold. It seems like bad karma to complain about the cold, what with my recent history of way-too-hot race temperatures, but it's just the God's-honest-truth. Besides, I don't really have to complain. My two thin-blooded companions for the weekend are both from the South, and they handle the bulk of the complaining. I figure this helps me conserve some karma. They are both, after all, much faster runners than me, so they can afford the karma thing more than I can.
We spend the day doing typical pre-marathon stuff: searching out food (the IHOP, that beacon of breakfast food, is too crowded Saturday morning, so we opt for pancakes and eggs at the Bob Evans instead), going to packet pickup, finding my refrigerator magnet, getting provisions for race morning at a local supermarket, and - of course - fretting about the weather. We drive a good deal of the race course, and confirm that it is, indeed, as flat as advertised, which is not an easy feat given that we are in West Virginia, and other than this one little stretch of earth that is the city of Huntington, it appears that there are no other flat spots in the state whatsoever. We even drive down the road across the border into Kentucky just for grins. Then we fret about the weather some more. And then we go in search of food again.
One of the great benefits of this race is that your race entry fee includes a complimentary pasta dinner, so we head back to the packet pickup locale on the Marshall University campus. The pasta dinner is well run: ample quantities of spaghetti with marina sauce and a lettuce salad on the side. Pretty basic, but since it's free, nobody is complaining. Besides stoking up on carbs, we are expanding our social circle at this dinner. We meet fellow v-teamer Mark Kramer here, and fellow Taper Babs and her husband Tim. We also meet a few Marathon Maniacs: Greg and Pascal. There's nothing like pre-race chatter with other runners to get you stoked up for a marathon. Before heading back to the hotel, Mark directs us to the local Cold Stone Creamery so that we can complete our carb-loading with yummy ice cream. Even though we're all freezing, nobody passes on the ice cream.
Race morning finds us scraping the windshield with our room keys. Frost. Man, is it cold! But we've all bundled up, and the heat builds up in the car quickly. The outside temperature gauge on Leann's car varies from 26 to 29 on the way over into Huntington. It's dark, and it's cold. But we keep telling ourselves that this is far better than a hot marathon. It's got to be.
One advantage of running a small marathon that starts and ends on a college campus is the accessibility of the rec center and a place to a) stay warm until just minutes before the race start, and b) use real flush toilets. Marathons tend to bring your view of life down to essentials. Warmth and flush toilets. We're just about ready to head over to the start line, and I decide to avail myself of the flush toilets just one last time, so I tell Leann and Melissa to take off without me, figuring that I'll find them at the starting line. Sadly, I won't see either of them again until after the finish line.
The start line is a zoo. It's not a huge race, but with a half marathon starting at the same time, the starting area is crowded. I do see Pascal - the Marathon Maniac from last night's dinner - so we line up together and chat for a few minutes. Just before the start is signalled, I spy Lynne from the Taper Madness group, and call out to her. She and I are chatting, and end up rolling over the start line - wherever it is - together. The thing is, I never do see the official start line. This race is chip timed, but there is no chip mat at the start. This means that you "eat" the time you spend getting across the start, but since I'm more interested in chatting with Lynne, I miss the opportunity to capture the time it takes me to get across the start.
But steps into the race, I take off. I feel ready to run, and, quite frankly, I figure the harder I run right now, the faster I'll build up some heat. I've worn a large black garbage bag as a skirt to keep my legs warm, and now as we start, I decide to get rid of it. But that's easier said than done. I tug on the knot I've tied at my waist, and instead of tearing, the knot just gets tighter. I start to wonder if I'll have to wear the plastic skirt for the entire race! A few strategic pokes with my fingernails, and I make headway, and finally tear the thing off. Who knew that plastic bags were so durable? It's crowded for a short time, but we have pretty much the entire road, and before you know it, we're at the Mile 1 marker. First mile: 9:30. With the delay to cross the start line, I figure that I'm probably running around a 9 minute pace. Mile 2 proves out my theory: 9 minutes flat. I've forgotten my heart rate monitor this trip, so I am running completely by perceived effort, and after the second mile, I settle in to a solid 9:15 pace. It feels good. It feels natural. All systems go.
It's chilly, but not too chilly. My legs (I'm wearing shorts) are a little cold, but otherwise I'm fine with a long-sleeved shirt, singlet, and a second (throwaway) long-sleeved shirt. Gloves keep my hands warm, and a headband keeps my ears warm. I'm actually very comfortable after just a few miles.
The first 3 miles are a loop that takes us east of Marshall University and then u-turns to return us back to campus again where we cross the starting area, just heading in the opposite direction. Just after Mile 4, we take a detour into Riverfront Park, crossing through the 20 foot high floodwalls that protect downtown Huntington from the Ohio River. The river doesn't look dangerous at all this morning in the early, cold sunlight: mist rises from the water like a dream. We don't get this view very long before getting directed back onto the city streets.
Much of this race is through parts of Huntington that are just plain ugly and poor. But those sections serve as connectors to the prettier parts of the city, and whoever designed this course clearly understands where those pretty parts are. And whoever designed the race also understands how to supply a race with lots of fluids. There are aid stations every mile or two for the length of the course, something that is a treat, especially in a race of this size.
My solid 9:15 pace takes a small hit at Mile 6 where I have to stop and wait at an aid station while the volunteers try to catch up to the demand for water. If I had not just taken a gel, I would have skipped this stop, but I figure that I can afford the time. I have no time goals at all for today. My only goal is to finish strong, and I know that in order to do that I need to stay conservative and I need to stay on my nutrition plan. It's also clear - from even before the race starts - that I'm going to need a port-a-potty stop sometime in the race, so I try to keep myself from obsessing about a short delay now when I know I'll have a longer one sometime down the road.
The race moves along, and now we're running along a parkway that will take us to our first lap around the very pretty Ritter Park, and it's our first chance to see the race leaders coming back in the opposite direction. I look for Melissa, and I look for Leann, but I don't see either of them. The lap around Ritter Park is nice: a solid, crushed gravel surface. Even though it's early November, it seems just past peak leaf-viewing season here, and there are lots of trees and pretty leaves in the park.
After the lap around Ritter Park, we head back west, and now I get to see runners behind me. Again, I look for familiar faces and see none. I pass Sara, a 50-stater I know from Duluth, and we exchange greetings. Just before Mile 12, I spy a port-a-john without a line, and finally take my break. I only lose a couple of minutes at this stop, but it changes the entire race. Before the stop, my pace is like clockwork: 9:15 all the way. After the stop, I cannot buy a pace that's faster than 9:30 or 9:40.
It's a disappointment to see the miles click by at this slower pace, but as much as I try to will my legs to move faster, this is, apparently, the new pace for the rest of the race. The miles get lonelier and lonelier as we head out through some of the not-so-scenic parts of Huntington. Just around Mile 16, we make a u-turn and head back into the center of town. By now, the weather has turned perfect. The sun is shining brightly, there is no wind whatsoever, and the temperature is heavenly. I ditch my throwaway shirt.
Even though I'm moving slower than I'd like, I am managing to pick off people, one at a time. We go back through Ritter Park - this time in the opposite direction, and then head back over to Riverfront Park. Throughout the day, I've been doing mental math. Early on - when I owned that 9:15 pace - I started thinking that I might just run my fastest marathon of the year today. Now, with my post-port-a-let slowdown, I'm adjusting my projection, and not coming up with anything that is very motivating. Until, that is, I remember about the football.
Have you heard the story about the 1970 Marshall University football team, the one where the entire team and the coaching and administrative staff died in a tragic plane crash? And how the entire football program went through a crisis after that, but the community - both college and town - rebuilt the team? Yeah, that one, the Marshall University team of "We Are Marshall", the team cheer that inspired the movie that portrayed the events. Well, this marathon finishes in the Marshall University football stadium, and one of the most unique aspects of the race is that you get the opportunity to run the final hundred yards of the marathon right down the center of the football field, carrying a football.
You could say that I've been looking forward to this. You could say that it was one of the deciding factors when I chose my West Virginia marathon. You could say that it's the thing that changes my lame 9:40 pace for the last few miles into an accelerating pace in the final miles of the marathon, from 9:29 to 9:24 to an 8:53 mile 26 pace, my fastest mile of the day. You could say all of those things and they'd be true.
The last mile of the race takes us through the campus, and although the brick surface is hell on marathon-fatigued legs, this detour is perfect. The campus is pretty - not stunning, but college-red-brick-pretty. We run past the memorial fountain that is dedicated to all the souls lost in that tragedy in 1970. Runners earlier in the day left flowers at the fountain, a tribute.
I've been following two guys, and trying like crazy to catch and pass them. One is in a red shirt and black sweat pants, the other in a black shirt and red shorts. Finally, finally, as I pour it on in this final mile, I creep up behind them and finally, finally, I sprint around them. To my complete surprise (and bafflement), one of them yells my name as I run past. What? I turn to look, and see that I've caught up with Pascal. What a long strange trip this has been: to cross the starting line with him, and now to converge at the finish line.
We run across a street, pass mile 26 (oh, that sweet mile marker!), and into the stadium. The steep ramp down into the stadium is hard on these tired legs, but I'm so excited to take my football from an outstretched hand that I ignore the pain. I grab that ball, and I feel like I'm every famous football player I've ever seen run down the field. I feel like I'm carrying the ball for each of those lost souls from 1970. I get all choked up and almost start to cry, but I've learned over the years that it just doesn't work to run and cry at the same time, so I choose to keep running. The final one hundred yards of a marathon have never seemed so short, or gone by so quickly, as these hundred yards.
How good I feel at the end of this marathon more than makes up for how lousy I felt at the finish of my last marathon in New Hampshire. There are Marathon Maniacs and 50 Staters hanging around the finish area, and I feel right at home with them. Leann follows me across the finish line shortly, and we head back to the hotel where Melissa has already showered (more than one reason we call her Speedy!). Before long, we are scattering back to our homes, promising to meet again soon for another long run.
Every marathon has its own set of memories, some better than others; some you'd like to forget as soon as you stop running, and others you want to live on and on in your memory. I know as I cross this finish line that this marathon will be the latter kind of marathon. I want to go back and run that final hundred yards again and again, even if I have to run the full 26 miles again to earn the right. In my dreams, I am grabbing the football again, and I'm flying down that field with the sun shining brightly overhead. It turns out that this marathon, which started out as just another checkmark (the 42nd, to be exact) in my journey across the 50 states, is something larger, much more meaningful. Maybe the spirit of the 1970 football team infuses everything and everyone who runs in this stadium. As I leave Huntington behind, I can't help but feel certain that all of us who ran here today can say with pride "We Are Marshall".
But....let's start back at the beginning. And to start back at the beginning takes us back to Friday night, with Leann picking me up at the oddly remote little airport in Charleston, the capitol of West Virginia. It has taken me, quite literally, all day to get here. And we still have an hour's drive to Huntington.
The hour goes by quickly, though, as does pretty much all time spent with Leann. We laugh, tell stories, and laugh some more. Then we get down to business and start to look for food, which is more of a challenge than you might think. We get off the freeway in Barboursville, just a bit east of Huntington, as we've spotted the signs of the ubiquitous chains: Applebees, Chilis, Ruby Tuesday, etc. Surely we can find something decent to eat at one of these places. Surely, that is, if any of these places were still open. After many circuitous laps of the maze that is the roadway around this shopping center area, we settle on dinner at IHOP. At first I'm thrilled: breakfast! Then I realize that we'll most likely be back here for real breakfast in about 12 hours, so I decide I should have dinner food instead of pancakes and eggs. As I eat the bland turkey sandwich, I think: first mistake of the weekend. There's a reason IHOP is known for breakfast food, and not dinners.
But the weekend company more than makes up for the food disappointment. Leann and I continue on to Huntington, and then across the river into Ohio where our Comfort Suites hotel room awaits. It's late when we arrive - midnight or so - and Melissa arrives moments later. It's a slumber party!
Saturday morning arrives, and there's just no other way to put it: it's cold. Really cold. The sky is dark and cloudy, and the wind is whipping around, and it's cold. It seems like bad karma to complain about the cold, what with my recent history of way-too-hot race temperatures, but it's just the God's-honest-truth. Besides, I don't really have to complain. My two thin-blooded companions for the weekend are both from the South, and they handle the bulk of the complaining. I figure this helps me conserve some karma. They are both, after all, much faster runners than me, so they can afford the karma thing more than I can.
We spend the day doing typical pre-marathon stuff: searching out food (the IHOP, that beacon of breakfast food, is too crowded Saturday morning, so we opt for pancakes and eggs at the Bob Evans instead), going to packet pickup, finding my refrigerator magnet, getting provisions for race morning at a local supermarket, and - of course - fretting about the weather. We drive a good deal of the race course, and confirm that it is, indeed, as flat as advertised, which is not an easy feat given that we are in West Virginia, and other than this one little stretch of earth that is the city of Huntington, it appears that there are no other flat spots in the state whatsoever. We even drive down the road across the border into Kentucky just for grins. Then we fret about the weather some more. And then we go in search of food again.
One of the great benefits of this race is that your race entry fee includes a complimentary pasta dinner, so we head back to the packet pickup locale on the Marshall University campus. The pasta dinner is well run: ample quantities of spaghetti with marina sauce and a lettuce salad on the side. Pretty basic, but since it's free, nobody is complaining. Besides stoking up on carbs, we are expanding our social circle at this dinner. We meet fellow v-teamer Mark Kramer here, and fellow Taper Babs and her husband Tim. We also meet a few Marathon Maniacs: Greg and Pascal. There's nothing like pre-race chatter with other runners to get you stoked up for a marathon. Before heading back to the hotel, Mark directs us to the local Cold Stone Creamery so that we can complete our carb-loading with yummy ice cream. Even though we're all freezing, nobody passes on the ice cream.
Race morning finds us scraping the windshield with our room keys. Frost. Man, is it cold! But we've all bundled up, and the heat builds up in the car quickly. The outside temperature gauge on Leann's car varies from 26 to 29 on the way over into Huntington. It's dark, and it's cold. But we keep telling ourselves that this is far better than a hot marathon. It's got to be.
One advantage of running a small marathon that starts and ends on a college campus is the accessibility of the rec center and a place to a) stay warm until just minutes before the race start, and b) use real flush toilets. Marathons tend to bring your view of life down to essentials. Warmth and flush toilets. We're just about ready to head over to the start line, and I decide to avail myself of the flush toilets just one last time, so I tell Leann and Melissa to take off without me, figuring that I'll find them at the starting line. Sadly, I won't see either of them again until after the finish line.
The start line is a zoo. It's not a huge race, but with a half marathon starting at the same time, the starting area is crowded. I do see Pascal - the Marathon Maniac from last night's dinner - so we line up together and chat for a few minutes. Just before the start is signalled, I spy Lynne from the Taper Madness group, and call out to her. She and I are chatting, and end up rolling over the start line - wherever it is - together. The thing is, I never do see the official start line. This race is chip timed, but there is no chip mat at the start. This means that you "eat" the time you spend getting across the start, but since I'm more interested in chatting with Lynne, I miss the opportunity to capture the time it takes me to get across the start.
But steps into the race, I take off. I feel ready to run, and, quite frankly, I figure the harder I run right now, the faster I'll build up some heat. I've worn a large black garbage bag as a skirt to keep my legs warm, and now as we start, I decide to get rid of it. But that's easier said than done. I tug on the knot I've tied at my waist, and instead of tearing, the knot just gets tighter. I start to wonder if I'll have to wear the plastic skirt for the entire race! A few strategic pokes with my fingernails, and I make headway, and finally tear the thing off. Who knew that plastic bags were so durable? It's crowded for a short time, but we have pretty much the entire road, and before you know it, we're at the Mile 1 marker. First mile: 9:30. With the delay to cross the start line, I figure that I'm probably running around a 9 minute pace. Mile 2 proves out my theory: 9 minutes flat. I've forgotten my heart rate monitor this trip, so I am running completely by perceived effort, and after the second mile, I settle in to a solid 9:15 pace. It feels good. It feels natural. All systems go.
It's chilly, but not too chilly. My legs (I'm wearing shorts) are a little cold, but otherwise I'm fine with a long-sleeved shirt, singlet, and a second (throwaway) long-sleeved shirt. Gloves keep my hands warm, and a headband keeps my ears warm. I'm actually very comfortable after just a few miles.
The first 3 miles are a loop that takes us east of Marshall University and then u-turns to return us back to campus again where we cross the starting area, just heading in the opposite direction. Just after Mile 4, we take a detour into Riverfront Park, crossing through the 20 foot high floodwalls that protect downtown Huntington from the Ohio River. The river doesn't look dangerous at all this morning in the early, cold sunlight: mist rises from the water like a dream. We don't get this view very long before getting directed back onto the city streets.
Much of this race is through parts of Huntington that are just plain ugly and poor. But those sections serve as connectors to the prettier parts of the city, and whoever designed this course clearly understands where those pretty parts are. And whoever designed the race also understands how to supply a race with lots of fluids. There are aid stations every mile or two for the length of the course, something that is a treat, especially in a race of this size.
My solid 9:15 pace takes a small hit at Mile 6 where I have to stop and wait at an aid station while the volunteers try to catch up to the demand for water. If I had not just taken a gel, I would have skipped this stop, but I figure that I can afford the time. I have no time goals at all for today. My only goal is to finish strong, and I know that in order to do that I need to stay conservative and I need to stay on my nutrition plan. It's also clear - from even before the race starts - that I'm going to need a port-a-potty stop sometime in the race, so I try to keep myself from obsessing about a short delay now when I know I'll have a longer one sometime down the road.
The race moves along, and now we're running along a parkway that will take us to our first lap around the very pretty Ritter Park, and it's our first chance to see the race leaders coming back in the opposite direction. I look for Melissa, and I look for Leann, but I don't see either of them. The lap around Ritter Park is nice: a solid, crushed gravel surface. Even though it's early November, it seems just past peak leaf-viewing season here, and there are lots of trees and pretty leaves in the park.
After the lap around Ritter Park, we head back west, and now I get to see runners behind me. Again, I look for familiar faces and see none. I pass Sara, a 50-stater I know from Duluth, and we exchange greetings. Just before Mile 12, I spy a port-a-john without a line, and finally take my break. I only lose a couple of minutes at this stop, but it changes the entire race. Before the stop, my pace is like clockwork: 9:15 all the way. After the stop, I cannot buy a pace that's faster than 9:30 or 9:40.
It's a disappointment to see the miles click by at this slower pace, but as much as I try to will my legs to move faster, this is, apparently, the new pace for the rest of the race. The miles get lonelier and lonelier as we head out through some of the not-so-scenic parts of Huntington. Just around Mile 16, we make a u-turn and head back into the center of town. By now, the weather has turned perfect. The sun is shining brightly, there is no wind whatsoever, and the temperature is heavenly. I ditch my throwaway shirt.
Even though I'm moving slower than I'd like, I am managing to pick off people, one at a time. We go back through Ritter Park - this time in the opposite direction, and then head back over to Riverfront Park. Throughout the day, I've been doing mental math. Early on - when I owned that 9:15 pace - I started thinking that I might just run my fastest marathon of the year today. Now, with my post-port-a-let slowdown, I'm adjusting my projection, and not coming up with anything that is very motivating. Until, that is, I remember about the football.
Have you heard the story about the 1970 Marshall University football team, the one where the entire team and the coaching and administrative staff died in a tragic plane crash? And how the entire football program went through a crisis after that, but the community - both college and town - rebuilt the team? Yeah, that one, the Marshall University team of "We Are Marshall", the team cheer that inspired the movie that portrayed the events. Well, this marathon finishes in the Marshall University football stadium, and one of the most unique aspects of the race is that you get the opportunity to run the final hundred yards of the marathon right down the center of the football field, carrying a football.
You could say that I've been looking forward to this. You could say that it was one of the deciding factors when I chose my West Virginia marathon. You could say that it's the thing that changes my lame 9:40 pace for the last few miles into an accelerating pace in the final miles of the marathon, from 9:29 to 9:24 to an 8:53 mile 26 pace, my fastest mile of the day. You could say all of those things and they'd be true.
The last mile of the race takes us through the campus, and although the brick surface is hell on marathon-fatigued legs, this detour is perfect. The campus is pretty - not stunning, but college-red-brick-pretty. We run past the memorial fountain that is dedicated to all the souls lost in that tragedy in 1970. Runners earlier in the day left flowers at the fountain, a tribute.
I've been following two guys, and trying like crazy to catch and pass them. One is in a red shirt and black sweat pants, the other in a black shirt and red shorts. Finally, finally, as I pour it on in this final mile, I creep up behind them and finally, finally, I sprint around them. To my complete surprise (and bafflement), one of them yells my name as I run past. What? I turn to look, and see that I've caught up with Pascal. What a long strange trip this has been: to cross the starting line with him, and now to converge at the finish line.
We run across a street, pass mile 26 (oh, that sweet mile marker!), and into the stadium. The steep ramp down into the stadium is hard on these tired legs, but I'm so excited to take my football from an outstretched hand that I ignore the pain. I grab that ball, and I feel like I'm every famous football player I've ever seen run down the field. I feel like I'm carrying the ball for each of those lost souls from 1970. I get all choked up and almost start to cry, but I've learned over the years that it just doesn't work to run and cry at the same time, so I choose to keep running. The final one hundred yards of a marathon have never seemed so short, or gone by so quickly, as these hundred yards.
How good I feel at the end of this marathon more than makes up for how lousy I felt at the finish of my last marathon in New Hampshire. There are Marathon Maniacs and 50 Staters hanging around the finish area, and I feel right at home with them. Leann follows me across the finish line shortly, and we head back to the hotel where Melissa has already showered (more than one reason we call her Speedy!). Before long, we are scattering back to our homes, promising to meet again soon for another long run.
Every marathon has its own set of memories, some better than others; some you'd like to forget as soon as you stop running, and others you want to live on and on in your memory. I know as I cross this finish line that this marathon will be the latter kind of marathon. I want to go back and run that final hundred yards again and again, even if I have to run the full 26 miles again to earn the right. In my dreams, I am grabbing the football again, and I'm flying down that field with the sun shining brightly overhead. It turns out that this marathon, which started out as just another checkmark (the 42nd, to be exact) in my journey across the 50 states, is something larger, much more meaningful. Maybe the spirit of the 1970 football team infuses everything and everyone who runs in this stadium. As I leave Huntington behind, I can't help but feel certain that all of us who ran here today can say with pride "We Are Marshall".
Sunday, October 03, 2010
Clarence DeMar Marathon 2010
Devotees of the Boston Marathon know the legends of that race well, and few of the legends are better than that of Clarence DeMar, who won the race an unequalled seven times. The first of these victories - in 1911 - was at the age of 22; the last of these victories - in 1930 - at the age of 41. Four of these times he set a course record. Along the way, Mr. DeMar, who found himself working up the road from Boston in New Hampshire, earned a master's degree from Boston University - by walking, running, and hitchhiking the 90 miles each way each week. Could there be a better inspiration for a marathon?
Back in 1978, the folks in Keene, New Hampshire, decided that this was, indeed, a great inspiration, and they organized to form a marathon in Clarence DeMar's honor; 2010 represents the 33rd annual running of the event. The Clarence DeMar Marathon is a marathoner's marathon: short on frills, easy on the entry fee, but full of all the things that a runner truly needs - things like aid stations (staffed by the local cross country team) and accurate mile markers. These things alone would all lead me to choose the Clarence DeMar for my New Hampshire marathon, a choice I made many years ago, when I first started down this crazy 50 states quest. The fact that the marathon is in the fall - in the peak of fall foliage season - was a bonus. The added fact that my friend Leann also wanted to run the race this particular fall closed the deal.
Leann and I meet up at the Manchester, NH, airport on a warm Friday afternoon, and head directly out to do some sight-seeing along the way to our hotel in Brattleboro, Vermont. Our drive takes us through the southern tier of New Hampshire, all ablaze in fall colors. The leaves are a few weeks shy of being at their peak, which means that every truly colorful tree catches our attention. We take the advice of the nice ladies at the information booth at the airport and make a detour up to the historic mill town of Harrisville. We stop next to a beautiful, placid little lake, and I announce "I want to move here!" as we step out of the car. It's a sentiment I'll repeat many times over the next few days.
I've managed my running shoe rotation badly leading up to this marathon. This means that I have brought two choices of footwear for the race: an old pair of shoes with more than 300 miles on them, and a brand new, fresh-out-of-the-box pair. I'm reluctant to start out a marathon with the old shoes, but not quite daring enough to go with the new shoes without at least putting a few miles on them. That means I do something Saturday morning that is out of the norm for me: run. Lucky for me, Leann normally puts in a few miles the day before a marathon, so I have a running partner. We drive around the Brattleboro area, looking for a suitable place, and stumble upon Fort Dummer State Park. The park is closed for the season, so we park at the fenced-off entrance, and have the leaf-covered, shady road through the park pretty much to ourselves. Well, except for the snake that we roust. It's a lovely short run, and the shoes feel great. Time to go sight-seeing!
We spend the rest of the day enjoying fall in New England, starting out with a trip to a local diner on one of the many scenic byways outside of Brattleboro, where we do an admirable job of carbing-up for the race on Sunday. Breakfast consists of scrambled eggs, hash browns, half a waffle, and a couple of pancakes. Mmmm. We meander around the hills, seeking out covered bridges amid the foliage. By mid-afternoon, we've made our way back into New Hampshire, and to Gilsum, where the race starts. The race is billed as a net-downhill course, and we've decided to scope out the race course. It sure feels a lot more like rolling hills in the car than like a constant downhill, and that worries me some. But the scenery - especially in the first half - is spectacular: heavily wooded with trees that are turning, the scenic Ashuelot River on the left hand side of this narrow rural road. This, I think, might just be one of the prettiest marathons I've run.
Sunday morning we are at the Keene State College location bright and early to board buses that will take us out to Gilsum. Friday and Saturday were both warm days, but the forecasted cooler weather has hit New Hampshire, and it's pleasantly chilly as we wait in Gilsum for the race start. Every time I shiver or say "brrr!", I follow up with "but that's not a complaint!" I'm praying for the cooler temps to hang around until I finish this thing.
Leann has informed me that this is merely a training run for her (she has several more races - including a couple of ultras - coming up in the next few weeks), and that she plans to run it slowly. "The plan is: no miles faster than ten minutes per mile." I think that sounds fairly reasonable for me, also, given that I have a lousy base coming into this thing, after cracking my knee back in late June. Leann and I have run a few marathons together in the past, and I love her company. When she asks me my plans, my reply is "just to hold on and try to finish this thing", although I'm actually thinking that I'll tag along with her as long as possible.
Final race instructions from the race director include a message about mile measurements. Because there is road construction in mile 13, we will have a short detour there, which adds a couple hundred feet to the route. In order to keep the same finish line, the race crew has moved the start line up to make up for the extra distance we'll run later. But they haven't bothered to move all of the mile markers, so our first mile will be short, and mile 13 will be long. Leann and I agree that with the downhill start, and race nerves, and now this short first mile, we'll come in somewhere under ten minutes, but otherwise, she is dedicated to her game plan. The RD yells out the starting command, and we're running.
As we leave Gilsum, I thank the race directors for the downhill start. We soon make a couple of turns, and then run across the Gilsum Stone Arch Bridge, a historic landmark which is billed as having the highest vault of any dry-laid bridge in New Hampshire. The bridge spans the Ashuelot River, which we'll follow for the next ten or so miles. It's pretty, with round river rocks and clear water and just a bit of sunlight making it through the heavy foliage overhead.
We pass mile one, and hit our watches. 8:42. A tad faster than the 10 minute pace that Leann has in mind. Ah well. We run along, and now I'm watching my feet. This road is asphalt, badly cracked and pot-holed. We noticed the bad roads on our drive yesterday, so are extra careful today. Mile two comes up quickly, in 9:05. Leann makes noises about needing to slow down, but I find myself struggling to keep up with the pace that she's setting, and the next couple of miles go by in 8:47 and 9:10. I look at my heart rate monitor, and it tells me that I'm not working all that hard, so I just go with the flow.
Finally, around mile 5, we settle into a pace zone that we'll pretty much hold through mile 18, with our splits averaging around 9:50. This is a nice comfortable pace, and we chat away. I'm wearing a 50 States Marathon singlet, and that always attracts attention and questions. One woman, Carmen from New York, joins us and adds to the conversation as we talk about other marathons, other states, plans to finish.
The road is not closed to traffic here, but there are few cars, and we start to recognize most of the cars as race supporters. One guy in a Jeep lead-frogs along the course with us, and blasts music for our benefit as we go by. The vibe reminds me of why I like small races.
Carmen sticks with us until mile 12, when we run our first mile that clocks in over ten minutes (10:08), and then she takes off and we don't see her again. The first 10 or 11 miles of the course have been a steady downhill, more pronounced in the early miles but still a nice grade, but mile 12 goes uphill noticeably, on a stretch that parallels a pretty golf course. The little detour at mile 13 comes along, as advertised, and then we're through the halfway point in 2:04 and change. Not exactly a ten minute pace, but a very comfortable first half.
The second half of the race course winds around many residential districts in Keene, and it just doesn't compete in terms of scenery or support or joy. The temps have climbed a little, but are still bearable; the terrain is much flatter now. Leann and I run along, side by side, out of conversation, just working at the task at hand. I'm feeling remarkably good given my lack of training. And then Leann finally says, "at eighteen, I'm going to go back to my original plan, and do a run-walk combo to make this truly a training run". I'm not interested in run-walk - I just want to get done with this thing, so at the 18 mile mark, we split company.
The next mile is a lonely one, still in the residential zone. At mile 19, we enter Wheelock Park, where we get some more shade and a change of venue: we're on a paved bike path. Mile markers disappear, and I'm grateful for this since it feels like I'm slowing down quite a bit. I've started to count my steps - something I do to keep my mind occupied, and to keep track of where I am in each mile - and I know that I've missed the marker at 20, and now 21. I start to like this: it's better to not know exactly how much I've slowed. Finally, back on city streets, I see a marker for mile 22, and hit the split button on my watch. 29:58 for the last three miles, almost exactly a ten minute pace. I'm immensely relieved to learn that I haven't really slowed much at all.
But then there's mile 23 to look forward to. This was the biggest revelation when we drove the course yesterday: the monster Mount Everest in the 23rd mile. It seems downright sadistic of the race organizers to put a hill of this steepness at this point in the race, but there it is, staring me right in the face. I have been dreading this sucker all day long, and now that it's here, I do the only thing I can: I scale the thing. I do not slow to a walk, but a fast walker could pass me at this crawling pace. But I do not walk. I scale the thing, and start dreaming of the finish line.
The problem with big hills late in a race like this is that they destroy your pace. It takes me 10:49 to cover mile 23, and I'm quite amazed that it wasn't closer to twelve minutes. But the hill has conquered me, and I just can't get my legs to move. Mile 24 is the slowest of my day at 10:57. I've been chasing a guy in a "100 Marathons" shirt for a long time, and now I come alongside him, and we exchange greetings. Chasing this guy improves my time in mile 25, but I'm crawling again in the final mile.
Finally we make the last couple of turns to the finish. I've been chasing a younger woman for a mile or so now, and I have delusions of catching her before the finish line. It's not meant to be today, and I finish a second behind her in 4:17:49. It's not one of my faster efforts, but given the level of my training, I couldn't ask for any better today.
Leann comes loping across the finish line just a few minutes later, and she's in much better shape than I am. I think the run-walk thing was a good idea. Me, I'm bonking big-time until I swallow a Pepsi in about three gulps. The sky is nice and cloudy now, and it never did really get hot today. For that, I'm extremely grateful. Next up: showers at the college gym building - something that has rarely felt this wonderful.
Once revived by the soda and the shower, Leann and I head out to complete our sight-seeing. We follow our tourist map and head south out of Keene to see six or seven more covered bridges. When we've exhausted the supply of bridges - and nearly the supply of daylight - we make our way to the Kimball Farm Ice Cream Restaurant for fish-and-chips, and then ice cream. It's just starting to drizzle as we pull away from the restaurant, on our way back to Manchester. The rain makes it feel like fall, my favorite season of the year. Running in the fall: the stuff legends are made of.
Back in 1978, the folks in Keene, New Hampshire, decided that this was, indeed, a great inspiration, and they organized to form a marathon in Clarence DeMar's honor; 2010 represents the 33rd annual running of the event. The Clarence DeMar Marathon is a marathoner's marathon: short on frills, easy on the entry fee, but full of all the things that a runner truly needs - things like aid stations (staffed by the local cross country team) and accurate mile markers. These things alone would all lead me to choose the Clarence DeMar for my New Hampshire marathon, a choice I made many years ago, when I first started down this crazy 50 states quest. The fact that the marathon is in the fall - in the peak of fall foliage season - was a bonus. The added fact that my friend Leann also wanted to run the race this particular fall closed the deal.
Leann and I meet up at the Manchester, NH, airport on a warm Friday afternoon, and head directly out to do some sight-seeing along the way to our hotel in Brattleboro, Vermont. Our drive takes us through the southern tier of New Hampshire, all ablaze in fall colors. The leaves are a few weeks shy of being at their peak, which means that every truly colorful tree catches our attention. We take the advice of the nice ladies at the information booth at the airport and make a detour up to the historic mill town of Harrisville. We stop next to a beautiful, placid little lake, and I announce "I want to move here!" as we step out of the car. It's a sentiment I'll repeat many times over the next few days.
I've managed my running shoe rotation badly leading up to this marathon. This means that I have brought two choices of footwear for the race: an old pair of shoes with more than 300 miles on them, and a brand new, fresh-out-of-the-box pair. I'm reluctant to start out a marathon with the old shoes, but not quite daring enough to go with the new shoes without at least putting a few miles on them. That means I do something Saturday morning that is out of the norm for me: run. Lucky for me, Leann normally puts in a few miles the day before a marathon, so I have a running partner. We drive around the Brattleboro area, looking for a suitable place, and stumble upon Fort Dummer State Park. The park is closed for the season, so we park at the fenced-off entrance, and have the leaf-covered, shady road through the park pretty much to ourselves. Well, except for the snake that we roust. It's a lovely short run, and the shoes feel great. Time to go sight-seeing!
We spend the rest of the day enjoying fall in New England, starting out with a trip to a local diner on one of the many scenic byways outside of Brattleboro, where we do an admirable job of carbing-up for the race on Sunday. Breakfast consists of scrambled eggs, hash browns, half a waffle, and a couple of pancakes. Mmmm. We meander around the hills, seeking out covered bridges amid the foliage. By mid-afternoon, we've made our way back into New Hampshire, and to Gilsum, where the race starts. The race is billed as a net-downhill course, and we've decided to scope out the race course. It sure feels a lot more like rolling hills in the car than like a constant downhill, and that worries me some. But the scenery - especially in the first half - is spectacular: heavily wooded with trees that are turning, the scenic Ashuelot River on the left hand side of this narrow rural road. This, I think, might just be one of the prettiest marathons I've run.
Sunday morning we are at the Keene State College location bright and early to board buses that will take us out to Gilsum. Friday and Saturday were both warm days, but the forecasted cooler weather has hit New Hampshire, and it's pleasantly chilly as we wait in Gilsum for the race start. Every time I shiver or say "brrr!", I follow up with "but that's not a complaint!" I'm praying for the cooler temps to hang around until I finish this thing.
Leann has informed me that this is merely a training run for her (she has several more races - including a couple of ultras - coming up in the next few weeks), and that she plans to run it slowly. "The plan is: no miles faster than ten minutes per mile." I think that sounds fairly reasonable for me, also, given that I have a lousy base coming into this thing, after cracking my knee back in late June. Leann and I have run a few marathons together in the past, and I love her company. When she asks me my plans, my reply is "just to hold on and try to finish this thing", although I'm actually thinking that I'll tag along with her as long as possible.
Final race instructions from the race director include a message about mile measurements. Because there is road construction in mile 13, we will have a short detour there, which adds a couple hundred feet to the route. In order to keep the same finish line, the race crew has moved the start line up to make up for the extra distance we'll run later. But they haven't bothered to move all of the mile markers, so our first mile will be short, and mile 13 will be long. Leann and I agree that with the downhill start, and race nerves, and now this short first mile, we'll come in somewhere under ten minutes, but otherwise, she is dedicated to her game plan. The RD yells out the starting command, and we're running.
As we leave Gilsum, I thank the race directors for the downhill start. We soon make a couple of turns, and then run across the Gilsum Stone Arch Bridge, a historic landmark which is billed as having the highest vault of any dry-laid bridge in New Hampshire. The bridge spans the Ashuelot River, which we'll follow for the next ten or so miles. It's pretty, with round river rocks and clear water and just a bit of sunlight making it through the heavy foliage overhead.
We pass mile one, and hit our watches. 8:42. A tad faster than the 10 minute pace that Leann has in mind. Ah well. We run along, and now I'm watching my feet. This road is asphalt, badly cracked and pot-holed. We noticed the bad roads on our drive yesterday, so are extra careful today. Mile two comes up quickly, in 9:05. Leann makes noises about needing to slow down, but I find myself struggling to keep up with the pace that she's setting, and the next couple of miles go by in 8:47 and 9:10. I look at my heart rate monitor, and it tells me that I'm not working all that hard, so I just go with the flow.
Finally, around mile 5, we settle into a pace zone that we'll pretty much hold through mile 18, with our splits averaging around 9:50. This is a nice comfortable pace, and we chat away. I'm wearing a 50 States Marathon singlet, and that always attracts attention and questions. One woman, Carmen from New York, joins us and adds to the conversation as we talk about other marathons, other states, plans to finish.
The road is not closed to traffic here, but there are few cars, and we start to recognize most of the cars as race supporters. One guy in a Jeep lead-frogs along the course with us, and blasts music for our benefit as we go by. The vibe reminds me of why I like small races.
Carmen sticks with us until mile 12, when we run our first mile that clocks in over ten minutes (10:08), and then she takes off and we don't see her again. The first 10 or 11 miles of the course have been a steady downhill, more pronounced in the early miles but still a nice grade, but mile 12 goes uphill noticeably, on a stretch that parallels a pretty golf course. The little detour at mile 13 comes along, as advertised, and then we're through the halfway point in 2:04 and change. Not exactly a ten minute pace, but a very comfortable first half.
The second half of the race course winds around many residential districts in Keene, and it just doesn't compete in terms of scenery or support or joy. The temps have climbed a little, but are still bearable; the terrain is much flatter now. Leann and I run along, side by side, out of conversation, just working at the task at hand. I'm feeling remarkably good given my lack of training. And then Leann finally says, "at eighteen, I'm going to go back to my original plan, and do a run-walk combo to make this truly a training run". I'm not interested in run-walk - I just want to get done with this thing, so at the 18 mile mark, we split company.
The next mile is a lonely one, still in the residential zone. At mile 19, we enter Wheelock Park, where we get some more shade and a change of venue: we're on a paved bike path. Mile markers disappear, and I'm grateful for this since it feels like I'm slowing down quite a bit. I've started to count my steps - something I do to keep my mind occupied, and to keep track of where I am in each mile - and I know that I've missed the marker at 20, and now 21. I start to like this: it's better to not know exactly how much I've slowed. Finally, back on city streets, I see a marker for mile 22, and hit the split button on my watch. 29:58 for the last three miles, almost exactly a ten minute pace. I'm immensely relieved to learn that I haven't really slowed much at all.
But then there's mile 23 to look forward to. This was the biggest revelation when we drove the course yesterday: the monster Mount Everest in the 23rd mile. It seems downright sadistic of the race organizers to put a hill of this steepness at this point in the race, but there it is, staring me right in the face. I have been dreading this sucker all day long, and now that it's here, I do the only thing I can: I scale the thing. I do not slow to a walk, but a fast walker could pass me at this crawling pace. But I do not walk. I scale the thing, and start dreaming of the finish line.
The problem with big hills late in a race like this is that they destroy your pace. It takes me 10:49 to cover mile 23, and I'm quite amazed that it wasn't closer to twelve minutes. But the hill has conquered me, and I just can't get my legs to move. Mile 24 is the slowest of my day at 10:57. I've been chasing a guy in a "100 Marathons" shirt for a long time, and now I come alongside him, and we exchange greetings. Chasing this guy improves my time in mile 25, but I'm crawling again in the final mile.
Finally we make the last couple of turns to the finish. I've been chasing a younger woman for a mile or so now, and I have delusions of catching her before the finish line. It's not meant to be today, and I finish a second behind her in 4:17:49. It's not one of my faster efforts, but given the level of my training, I couldn't ask for any better today.
Leann comes loping across the finish line just a few minutes later, and she's in much better shape than I am. I think the run-walk thing was a good idea. Me, I'm bonking big-time until I swallow a Pepsi in about three gulps. The sky is nice and cloudy now, and it never did really get hot today. For that, I'm extremely grateful. Next up: showers at the college gym building - something that has rarely felt this wonderful.
Once revived by the soda and the shower, Leann and I head out to complete our sight-seeing. We follow our tourist map and head south out of Keene to see six or seven more covered bridges. When we've exhausted the supply of bridges - and nearly the supply of daylight - we make our way to the Kimball Farm Ice Cream Restaurant for fish-and-chips, and then ice cream. It's just starting to drizzle as we pull away from the restaurant, on our way back to Manchester. The rain makes it feel like fall, my favorite season of the year. Running in the fall: the stuff legends are made of.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Leadville Trail 100 Mtn Bike Race
aka Crewing for John
August 14, 2010
Here's the thing about Leadville: it's never not cold in the morning. So this morning in mid-August at 5:30, as John gets ready to ride down to the start line, the question is how to stay warm until the race starts. He decides to wear his green down parka, and I'll pick it up from him when I get there. Frank - the Leadville friend we're staying with - and I take off by truck a few minutes later.
But the start area is a zoo. Incredible. Bikes and cyclists everywhere. People have claimed spots in the start chute, and left bikes strewn across the road. I've never seen anything like this, even after seven Ride the Rockies and three trips to the Tour de France. We split up (Frank and I are joined by three more friends in this search). It's impossible to find him. Who knew there would be so many people wearing green down parkas in mid-summer? Finally, in desperation, I climb up on top of a garbage can, and scan the crowds. I shout "JOHN!" No luck. So I try again. "ARMSTRONG!!!" Well, that gets a few more looks, and it yields what I'm looking for. There he is, smiling and looking ready to ride. He points behind him to indicate that he's ditched the jacket. I will pick it up after the race starts, before heading out for my first assignment as his crew.
The race starts. It's exhilarating. It's a thing of beauty, actually. The bikes start to roll down the hill, and it's like watching synchronized swimming, or birds in flight - large flocks of birds in flight. I'm awed. Who knew?
I find Frank and friends after the start and we go look for the parka, but it's just not there. I'm bummed. I feel like I've failed at my first crewing task. But no time to worry about that - I have to get to the first aid station.
Pipeline Aid Station
Here's the direction that Frank gives me, before he goes off to watch the race at other vantage points: don't get boxed in parking at the aid stations. So when I see the cars assembling, I find a place to park and make sure I have plenty of room and am facing the right direction for an escape. Then I gather up all the supplies for the first aid and start hiking.
The basket I'm using is my grocery shopping basket; I love this thing. It does not collapse, and it holds just enough. But I've loaded it up, and it's a tad heavy. Here's what I carry: pb&j sandwich halves in baggies, chocolate chip cookies (ditto the baggies), a fresh bottle of cytomax, a fresh bottle of water, my own bottle of water, a bike tool thingy, some clif shots, some packets of powdered FRS, sunscreen, chain lube, a rag or two, a can of Big Air, some Advil and my own breakfast muffin. On top of this all is a camelbak that John will pick up at this station. On one shoulder is my camp chair, on the other my camera. I'm also carrying my cup of lousy convenience store coffee. It seems like a long hike with all this stuff.
But once I see the tents, it's all worth the effort. This is like the coolest block party ever - and at 7 a.m. There's a buzz of anticipation. Tents set up, aid stations set up, people just looking down the dirt road, waiting for the action to start.
The helicopter signals the arrival of the front riders. This is deja vu Tour de France. I'm expecting something less than Tour de France competitiveness, but I'm wrong. The front runners come through at warp speed, pedaling by so fast that you can't really see faces, numbers. Good thing to have a camera so that later you can say, oh yeah, I saw so-and-so go by. The third or fourth group of riders to go by grab their food from people standing right next to me, in musettes just like the ones you see at the Tour. Only this time, one of the guys spins a bit and goes down in the middle of the trail, right in front of me. It's all adrenaline, all panic, all let's-get-him-up-and-sorted-out. He's gone in an instant but it makes me nervous all the same.
The trail is flat here, so the riders are coming in at a pretty good clip. At this point in the day, they all look the same - helmets, sunglasses, long sleeves, leg warmers. Thank God for the numbers that are attached to the front of all the bicycles. I start focusing on looking for John's number: 125. Numbers fly by, so close but not quite. Number 1125 goes by. No dice. More numbers, a couple of tandems (whoa! talk about strong relationships!), and just a few women.
I see John and step onto the trail and yell his name over and over until I'm sure he sees me. I've got this huge basket full of stuff and start shoving stuff at him, but he just wants the cookies and the fresh bottle of cytomax. He says no to the camelbak. He takes off his leg warmers and hands them to me while a woman standing next to me holds his bike (that's what kind of crowd this is). I'm so nervous about getting him what he wants that I don't ask, but then he volunteers, "I'm feeling pretty good". Well, good then. And he's off again.
Twin Lakes Aid Station
I've heard from the folks at Pipeline that I'll only have an hour or maybe an hour and 15 minutes before he arrives at Twin Lakes, so I know I have to beat it. I have the camp chair packed, so as soon as John pedals off, I pick up my stuff and high-tail it back to the truck. It's a hike. I am kicking myself for not trying to park up closer.
Just as I start to pull out of the parking place, two women knock on my window and ask for a ride to Twin Lakes. "Of course! Jump in!" Their husbands have both just been by here, too, and the person they rode with is waiting for her man, and they are - as I am - worried about getting to the next aid on time. We drive as fast as we can.
But here's the thing about the distance between the first and second aid stations: by trail, it's only 13 or so miles, and by road, it's many more. Not only that, but that parking at Twin Lakes is far worse than at Pipeline. The parking lot is full, so we have to park on the road and then we start the hike up to the dam.
We're almost to the road side of the dam, and Frank calls me. "Where are you?" he barks, and "has John come by yet?" While we're trying to figure out where we are in relation to one another, he shouts, "Go John Go!" and then back into the phone, "He just went by - did you give him his aid here?!" Noooooooo! I can't believe that I missed him. It's only been 48 minutes since he left Pipeline! I feel lousy because it feels like I've failed in my job crewing, but more than that I'm worried about him making the climb up to 12,600' and back down again on the little nutrition he took at Pipeline. There's nothing I can do now, though, but just wait.
What a zoo this place is! It makes Pipeline look like a ladies luncheon. Frank and his group of cohorts are here, but preparing to take off, so I settle in with my hitch-hiking friends. Everyone here is from somewhere else: Texas, Virginia, Philadelphia, Tennessee, wherever. I'm wearing this year's Boston Marathon t-shirt, and it gets lots of comments. The woman from Philadelphia strikes up a conversation, and soon we're exchanging marathon stories. I tell her about running Delaware earlier this year, and about the guy we saw carted off at the finish line. "Oh yeah", she says, "that was the guy who died." I tell her that I had read that he survived. "Yeah, but only for a few days", she replies, and then fills in the rest of the story - how the guy's kidneys had shut down and that they kept him alive several days after the marathon but his kidneys never started working again.
What a weird thing to learn here, but not that out of place. This is, after all, a mountain bike race, and as we're standing here waiting for our riders, the Search and Rescue folks go up the trail to retrieve someone who crashed. I don't really worry that much about John - he's a very strong and safe rider - but I also know that it's a risky sport.
This Aid Station is both mile 40 and mile 60. The riders are all outbound when I get here, but soon there's a flurry, and two homebound cyclists tear by on their trip back into town. They go by so fast and so unexpectedly that they are not even a blur, more like a thought. A race official is near me, and I hear him tell somebody who it was: Levi and Jeremy. Oh boy. This is a race! My mental math tells me that they are on a record pace, but I wonder if I'm missing something. Lance set an insane course record here last year, so it can't be that likely to fall again this year.
A few more front runners go by on the return trip, and then the action all goes back to the people just getting to mile 40. A buzz goes through the crowd, and I look at my watch: the cutoff is close. There are intermediate cutoff times along the course, and pretty soon a few guys come walking by, pushing their bikes, day done because they couldn't get here fast enough. There's a woman (a rider forced out of the race here due to missing the cutoff) who is crying and making quite a scene; I wonder what the rest of her story is. Most of the guys seem to take it in stride. And then it's back to waiting - just waiting for the riders to go by in the opposite direction.
The hitch-hiking women have both also missed their husbands on their outbound journey, and are as anxious as I am to see their guys on the return trip. I go up on a hill to survey the scene, and talk to a family who asks about my Boston shirt while I snap a few photos. They tell me that they live in Hopkinton, and the son - probably in his late teens or early twenties - tells me that he ran the marathon for his first time this year. We have a nice chat, then I climb back down the berm and get busy fretting over John's arrival.
I've added some stuff to the basket for this stop: a no-longer-cold Coke, as well as some potato chips, and, of course, another fresh bottle of cytomax. The cantaloupe that I brought as a surprise is still back in the truck, in the cooler, but I just don't have the energy to go back there. I'm tempted, because I'm still wearing the jeans that I appreciated earlier in the day, and I'd love to change into my shorts, but it's a long hike. I can survive in jeans.
The day could not be more glorious. Bright sun, and not much wind out here. Virtually no clouds in the sky. I start to recognize numbers coming down the trail. The guy standing next to me asks who I'm watching for, so now I have a second set of eyes searching for "125". There's a woman who goes by with some frilly stuff on her helmet; I remember seeing here way back at Pipeline, and she was right in front of John. There goes number 1125 again. Finally, he's here!
I shove a Coke at him, and start babbling apologies for missing him outbound. He takes some potato chips and another bottle of cytomax, but little else. When I take a break from my babbling, he says it wasn't a big deal. But then he adds, "my legs are toast". I realize just before he rides off that I haven't even asked how the last 30 miles have gone!
Pipeline Aid Station
The hitchhikers do not join me for the return to Pipeline, so I make a beeline for the truck. Well, actually, it's not even close to a beeline, but rather a long and dusty race-walk. I'm determined to get back to Pipeline before John gets there.
Traffic at Pipeline is minimal, and I'm able to park much closer than earlier this morning, so I throw a new ice-cold Coke and a new bottle of cytomax into my basket, and I'm back at the trail quickly. In fact, so quickly that I actually have ten or fifteen minutes to wait before John arrives. The mood at Pipeline is much subdued from earlier today. The cyclists are pedaling by much more slowly, and starting to look just a little ragged. By now, I'm able to recognize most of the numbers coming in before him. Just after the woman with the frilly stuff on her helmet, number 125 rolls up to me.
I've learned, finally, to ask "what do you need" before shoving stuff in John's face. So now, he answers "To be done". I think "ouch" - there are nearly 30 hard miles left in front of him. But I can't ride it for him, I can just offer up sustenance. So I shove the drinks at him, and he takes some food and a couple of Advil. He lubes his chain - he and his bike are both covered in dust - and then he takes off. And I take off, too: back to Leadville.
Finish in Leadville
Given that the last part of this race contains a lot of climbing over 29 miles, I know I have at least a couple of hours before I can expect John at the finish line. So, for once today, I have a leisurely time getting to my next vantage spot. I park several blocks away from the finish, and spend some time organizing the disaster zone in the back of the truck. Finally, I change into shorts. It's a glorious day, have I mentioned this? Bright sun and not a cloud in the sky. This is Leadville at its finest.
But here's the thing about Leadville: it's never not windy. So when I eventually get my act together and tote my camp chair up to the race course and park myself in a nice shady spot to cheer on the finishers, I find myself getting chilled quickly. This is Leadville, 10,000 feet. So I move into the sun, and I clang my cowbell, and I yell, over and over, "Nice job!" or "Great finish!" I mean it every time. I'm awed by the power and the charge and the strength of these folks as they push it in to the finish.
Now, all day long I've been trying to gauge when John will arrive at any given point, and by now my time-math is getting fuzzy, but one thing is clear: the expected time that he gave me this morning - ten hours and thirty minutes - is bogus. Sandbagging. Because I'm here, and I'm figuring miles from the last aid station, and I know he's going to blow that time.
All day, folks rolled through the aid stations in a certain order, but here at the finish, they are way out of sequence. It seems that Powerline - the last big nasty climb of the race - has taken a severe toll on the field. I recognize the number of one of the guys I've seen multiple times, so I figure that I'll see John in about 15 minutes. I watch for the woman with the frilly stuff on her helmet, but she doesn't go by. So I'm almost caught without my camera ready when he rolls into my viewfinder just a couple of minutes later. Done!
I make my way to the finish area just as John walks out of the chute, and he's all smiles. He's finished in 9:45, which turns out to be good for second place in his age group. It was, he says, a perfect day. The trail was perfect (there was rain earlier in the week, so the trail was packed but not muddy), the weather was perfect (sunny, but cool for the riders, not too hot). In fact, the insane course record set by Lance last year (30 minutes faster than the old course record) was broken again today by both Levi and Jeremy.
The only thing I'm feeling bad about is that lost green parka. But John says, follow me, and we walk partway up the block to a little coffee shop. He walks in while I hold his bike, and he walks back out with the parka. He had, wisely, stashed it inside, in the back, early in the morning. All that's left now is to head back to Frank's. John chooses to ride the mile or so back to the other side of town. I walk back to the truck, and then drive cross town. And here's the thing about Leadville today: the bike rocks. John is comfortably back at Frank's, lounging in a recliner by the time I even get to the truck. It's a great day to be on a bike.
August 14, 2010
Here's the thing about Leadville: it's never not cold in the morning. So this morning in mid-August at 5:30, as John gets ready to ride down to the start line, the question is how to stay warm until the race starts. He decides to wear his green down parka, and I'll pick it up from him when I get there. Frank - the Leadville friend we're staying with - and I take off by truck a few minutes later.
But the start area is a zoo. Incredible. Bikes and cyclists everywhere. People have claimed spots in the start chute, and left bikes strewn across the road. I've never seen anything like this, even after seven Ride the Rockies and three trips to the Tour de France. We split up (Frank and I are joined by three more friends in this search). It's impossible to find him. Who knew there would be so many people wearing green down parkas in mid-summer? Finally, in desperation, I climb up on top of a garbage can, and scan the crowds. I shout "JOHN!" No luck. So I try again. "ARMSTRONG!!!" Well, that gets a few more looks, and it yields what I'm looking for. There he is, smiling and looking ready to ride. He points behind him to indicate that he's ditched the jacket. I will pick it up after the race starts, before heading out for my first assignment as his crew.
The race starts. It's exhilarating. It's a thing of beauty, actually. The bikes start to roll down the hill, and it's like watching synchronized swimming, or birds in flight - large flocks of birds in flight. I'm awed. Who knew?
I find Frank and friends after the start and we go look for the parka, but it's just not there. I'm bummed. I feel like I've failed at my first crewing task. But no time to worry about that - I have to get to the first aid station.
Pipeline Aid Station
Here's the direction that Frank gives me, before he goes off to watch the race at other vantage points: don't get boxed in parking at the aid stations. So when I see the cars assembling, I find a place to park and make sure I have plenty of room and am facing the right direction for an escape. Then I gather up all the supplies for the first aid and start hiking.
The basket I'm using is my grocery shopping basket; I love this thing. It does not collapse, and it holds just enough. But I've loaded it up, and it's a tad heavy. Here's what I carry: pb&j sandwich halves in baggies, chocolate chip cookies (ditto the baggies), a fresh bottle of cytomax, a fresh bottle of water, my own bottle of water, a bike tool thingy, some clif shots, some packets of powdered FRS, sunscreen, chain lube, a rag or two, a can of Big Air, some Advil and my own breakfast muffin. On top of this all is a camelbak that John will pick up at this station. On one shoulder is my camp chair, on the other my camera. I'm also carrying my cup of lousy convenience store coffee. It seems like a long hike with all this stuff.
But once I see the tents, it's all worth the effort. This is like the coolest block party ever - and at 7 a.m. There's a buzz of anticipation. Tents set up, aid stations set up, people just looking down the dirt road, waiting for the action to start.
The helicopter signals the arrival of the front riders. This is deja vu Tour de France. I'm expecting something less than Tour de France competitiveness, but I'm wrong. The front runners come through at warp speed, pedaling by so fast that you can't really see faces, numbers. Good thing to have a camera so that later you can say, oh yeah, I saw so-and-so go by. The third or fourth group of riders to go by grab their food from people standing right next to me, in musettes just like the ones you see at the Tour. Only this time, one of the guys spins a bit and goes down in the middle of the trail, right in front of me. It's all adrenaline, all panic, all let's-get-him-up-and-sorted-out. He's gone in an instant but it makes me nervous all the same.
The trail is flat here, so the riders are coming in at a pretty good clip. At this point in the day, they all look the same - helmets, sunglasses, long sleeves, leg warmers. Thank God for the numbers that are attached to the front of all the bicycles. I start focusing on looking for John's number: 125. Numbers fly by, so close but not quite. Number 1125 goes by. No dice. More numbers, a couple of tandems (whoa! talk about strong relationships!), and just a few women.
I see John and step onto the trail and yell his name over and over until I'm sure he sees me. I've got this huge basket full of stuff and start shoving stuff at him, but he just wants the cookies and the fresh bottle of cytomax. He says no to the camelbak. He takes off his leg warmers and hands them to me while a woman standing next to me holds his bike (that's what kind of crowd this is). I'm so nervous about getting him what he wants that I don't ask, but then he volunteers, "I'm feeling pretty good". Well, good then. And he's off again.
Twin Lakes Aid Station
I've heard from the folks at Pipeline that I'll only have an hour or maybe an hour and 15 minutes before he arrives at Twin Lakes, so I know I have to beat it. I have the camp chair packed, so as soon as John pedals off, I pick up my stuff and high-tail it back to the truck. It's a hike. I am kicking myself for not trying to park up closer.
Just as I start to pull out of the parking place, two women knock on my window and ask for a ride to Twin Lakes. "Of course! Jump in!" Their husbands have both just been by here, too, and the person they rode with is waiting for her man, and they are - as I am - worried about getting to the next aid on time. We drive as fast as we can.
But here's the thing about the distance between the first and second aid stations: by trail, it's only 13 or so miles, and by road, it's many more. Not only that, but that parking at Twin Lakes is far worse than at Pipeline. The parking lot is full, so we have to park on the road and then we start the hike up to the dam.
We're almost to the road side of the dam, and Frank calls me. "Where are you?" he barks, and "has John come by yet?" While we're trying to figure out where we are in relation to one another, he shouts, "Go John Go!" and then back into the phone, "He just went by - did you give him his aid here?!" Noooooooo! I can't believe that I missed him. It's only been 48 minutes since he left Pipeline! I feel lousy because it feels like I've failed in my job crewing, but more than that I'm worried about him making the climb up to 12,600' and back down again on the little nutrition he took at Pipeline. There's nothing I can do now, though, but just wait.
What a zoo this place is! It makes Pipeline look like a ladies luncheon. Frank and his group of cohorts are here, but preparing to take off, so I settle in with my hitch-hiking friends. Everyone here is from somewhere else: Texas, Virginia, Philadelphia, Tennessee, wherever. I'm wearing this year's Boston Marathon t-shirt, and it gets lots of comments. The woman from Philadelphia strikes up a conversation, and soon we're exchanging marathon stories. I tell her about running Delaware earlier this year, and about the guy we saw carted off at the finish line. "Oh yeah", she says, "that was the guy who died." I tell her that I had read that he survived. "Yeah, but only for a few days", she replies, and then fills in the rest of the story - how the guy's kidneys had shut down and that they kept him alive several days after the marathon but his kidneys never started working again.
What a weird thing to learn here, but not that out of place. This is, after all, a mountain bike race, and as we're standing here waiting for our riders, the Search and Rescue folks go up the trail to retrieve someone who crashed. I don't really worry that much about John - he's a very strong and safe rider - but I also know that it's a risky sport.
This Aid Station is both mile 40 and mile 60. The riders are all outbound when I get here, but soon there's a flurry, and two homebound cyclists tear by on their trip back into town. They go by so fast and so unexpectedly that they are not even a blur, more like a thought. A race official is near me, and I hear him tell somebody who it was: Levi and Jeremy. Oh boy. This is a race! My mental math tells me that they are on a record pace, but I wonder if I'm missing something. Lance set an insane course record here last year, so it can't be that likely to fall again this year.
A few more front runners go by on the return trip, and then the action all goes back to the people just getting to mile 40. A buzz goes through the crowd, and I look at my watch: the cutoff is close. There are intermediate cutoff times along the course, and pretty soon a few guys come walking by, pushing their bikes, day done because they couldn't get here fast enough. There's a woman (a rider forced out of the race here due to missing the cutoff) who is crying and making quite a scene; I wonder what the rest of her story is. Most of the guys seem to take it in stride. And then it's back to waiting - just waiting for the riders to go by in the opposite direction.
The hitch-hiking women have both also missed their husbands on their outbound journey, and are as anxious as I am to see their guys on the return trip. I go up on a hill to survey the scene, and talk to a family who asks about my Boston shirt while I snap a few photos. They tell me that they live in Hopkinton, and the son - probably in his late teens or early twenties - tells me that he ran the marathon for his first time this year. We have a nice chat, then I climb back down the berm and get busy fretting over John's arrival.
I've added some stuff to the basket for this stop: a no-longer-cold Coke, as well as some potato chips, and, of course, another fresh bottle of cytomax. The cantaloupe that I brought as a surprise is still back in the truck, in the cooler, but I just don't have the energy to go back there. I'm tempted, because I'm still wearing the jeans that I appreciated earlier in the day, and I'd love to change into my shorts, but it's a long hike. I can survive in jeans.
The day could not be more glorious. Bright sun, and not much wind out here. Virtually no clouds in the sky. I start to recognize numbers coming down the trail. The guy standing next to me asks who I'm watching for, so now I have a second set of eyes searching for "125". There's a woman who goes by with some frilly stuff on her helmet; I remember seeing here way back at Pipeline, and she was right in front of John. There goes number 1125 again. Finally, he's here!
I shove a Coke at him, and start babbling apologies for missing him outbound. He takes some potato chips and another bottle of cytomax, but little else. When I take a break from my babbling, he says it wasn't a big deal. But then he adds, "my legs are toast". I realize just before he rides off that I haven't even asked how the last 30 miles have gone!
Pipeline Aid Station
The hitchhikers do not join me for the return to Pipeline, so I make a beeline for the truck. Well, actually, it's not even close to a beeline, but rather a long and dusty race-walk. I'm determined to get back to Pipeline before John gets there.
Traffic at Pipeline is minimal, and I'm able to park much closer than earlier this morning, so I throw a new ice-cold Coke and a new bottle of cytomax into my basket, and I'm back at the trail quickly. In fact, so quickly that I actually have ten or fifteen minutes to wait before John arrives. The mood at Pipeline is much subdued from earlier today. The cyclists are pedaling by much more slowly, and starting to look just a little ragged. By now, I'm able to recognize most of the numbers coming in before him. Just after the woman with the frilly stuff on her helmet, number 125 rolls up to me.
I've learned, finally, to ask "what do you need" before shoving stuff in John's face. So now, he answers "To be done". I think "ouch" - there are nearly 30 hard miles left in front of him. But I can't ride it for him, I can just offer up sustenance. So I shove the drinks at him, and he takes some food and a couple of Advil. He lubes his chain - he and his bike are both covered in dust - and then he takes off. And I take off, too: back to Leadville.
Finish in Leadville
Given that the last part of this race contains a lot of climbing over 29 miles, I know I have at least a couple of hours before I can expect John at the finish line. So, for once today, I have a leisurely time getting to my next vantage spot. I park several blocks away from the finish, and spend some time organizing the disaster zone in the back of the truck. Finally, I change into shorts. It's a glorious day, have I mentioned this? Bright sun and not a cloud in the sky. This is Leadville at its finest.
But here's the thing about Leadville: it's never not windy. So when I eventually get my act together and tote my camp chair up to the race course and park myself in a nice shady spot to cheer on the finishers, I find myself getting chilled quickly. This is Leadville, 10,000 feet. So I move into the sun, and I clang my cowbell, and I yell, over and over, "Nice job!" or "Great finish!" I mean it every time. I'm awed by the power and the charge and the strength of these folks as they push it in to the finish.
Now, all day long I've been trying to gauge when John will arrive at any given point, and by now my time-math is getting fuzzy, but one thing is clear: the expected time that he gave me this morning - ten hours and thirty minutes - is bogus. Sandbagging. Because I'm here, and I'm figuring miles from the last aid station, and I know he's going to blow that time.
All day, folks rolled through the aid stations in a certain order, but here at the finish, they are way out of sequence. It seems that Powerline - the last big nasty climb of the race - has taken a severe toll on the field. I recognize the number of one of the guys I've seen multiple times, so I figure that I'll see John in about 15 minutes. I watch for the woman with the frilly stuff on her helmet, but she doesn't go by. So I'm almost caught without my camera ready when he rolls into my viewfinder just a couple of minutes later. Done!
I make my way to the finish area just as John walks out of the chute, and he's all smiles. He's finished in 9:45, which turns out to be good for second place in his age group. It was, he says, a perfect day. The trail was perfect (there was rain earlier in the week, so the trail was packed but not muddy), the weather was perfect (sunny, but cool for the riders, not too hot). In fact, the insane course record set by Lance last year (30 minutes faster than the old course record) was broken again today by both Levi and Jeremy.
The only thing I'm feeling bad about is that lost green parka. But John says, follow me, and we walk partway up the block to a little coffee shop. He walks in while I hold his bike, and he walks back out with the parka. He had, wisely, stashed it inside, in the back, early in the morning. All that's left now is to head back to Frank's. John chooses to ride the mile or so back to the other side of town. I walk back to the truck, and then drive cross town. And here's the thing about Leadville today: the bike rocks. John is comfortably back at Frank's, lounging in a recliner by the time I even get to the truck. It's a great day to be on a bike.
Monday, May 31, 2010
I'm Alive (Delaware Marathon 2010)
Sometimes the only way to make sense of a story is to start at the end, especially when the finish changes the way you look at the entire experience in the rear view mirror. That’s the case with the Delaware Marathon. Crossing the finish line changed the way I will always remember the day, but not in any way that I could have conjured up in my mind as I ran the 26.2 miles. When you approach a marathon finish line, only to have that finish line blocked by paramedics who are performing CPR on a downed runner, and then they yank up the gurney and sprint off to the ambulance with that gentleman as their passenger, your focus changes, suddenly and violently. You no longer think about the pain in your legs and feet, you no longer experience the unique joy of finishing another marathon (in a new – to you – state), you no longer look for the volunteers at the finish line to get your medal or glass of water or to point you to the food or the port-a-potties. No, suddenly, you look at your friend – the friend who has covered the distance with you – and you think, thank God we’re okay. And you think, thank God I’m alive. I’m alive!
So, everything else pales in the haze that covers the weekend, but it makes you appreciate the life in the thing. Suddenly, every single detail is more important than it was a moment ago. Suddenly, none of it matters a bit. The only thing that matters is that you survived, and that you can smile when you think about the experience.
The weekend starts with a huge smile – Leann offers to pick me up at the Philadelphia airport, saving me a few more hours of travel and a sizable hassle (train from the Philly airport to the Amtrak station, transfer to a Wilmington-bound train, then hooking up in downtown Wilmington – something that we were soon to discover would not be all that simple, anyway). So, instead of all that, I exit the secure part of the airport to find Leann waiting in the chairs for me. Yes!
Here’s the thing about spending time with Leann: you laugh a lot. You laugh so much and so hard that you get the hiccups and tears run down your face. Later, you can’t even remember what you laughed about, but at the time it was hysterical. That’s the way the drive from Philly to Wilmington goes: all 20 or so minutes of the drive.
And here’s what makes the weekend a huge success, no matter marathon finish line dramas or disappointing times: all that laughter. What else matters, really?
This is a weekend of travel in an old East Coast city, which means that streets are not on a grid – at least not for long – and even if they are, they change names every few blocks just to keep you guessing. So it takes two people with full attention to drive and navigate. Because Leann has already scoped things out, we find the Comfort Inn easily, and get checked in. Our room opens to a courtyard, complete with swimming pool. It’s early afternoon, and we both notice the sunbathers at the same time. Women in bikinis. Because it’s warm. Hot, actually. With full sun. This is not, we already know, going to be a good marathon. Well, not for us runners. It will be a dandy day for the spectators. For us runners, it will be a day of survival.
We spend much of Friday and Saturday trying to navigate through Wilmington. Good thing there are lots of graduate degrees in Leann’s car, because I’m not sure we would have ever made it to the start line otherwise. It takes three or four maps, and lots of retracing ground we’ve already covered, but we do find our way through the city, and manage to even drive most of the course late Saturday morning. It’s a good thing, too, because the drive sets our expectations for something that wasn’t really clear from the race website: this course is hilly. Not (for the most part) Pike’s Peak type hills, but definitely hilly. And did I mention, the sun is shining and it’s warm?
The highlight of the day on Saturday is the breakfast we stumble into. We try to do the economical thing, and head to the Comfort Inn breakfast room. But between the empty coffee urns, and the kid scraping the burned waffle out of the waffle iron, and the empty chafing dishes, it’s not in the cards. Just down the road we spy Lucky’s Coffee Shop, and decide to give it a try. It’s the best decision we make all weekend. Lucky’s is a proper diner, complete with vinyl booths and chairs, and coffee cups that get refilled every time you blink. The menu features such treasures as scrapple and chipped dried beef in gravy (my dad called this “SOS”). But it also features all the pre-race carbs one person could hope for: pancakes and potatoes and toast. Breakfast for two of us, when it arrives, covers a 4-top table completely. Life is good.
The race starts and ends at the Tubman Garrett Riverfront Park in downtown Wilmington. Well, just the other side of the train tracks from downtown Wilmington. This is no small distinction, since traffic in and out of the park is greatly restricted by the train tracks and road closures (due to the race and other events in the park) and the general poor design of the roads within the park. We’ve scoped things out in advance, though, so on race morning we park in one of the recommended lots that will allow us easy ingress and egress before and after the race, and walk the short distance to the start line.
Here’s a thing about running a ridiculous number of marathons in order to complete a circuit of the states: you start to recognize people at races all around the country. The Delaware Marathon is no different. As Leann and I make our way to the port-a-potties early Sunday morning, I spy Sara, a woman I know from last year’s Steamboat Springs Marathon (and that whole experience with The Professor). We talk briefly, then see each other multiple times on the course. And there is Steve Boone, the president of the 50 States Marathon Club: he is easily recognizable with his wild white locks. There’s Tutu guy, in his completely pink get-up; it’s been awhile since I last saw him, but I read about him occasionally in the running publications. And there’s the guy I see over and over again at races – most notably at the Flying Monkey – but can never remember his name or where he’s from. Still, it feels like a community rather than some random event in some random distant city.
And so the race starts with the firing of a cannon, the loudest send-off I’ve ever experienced in a marathon. The race is a two-loop affair, and each loop takes us through a wide variety of neighborhoods and terrain. The race director clearly tries to showcase the riverfront park, but the park feels like a failed attempt at urban renewal. The park comprises many office buildings, an outdoor arena, and some shops and restaurants that are pretty quiet and empty when we visit on Friday and Saturday. It’s one of those urban projects with the right spirit but poor execution, and it just doesn’t have the vibrant downtown feel that the developers were after. In the marathon, we head southwest to the limits of the park on an interior road, out to the limit of the park, and then head back toward the start/finish on the boardwalk that parallels the Christina River. We cross the start/finish, and head onto the streets of Wilmington. The next bit of the race takes us through what we not-so-jokingly call the ghetto – an ugly, deserted, decrepit area. Ugh. The best thing about this part of the course is that it doesn’t last long, and then we’re dumped back onto Walnut Street, one of the main roadways through the downtown Wilmington business area. None of this part of the course is particularly nice, or scenic, or pleasant. We run past a church with funeral placards outside on the cars lined up, and that pretty much sets the mood for this part of the race.
But much of the race is pretty, and it turns so when we cross a bridge across Brandywine Creek that takes us into Brandywine Park. The park – also home to the local zoo – is lovely, most notably because it is heavily shaded. The flip side is that the road surface is pocked and uneven, which makes for cautious steps. To make matters worse, we have to navigate across a cobbled road, and then across a wooden footbridge. The footbridge sways with the motion of all the runners, and I almost have to stop and walk – it makes me lose my sense of balance. But what waits on the other side of the bridge is worse than the bridge itself – it’s the mile or so long climb that will take us up to the highest point on the race course.
The consolation prize to this climb is that it takes us to the prettiest part of the race. Lovering Avenue becomes Kentmere Parkway, and that takes us to Bancraft Parkway. These are all old, lovely, wide, tree-lined streets with stately homes and beautiful gardens. Leann and I compare notes on which houses we like best. These pretty streets soon give way to Little Italy and several commercial blocks. I read the restaurant names and wish we would have had our pasta-feed in this part of town last night.
After Little Italy, the course mostly doubles back on itself, and takes us back down to the riverfront where we get to pass “Go” but not collect $200 – we get to go back out and do it all again. Almost on cue, the sun, which has been mercifully hiding behind a thick bank of clouds this morning, comes out to blast us as we pass Go. So much for those dreams of an evenly split race. As soon as the clouds burn off, the wind picks up. There are two good things about this. First, the course meanders around so much that we never run directly into the wind for very long. Second, the wind – a good stiff breeze – has a cooling effect. It is, no doubt, also a slowing effect, but by this time, slowing is a given. We appreciate the cooling.
I’ve never run a multi-loop marathon before, and I’m not sure I’m crazy about it, especially when the second lap is, well, just plain hot. To be sure, we look forward to the shady and scenic parts, but the rest just seems annoyingly repetitious. The uphills seem longer and steeper the second time around, and the downhills seem almost non-existent. Thankfully, the volunteers are always the one constant that I enjoy – the race is stocked with plenty of good water and Gatorade.
There are many races going on at the same time (the marathon, the early-starters, the half-marathon, and the marathon relay), and most of these have slightly different course routes. The race course doubles back on itself many times. This all means that by just a few miles into the race, it’s impossible to know where you are in the grand scheme of things. We pass each other and wave and say hi, and yet I have no idea if most of the marathoners are in front of me or behind me.
Leann and I dutifully hit our split buttons at every mile. From the first mile (9:26 – the fastest of the day), I know it’s going to be a slog. My lower back and hamstrings feel tight as I pass the start line, so the slow splits are no surprise, but disappointing all the same. We average just under 10 minute miles in the first half, but the sun and wind do a whammy on us in the second half, and we slow down to almost 10:30 miles. My training runs have finally been a bit faster in the last couple of months, so this feels like a setback.
But Leann keeps things fun and upbeat as we run. Around mile 10, she tells me that she’s been running each mile for a family member or friend with a name that starts with the corresponding letter of the alphabet. This seems like a good distraction, so I use the next several miles to catch up. Mile 1, in retrospect, was for my niece and nephew Annie and Adam; mile 2 for my brother Bob; etc. I struggle with a few letters, and we share family stories of relatives with oddball names. But Leann comes better prepared, and by the time we get to the letter “Q” and she has a name at the ready, I start to think that the game is as much work as the running. It’s my turn, but I have to say “I got nothing”. Like my stomach, my mood is turning.
I rally with a long recitation for “S” – Sharon (Mom), Sue, Scott, Stan, Sandy, Sherri, Susie, Stacey,…and I’m just getting warmed up – but it has to wait, though, since the letter “S” falls just as we start that last long blasted hill coming out of Brandywine Park. On our first lap up out of the park, we passed a cyclist who was down, being attended to by paramedics – we later learn that this was the lead cyclist – so we’re both grateful to get past this spot on our second lap with no more casualties.
The one beautiful thing about this race course is that the finish is mostly downhill. As we head down the last mile or so – heavenly downhill – Leann says, “I have no kick today”, to which I reply, “this IS my kick”. It’s nice to know that we’re both equally toasted by the heat and the hills and the humidity and the headwinds. Still – kick or no – it feels like we both do pick it up a tad as we round the final corner and head to the finish line. We are both ready – very ready – to be done with this race.
You already know how this story ends. All of it, the heat and the hills and the aching legs and the disappointing splits and the slower-than-hoped-for finishing time of 4:25:57, takes on a different perspective as we cross that finish line. When we saw the forecasted warm temps for the day, we knew it would be a day of survival, but we didn’t imagine that merely surviving would take on so much meaning. In the days following the race, I’ll look not for race results or race photos or my finisher’s certificate, but rather for any information on the guy we saw at the finish line. Several days later, there will finally be a notice: he survived. Actually, not one, but two, men collapsed at the finish line. Both had heart attacks, and both survived. Any way you want to slice it, it was a very successful day. I’m alive. We’re all alive.
So, everything else pales in the haze that covers the weekend, but it makes you appreciate the life in the thing. Suddenly, every single detail is more important than it was a moment ago. Suddenly, none of it matters a bit. The only thing that matters is that you survived, and that you can smile when you think about the experience.
The weekend starts with a huge smile – Leann offers to pick me up at the Philadelphia airport, saving me a few more hours of travel and a sizable hassle (train from the Philly airport to the Amtrak station, transfer to a Wilmington-bound train, then hooking up in downtown Wilmington – something that we were soon to discover would not be all that simple, anyway). So, instead of all that, I exit the secure part of the airport to find Leann waiting in the chairs for me. Yes!
Here’s the thing about spending time with Leann: you laugh a lot. You laugh so much and so hard that you get the hiccups and tears run down your face. Later, you can’t even remember what you laughed about, but at the time it was hysterical. That’s the way the drive from Philly to Wilmington goes: all 20 or so minutes of the drive.
And here’s what makes the weekend a huge success, no matter marathon finish line dramas or disappointing times: all that laughter. What else matters, really?
This is a weekend of travel in an old East Coast city, which means that streets are not on a grid – at least not for long – and even if they are, they change names every few blocks just to keep you guessing. So it takes two people with full attention to drive and navigate. Because Leann has already scoped things out, we find the Comfort Inn easily, and get checked in. Our room opens to a courtyard, complete with swimming pool. It’s early afternoon, and we both notice the sunbathers at the same time. Women in bikinis. Because it’s warm. Hot, actually. With full sun. This is not, we already know, going to be a good marathon. Well, not for us runners. It will be a dandy day for the spectators. For us runners, it will be a day of survival.
We spend much of Friday and Saturday trying to navigate through Wilmington. Good thing there are lots of graduate degrees in Leann’s car, because I’m not sure we would have ever made it to the start line otherwise. It takes three or four maps, and lots of retracing ground we’ve already covered, but we do find our way through the city, and manage to even drive most of the course late Saturday morning. It’s a good thing, too, because the drive sets our expectations for something that wasn’t really clear from the race website: this course is hilly. Not (for the most part) Pike’s Peak type hills, but definitely hilly. And did I mention, the sun is shining and it’s warm?
The highlight of the day on Saturday is the breakfast we stumble into. We try to do the economical thing, and head to the Comfort Inn breakfast room. But between the empty coffee urns, and the kid scraping the burned waffle out of the waffle iron, and the empty chafing dishes, it’s not in the cards. Just down the road we spy Lucky’s Coffee Shop, and decide to give it a try. It’s the best decision we make all weekend. Lucky’s is a proper diner, complete with vinyl booths and chairs, and coffee cups that get refilled every time you blink. The menu features such treasures as scrapple and chipped dried beef in gravy (my dad called this “SOS”). But it also features all the pre-race carbs one person could hope for: pancakes and potatoes and toast. Breakfast for two of us, when it arrives, covers a 4-top table completely. Life is good.
The race starts and ends at the Tubman Garrett Riverfront Park in downtown Wilmington. Well, just the other side of the train tracks from downtown Wilmington. This is no small distinction, since traffic in and out of the park is greatly restricted by the train tracks and road closures (due to the race and other events in the park) and the general poor design of the roads within the park. We’ve scoped things out in advance, though, so on race morning we park in one of the recommended lots that will allow us easy ingress and egress before and after the race, and walk the short distance to the start line.
Here’s a thing about running a ridiculous number of marathons in order to complete a circuit of the states: you start to recognize people at races all around the country. The Delaware Marathon is no different. As Leann and I make our way to the port-a-potties early Sunday morning, I spy Sara, a woman I know from last year’s Steamboat Springs Marathon (and that whole experience with The Professor). We talk briefly, then see each other multiple times on the course. And there is Steve Boone, the president of the 50 States Marathon Club: he is easily recognizable with his wild white locks. There’s Tutu guy, in his completely pink get-up; it’s been awhile since I last saw him, but I read about him occasionally in the running publications. And there’s the guy I see over and over again at races – most notably at the Flying Monkey – but can never remember his name or where he’s from. Still, it feels like a community rather than some random event in some random distant city.
And so the race starts with the firing of a cannon, the loudest send-off I’ve ever experienced in a marathon. The race is a two-loop affair, and each loop takes us through a wide variety of neighborhoods and terrain. The race director clearly tries to showcase the riverfront park, but the park feels like a failed attempt at urban renewal. The park comprises many office buildings, an outdoor arena, and some shops and restaurants that are pretty quiet and empty when we visit on Friday and Saturday. It’s one of those urban projects with the right spirit but poor execution, and it just doesn’t have the vibrant downtown feel that the developers were after. In the marathon, we head southwest to the limits of the park on an interior road, out to the limit of the park, and then head back toward the start/finish on the boardwalk that parallels the Christina River. We cross the start/finish, and head onto the streets of Wilmington. The next bit of the race takes us through what we not-so-jokingly call the ghetto – an ugly, deserted, decrepit area. Ugh. The best thing about this part of the course is that it doesn’t last long, and then we’re dumped back onto Walnut Street, one of the main roadways through the downtown Wilmington business area. None of this part of the course is particularly nice, or scenic, or pleasant. We run past a church with funeral placards outside on the cars lined up, and that pretty much sets the mood for this part of the race.
But much of the race is pretty, and it turns so when we cross a bridge across Brandywine Creek that takes us into Brandywine Park. The park – also home to the local zoo – is lovely, most notably because it is heavily shaded. The flip side is that the road surface is pocked and uneven, which makes for cautious steps. To make matters worse, we have to navigate across a cobbled road, and then across a wooden footbridge. The footbridge sways with the motion of all the runners, and I almost have to stop and walk – it makes me lose my sense of balance. But what waits on the other side of the bridge is worse than the bridge itself – it’s the mile or so long climb that will take us up to the highest point on the race course.
The consolation prize to this climb is that it takes us to the prettiest part of the race. Lovering Avenue becomes Kentmere Parkway, and that takes us to Bancraft Parkway. These are all old, lovely, wide, tree-lined streets with stately homes and beautiful gardens. Leann and I compare notes on which houses we like best. These pretty streets soon give way to Little Italy and several commercial blocks. I read the restaurant names and wish we would have had our pasta-feed in this part of town last night.
After Little Italy, the course mostly doubles back on itself, and takes us back down to the riverfront where we get to pass “Go” but not collect $200 – we get to go back out and do it all again. Almost on cue, the sun, which has been mercifully hiding behind a thick bank of clouds this morning, comes out to blast us as we pass Go. So much for those dreams of an evenly split race. As soon as the clouds burn off, the wind picks up. There are two good things about this. First, the course meanders around so much that we never run directly into the wind for very long. Second, the wind – a good stiff breeze – has a cooling effect. It is, no doubt, also a slowing effect, but by this time, slowing is a given. We appreciate the cooling.
I’ve never run a multi-loop marathon before, and I’m not sure I’m crazy about it, especially when the second lap is, well, just plain hot. To be sure, we look forward to the shady and scenic parts, but the rest just seems annoyingly repetitious. The uphills seem longer and steeper the second time around, and the downhills seem almost non-existent. Thankfully, the volunteers are always the one constant that I enjoy – the race is stocked with plenty of good water and Gatorade.
There are many races going on at the same time (the marathon, the early-starters, the half-marathon, and the marathon relay), and most of these have slightly different course routes. The race course doubles back on itself many times. This all means that by just a few miles into the race, it’s impossible to know where you are in the grand scheme of things. We pass each other and wave and say hi, and yet I have no idea if most of the marathoners are in front of me or behind me.
Leann and I dutifully hit our split buttons at every mile. From the first mile (9:26 – the fastest of the day), I know it’s going to be a slog. My lower back and hamstrings feel tight as I pass the start line, so the slow splits are no surprise, but disappointing all the same. We average just under 10 minute miles in the first half, but the sun and wind do a whammy on us in the second half, and we slow down to almost 10:30 miles. My training runs have finally been a bit faster in the last couple of months, so this feels like a setback.
But Leann keeps things fun and upbeat as we run. Around mile 10, she tells me that she’s been running each mile for a family member or friend with a name that starts with the corresponding letter of the alphabet. This seems like a good distraction, so I use the next several miles to catch up. Mile 1, in retrospect, was for my niece and nephew Annie and Adam; mile 2 for my brother Bob; etc. I struggle with a few letters, and we share family stories of relatives with oddball names. But Leann comes better prepared, and by the time we get to the letter “Q” and she has a name at the ready, I start to think that the game is as much work as the running. It’s my turn, but I have to say “I got nothing”. Like my stomach, my mood is turning.
I rally with a long recitation for “S” – Sharon (Mom), Sue, Scott, Stan, Sandy, Sherri, Susie, Stacey,…and I’m just getting warmed up – but it has to wait, though, since the letter “S” falls just as we start that last long blasted hill coming out of Brandywine Park. On our first lap up out of the park, we passed a cyclist who was down, being attended to by paramedics – we later learn that this was the lead cyclist – so we’re both grateful to get past this spot on our second lap with no more casualties.
The one beautiful thing about this race course is that the finish is mostly downhill. As we head down the last mile or so – heavenly downhill – Leann says, “I have no kick today”, to which I reply, “this IS my kick”. It’s nice to know that we’re both equally toasted by the heat and the hills and the humidity and the headwinds. Still – kick or no – it feels like we both do pick it up a tad as we round the final corner and head to the finish line. We are both ready – very ready – to be done with this race.
You already know how this story ends. All of it, the heat and the hills and the aching legs and the disappointing splits and the slower-than-hoped-for finishing time of 4:25:57, takes on a different perspective as we cross that finish line. When we saw the forecasted warm temps for the day, we knew it would be a day of survival, but we didn’t imagine that merely surviving would take on so much meaning. In the days following the race, I’ll look not for race results or race photos or my finisher’s certificate, but rather for any information on the guy we saw at the finish line. Several days later, there will finally be a notice: he survived. Actually, not one, but two, men collapsed at the finish line. Both had heart attacks, and both survived. Any way you want to slice it, it was a very successful day. I’m alive. We’re all alive.
Monday, June 29, 2009
The Green Ribbon State Marathon
Vermont City Marathon 2009
Paul Theroux, my favorite travel writer, once said, “Travel is nasty”. In an interview about one of his books – a travel book, of course, not his fiction writing – he told the interviewer that there was nothing so tedious as a discussion of the comings and goings at airports, and all the waiting in between, et cetera, et cetera. And so, dear reader, I shall spare you the tedium and frustration of my trip to the Vermont City Marathon, with the endless airline delays and postponements and missed connections and the impromptu night at the Hotel Intercontinental at O’Hare (yes, in Chicago, a city that I had planned to simply pass through). I’ll start my story of the Vermont City Marathon with my arrival in Burlington, Vermont, on Saturday, May 23rd, at around 1 p.m. Nevermind that my original arrival time was scheduled about 20 hours earlier. Nevermind at all.
The first thing that I notice when I arrive at the airport in Vermont is how green and verdant this place is. It’s a greenocopia! Trees, grass, plants, flowers, everything as far as the eye can see. And as far as the eye can see is quite a ways – what with mountains in the background and water in the foreground, and – yes, say it with me – green everywhere. I’ve heard of the Green Mountains; have seen the name on the map; I just never imagined that the name was quite so literal.
Leann – who enticed me to run this thing this year – meets me at our hotel (she has, in my absence this Saturday morning, made a trip to visit her friends with their menagerie of critters, including a trio of pigs named Clyde, Clyde, and Clyde), and we commence on our own tour of exploration (as well as the mission to procure bagels and such for the morning). We drive the course as best we can (and as much as we have the patience for), for the course map and our driving map are not necessarily in synch. But who, really, cares? After all, we’re running this thing for fun, and to bag yet another state, and to see the local flora and fauna, so who really needs this level of preparation?
Late afternoon, we head to the expo and pasta dinner where we meet up with fellow TMer Doug (who was my host and guide in Hartford, CT - holy cow [or perhaps not, the cows also belong to Leann’s friends, with names like Stanley and Earl – that is, the cows, not the friends], have I already run a marathon in Connecticut?). Our little threesome has a great pre-dinner TM get together, catching up on all the news that’s fit to print (or not). We manage to score pre-dinner dessert at the Ben & Jerry’s booth at the expo, but otherwise make quick work of the place, even though there are lots more exhibitors than I would have imagined. We head to the pasta dinner, which is adequate but not really worth the $25 price of admission. Making it all worthwhile are the companions who join us at our table. There is the couple (gay, at least I think so, tattooed and pierced accordingly) from New York, with all kinds of advice about running NYC; on the other side of the round table is the couple (non-gay, and I think they were a couple, of sorts) from San Francisco, willing to advise us on any left coast running. The SF guy, in particular, is memorable. Everything he says is a bark, a command, a declaration. Ya gotta just love the guy…or else you might want to talk to your NY or NJ friends and order a hit.
Race day morning arrives. Leann and I have decided on our course of action for getting to the start on race morning, with opportunities to change course in the event of nerves taking over: we’ll take the shuttle to downtown from our hotel, but – in case the shuttle is tardy in picking us up, we come prepared to drive. Luckily (and wisely) for us, the shuttle arrives outside our hotel fairly promptly (even though it seems hours late), and we are deposited downtown, close to the start line, with ample time for multiple passes through the port-a-potty lines, along with time to check our stuff at the bag check. We have time to scan the crowd – at the appointed time/place – for Doug, but he doesn’t show. Because the first race I ran “with” Doug was in his hometown of Hartford, and I was responsible for our missed connection in the morning (my own dallying in port-a-let lines), I feel doubly responsible for making the connection this morning. It – surprisingly – starts to rain as we wait for Doug to appear. Leann is tough, and just deals with it. (I suspect that with the normal humidity in New Orleans, perhaps she doesn’t even notice that wet stuff is falling out of the sky.) Me, on the other hand, I’m a wimp, and I don a poncho that I’ve brought along (flotsam from the Myrtle Beach Marathon a few months ago). We scan the crowds again for Doug. No Doug. We do see our NY buddies (kinda hard to miss all those tattoos) (happily they don’t notice us), as well as the guy from San Francisco (we don’t approach him, on account of not needing to have a greeting barked at us this early in the morning). Still no Doug. The countdown for race start is approaching, so we ditch the meeting spot in favor of a place somewhere behind the start line. Sorry, Doug. We waited!
The race start is a mess – it’s nearly impossible to cross the line between the staging area and the start corral – but who really cares? We’re only here to bag the state. I ditch my poncho – who really cares if I get wet? It’s a comfortable temperature. It seems like an opportune time for us to discuss our anticipated pacing, seeing as how Leann and I have been talking in general terms about running together today. We quickly agree that we’ll play it by ear (or perhaps by foot); we both expect to run this thing somewhere between 4:15 and 4:30. Good, that’s settled, and now we’re moving across a start line. Leann provides color commentary as the local DJ provides endless babble. Thankfully, I will have only Leann’s commentary after we clear the start area, and I can tune out the DJ.
And so, Leann and I set off on a 26.2 mile journey. For me, the odd thing is how comfortable I was running the entire New Orleans Mardi Gras Marathon with Leann, even though I rarely run with others at all, and never before with anyone for an entire 26.2 miles. I’ve been looking forward to running Vermont with her, no matter what that means in terms of time or pace. Oddly (again), I have no qualms about this, even though she is clearly the faster of the two of us; I know I slowed her down at Mardi Gras, but I also know that we had a great time there. Happily, I know I can handle a faster pace today; I also know that I’ll be quite okay if Leann decides she needs to ditch me at some point in order to take off to run her own race.
We quickly settle into a comfortable pace, with commentary about everything around us….the DJ, the crowds, other runners, the terrain, the green, the rain, the scenery……..everything. When we’ve run for more than ten minutes without seeing a mile marker, we determine that we missed the one mile split. The race course is a bow-tie arrangement with multiple loops, and this initial section takes us south along a grand old street in Burlington that essentially captures the antebellum spirit that I was looking for earlier this year in Jackson, MS. Who knew we would find such mansions here in the frigid and inland north? Leann and I both admire the widow’s walks that adorn many of the homes along this stretch of the route. It’s early; we have plenty of energy to notice such features. We do manage to catch the mile two marker; we’ve accumulated a time of 19:04 so far. We both do the math (just over 9:30 per mile), and are both happy with our start. We go back to chattering away.
By now, we’re running north again, soon to transverse the pedestrian mall on Church Street for our first time, and to cross the start area for our second time of the day. The DJ is still spewing on with whatever DJs find to spew on about. By now, we’ve clearly missed the 3 mile marker, and we’re starting to wonder if the course is only marked every other mile? The rain, which was light at the start and for the first few miles, is now falling with more of a sense of urgency.
The next section of the course takes us on our first serious foray up north of the downtown section of town. As the rain falls more heavily, and as we leave the downtown area for the second time, I hear my name from the side of the road. It’s incredible, but there she is – Emily, a woman I met in Laramie a week ago at a 5k, and she’s shouting my name. Emily is a younger woman, a native of Laramie in exile in Vermont at present; the Professor introduced us at the 5k in Laramie, and I just mentioned that I would be running in Burlington this weekend. Emily is – obviously – not running today, but came out to support another friend of hers (also from Laramie) who is also running today. With nearly 8000 runners in this race, the odds of spotting her – especially on this rain-sodden course – are incredibly small. And yet, there she is, shouting my name. It’s a great early-race boost.
This section is one that Leann and I neglected to drive yesterday, so it’s all new discovery today. The road (highway 127) is completely closed to traffic, which makes it nice. The rain is falling pretty seriously, which makes it not so nice. But this is a clear out-and-back route, so Leann and I start watching seriously – in both directions – to see if we can spot Doug. Unfortunately, we don’t see him. But, with so many runners, and this early in the race, it’s difficult to scan each runner’s face as they go by.
The turnaround comes just before the mile 6 marker; by now, Leann and I have gotten into a rhythm of catching each marker as we pass it. Without noticing, we’ve gradually sped up from our initial 9:32/mile pace to one of 9:11. My heart rate – the guiding light for my pacing in marathons – is so low that it’s not even a factor or concern today. The rain – and accompanying cool temps – can take all the credit. The rain has lessened as we head back into the downtown area just after mile 8, but now the puddles on the road are an issue. I look intently for Emily again, but don’t spot her. That’s okay; I’m so busy trying to keep my shoes from becoming waterlogged that watching the side of the road takes substantial effort.
We soon pass the start area for our third time of the day, and, thankfully, the DJ has stopped broadcasting. It’s a good thing, or else I think Leann might have taken drastic measures. We retrace our steps and end up heading down the pedestrian mall on Church Street again, now in the opposite direction. Leann is, quite suddenly, spouting gibberish: New York! Beijing! I think that perhaps the rain and the early miles have fried her brain. But then she points under our feet, and I see the city names carved in the granite tiles we’re running on. Aha.
Now we head out for our serious loop down south. This time, instead of the genteel mansions with the widow’s walks, we follow an industrial street. We no longer have the full use of the road, and the standing water from the rain is an on-going issue. But it’s okay; we’re on familiar ground – this is a part of the course that Leann and I have covered in our course tour (not to mention comings and goings) over the last day.
The rain lets up some; we run on; we talk. After our burst of semi-speed in the north loop, our pace just naturally scales back to a more manageable 9:30 or so level. We’re very comfortably trotting along, but the new challenge is the road surface itself. We noticed this during yesterday’s tour: the road is quite broken and potholed here, so it requires some serious attention to footing. The scenery along this stretch is probably the least interesting of the entire course, so watching the road is not all that difficult.
Around mile 11, we veer westward, over to Lake Champlain, and on to some of the prettiest 15 miles that any marathon can offer. The good news is that we’re finally off that miserable stretch of road. The bad news is that now we’re on a much narrower bike path. The views along the bike path are quite lovely, especially on the stretches that front the lake. But with 8000 runners (3000 in the marathon and 5000 in the relays), that makes a lot of traffic on a narrow path. The rain stops altogether, then spits and feints a bit, and finally starts again as we head back into the downtown area. This time around, it’s a bit of a relief, as we’ve been dreading warmer temperatures. The rain keeps things nice and cool.
And cool is good, as we approach the toughest part of the course: the Assault on Battery. That is how the race literature refers to the 6 block stretch along Battery Street right at mile 15, where the road climbs precipitously. The bad news is that this is clearly the steepest and longest climb of the race. The good news is that it’s only 6 blocks long. The better news is that we’re right back in downtown Burlington, so there are lots of people here to cheer us up the hill. The best news of all is that there is a crew of drummers out at the base of the hill, beating out a rhythm that does nothing less than propel you straight up the hill. Even today, in what has become a steady rain again, the drummers are pounding away, the most invigorating beat imaginable. Leann – who humiliates this Rocky Mountain denizen with her mountain goat climbing ability – says “see you at the top”, and takes off to truly assault Battery. As for me, I’m a little intimidated until the beating of the drums gets under my skin, and then that energy just starts my legs churning. I’ve been afraid that Leann will totally embarrass me, but I’m able to keep her in sight, and reach the crest of the hill after she’s had just a short recovery period, waiting for me. I think, if that’s the worst that the day has to throw at us, life is good.
And, indeed, life is good from here on out. Although we’ve barely passed the halfway point in the race, it feels like the hardest work is done. We head north again, on a long slog of roadway that Leann and I drove yesterday. Today, I’m grateful for the detours off this main thoroughfare that take us through some nice, homey, tree-lined residential areas. I’m impressed by the number of people out in one of the cutout sections – an entire subdivision with tailgate parties happening, despite the early wet conditions. (When I visit these new locations for races, I always assess the area; would I, could I live here? The answer for this race – for Vermont in general, and this particular residential stretch in particular – is a resounding yes!) The rain finally stops altogether, and the sun makes its (somewhat unwelcome) appearance. Leann immediately protests this occurrence – she has much more experience with rain, sun, heat, and humidity. But the streets are (mostly) treelined, so the steam room effect is not nearly as bad as it might be.
Back out on the main, heavily traveled road, we see the guys in front of us pushing a car across the road. Yes, those are racers, complete with bib numbers and chips on their shoes, but they’re pushing a car. Wha??? This happens almost directly in front of us. We see, very quickly, what has happened: a car with a poorly set parking brake has lost its mooring in a driveway across the street, and drifted onto the race course. We applaud the guys – who could have just let the car block the race path, but who took time (and not a small amount of effort) to put things right again.
Now we’re at the northernmost place on the course, and we have a short and steep downhill pitch – on badly pitted and potholed asphalt – to the bike path that will take us back south to the finish line. A guy passes us – one of the few people we will concede ground to in the second half of the race – and he just seems to be having a great time. He assaults the downhill, and we follow suit.
We are at mile 22, and the rest of the course is just absolutely beautiful. The bike path follows the contours of Lake Champlain, and provides ample views of the waterfront. It doesn’t hurt that we’re on a gradual downhill grade to the finish. By the time we hit mile 20, we’re on a solid 9:30 or so per mile pace, with very minor deviation. It’s felt like a very good, comfortable pace for some time. But now, with the sun shining, and heat radiating off the ground, it’s a bit harder going. We pick up the effort for the next few miles, although our pace for miles 22 and 23 are right on track with the previous 21 miles. It’s tougher going now, owing to the fact that the bike path is narrow and a bit uneven, and we’re passing lots and lots of runners who have run out of steam. Leann has drawn the tougher duty on this section of the race, needing to weave more than I do to avoid the people we’re passing. This stuff takes concentration! We’re not talking much, just working on getting to the finish.
For a while now, people have been shouting out “Go 4-6-7!” as we pass them. I finally glance over at my running partner and confirm that it’s her bib number. Nobody yells “Go 2-4-3-5!” (my bib number), and I wonder (not for the first time) if maybe I really shouldn’t put my name on my shirt one of these days.
We hit splits for mile 23 (9:36), and Leann calls for mercy. Same effort + tougher conditions (heat, humidity, dodging people) = roughly the same pace. We back off the pace almost imperceptibly (mile 24 is 9:44), and it helps us both recover a little. But now we can almost smell that finish line. We are churning along through mile 25 (9:09 – at this point, our second fastest mile of the day), and then somehow we pour it on for mile 26. This finish is convoluted – we scoped it out yesterday – the race course does a big u-turn at the end, and sends us from the asphalt bike path onto a wooden boardwalk (briefly, thank God), then across some grass, and then onto a concrete path for the finish. As we hit the wood (my huge fear – long story from a million years ago: falling on a wooden boardwalk, splitting my chin, winding up in an emergency room, etc.), we see the 26 mile mark, and we both hit our split buttons: 8:56, our fastest mile of the day. Leann manages to grunt out “stupid”, and from deep recess in my brain, I respond with “Stupid is as stupid does”. But at least no hospital visit today. So much for an easy training run. We’re both now racing for the finish – not really racing each other, or even the clock, but making that plunge for the line. How can you not plunge for the line? People are calling out “go blue!”, and I realize that they are cheering for both of us, since we are – completely unwittingly – dressed almost identically. We look like the freaking Bobbsey Twins, if you get right down to it. Why did it take 26 miles for me to realize this?
The finish line finally comes into sight after all these last minute twists and turns, and we lunge across it. More people yell “go 4-6-7!” If this race were to go much longer, I might get an inferiority complex! As it is, I’ll discover, through our finishing times and placement as well as the finish line photos, that Leann has the better finish line surge – she clearly bested me at the line. But I’m quite thrilled with a time of 4:07:21, which is far faster than I imagined running today. It’s now sunny and warm, and my marathon partner and I can finally enjoy the beautiful day that it’s become.
The finish of the Vermont City Marathon is, amazingly large and crowded. The organizers put on a fine spread for the full marathoners (and they police the food tent so that the relay runners only have access to a smaller array of goodies). Leann and I head through the line, and I grab a little of almost everything – the sweetest orange slices ever, cookies, cereal bars, Dixie cups of chex mix, Vermont cheddar cheese in yet another Dixie cup – oh, yum!, and, of course, more Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. It almost pains me that we have a late lunch planned down the road from Burlington – the spread is among the best I’ve ever seen at a marathon finish.
But we do have more sight-seeing and partying to do, so we take the shuttle back to our hotel. After some quick showers, we head down the road to Waterbury and a great little brewpub, “The Alchemist”. A couple of friends of mine – people I used to work with in New Hampshire – live in Vermont now, and we meet them for some great brews and food while catching up. The scenery along the way there and back is everything you might wish for Vermont: mountains all around, a road that follows a winding river, picturesque villages and buildings, and green everywhere. (Don’t ask about the whale tails sculpture.) It’s still light and pleasant when we get back to Burlington, so we park the car downtown and take a stroll along the streets that we ran on earlier today. Naturally, we find ourselves at the (we believe original) Ben & Jerry’s shop for a “nightcap”, and we peek in some storefronts as we enjoy our second helping of ice cream for the day. Travel, I think to myself, to somewhere as wonderful as Vermont, is quite delightful.
Paul Theroux, my favorite travel writer, once said, “Travel is nasty”. In an interview about one of his books – a travel book, of course, not his fiction writing – he told the interviewer that there was nothing so tedious as a discussion of the comings and goings at airports, and all the waiting in between, et cetera, et cetera. And so, dear reader, I shall spare you the tedium and frustration of my trip to the Vermont City Marathon, with the endless airline delays and postponements and missed connections and the impromptu night at the Hotel Intercontinental at O’Hare (yes, in Chicago, a city that I had planned to simply pass through). I’ll start my story of the Vermont City Marathon with my arrival in Burlington, Vermont, on Saturday, May 23rd, at around 1 p.m. Nevermind that my original arrival time was scheduled about 20 hours earlier. Nevermind at all.
The first thing that I notice when I arrive at the airport in Vermont is how green and verdant this place is. It’s a greenocopia! Trees, grass, plants, flowers, everything as far as the eye can see. And as far as the eye can see is quite a ways – what with mountains in the background and water in the foreground, and – yes, say it with me – green everywhere. I’ve heard of the Green Mountains; have seen the name on the map; I just never imagined that the name was quite so literal.
Leann – who enticed me to run this thing this year – meets me at our hotel (she has, in my absence this Saturday morning, made a trip to visit her friends with their menagerie of critters, including a trio of pigs named Clyde, Clyde, and Clyde), and we commence on our own tour of exploration (as well as the mission to procure bagels and such for the morning). We drive the course as best we can (and as much as we have the patience for), for the course map and our driving map are not necessarily in synch. But who, really, cares? After all, we’re running this thing for fun, and to bag yet another state, and to see the local flora and fauna, so who really needs this level of preparation?
Late afternoon, we head to the expo and pasta dinner where we meet up with fellow TMer Doug (who was my host and guide in Hartford, CT - holy cow [or perhaps not, the cows also belong to Leann’s friends, with names like Stanley and Earl – that is, the cows, not the friends], have I already run a marathon in Connecticut?). Our little threesome has a great pre-dinner TM get together, catching up on all the news that’s fit to print (or not). We manage to score pre-dinner dessert at the Ben & Jerry’s booth at the expo, but otherwise make quick work of the place, even though there are lots more exhibitors than I would have imagined. We head to the pasta dinner, which is adequate but not really worth the $25 price of admission. Making it all worthwhile are the companions who join us at our table. There is the couple (gay, at least I think so, tattooed and pierced accordingly) from New York, with all kinds of advice about running NYC; on the other side of the round table is the couple (non-gay, and I think they were a couple, of sorts) from San Francisco, willing to advise us on any left coast running. The SF guy, in particular, is memorable. Everything he says is a bark, a command, a declaration. Ya gotta just love the guy…or else you might want to talk to your NY or NJ friends and order a hit.
Race day morning arrives. Leann and I have decided on our course of action for getting to the start on race morning, with opportunities to change course in the event of nerves taking over: we’ll take the shuttle to downtown from our hotel, but – in case the shuttle is tardy in picking us up, we come prepared to drive. Luckily (and wisely) for us, the shuttle arrives outside our hotel fairly promptly (even though it seems hours late), and we are deposited downtown, close to the start line, with ample time for multiple passes through the port-a-potty lines, along with time to check our stuff at the bag check. We have time to scan the crowd – at the appointed time/place – for Doug, but he doesn’t show. Because the first race I ran “with” Doug was in his hometown of Hartford, and I was responsible for our missed connection in the morning (my own dallying in port-a-let lines), I feel doubly responsible for making the connection this morning. It – surprisingly – starts to rain as we wait for Doug to appear. Leann is tough, and just deals with it. (I suspect that with the normal humidity in New Orleans, perhaps she doesn’t even notice that wet stuff is falling out of the sky.) Me, on the other hand, I’m a wimp, and I don a poncho that I’ve brought along (flotsam from the Myrtle Beach Marathon a few months ago). We scan the crowds again for Doug. No Doug. We do see our NY buddies (kinda hard to miss all those tattoos) (happily they don’t notice us), as well as the guy from San Francisco (we don’t approach him, on account of not needing to have a greeting barked at us this early in the morning). Still no Doug. The countdown for race start is approaching, so we ditch the meeting spot in favor of a place somewhere behind the start line. Sorry, Doug. We waited!
The race start is a mess – it’s nearly impossible to cross the line between the staging area and the start corral – but who really cares? We’re only here to bag the state. I ditch my poncho – who really cares if I get wet? It’s a comfortable temperature. It seems like an opportune time for us to discuss our anticipated pacing, seeing as how Leann and I have been talking in general terms about running together today. We quickly agree that we’ll play it by ear (or perhaps by foot); we both expect to run this thing somewhere between 4:15 and 4:30. Good, that’s settled, and now we’re moving across a start line. Leann provides color commentary as the local DJ provides endless babble. Thankfully, I will have only Leann’s commentary after we clear the start area, and I can tune out the DJ.
And so, Leann and I set off on a 26.2 mile journey. For me, the odd thing is how comfortable I was running the entire New Orleans Mardi Gras Marathon with Leann, even though I rarely run with others at all, and never before with anyone for an entire 26.2 miles. I’ve been looking forward to running Vermont with her, no matter what that means in terms of time or pace. Oddly (again), I have no qualms about this, even though she is clearly the faster of the two of us; I know I slowed her down at Mardi Gras, but I also know that we had a great time there. Happily, I know I can handle a faster pace today; I also know that I’ll be quite okay if Leann decides she needs to ditch me at some point in order to take off to run her own race.
We quickly settle into a comfortable pace, with commentary about everything around us….the DJ, the crowds, other runners, the terrain, the green, the rain, the scenery……..everything. When we’ve run for more than ten minutes without seeing a mile marker, we determine that we missed the one mile split. The race course is a bow-tie arrangement with multiple loops, and this initial section takes us south along a grand old street in Burlington that essentially captures the antebellum spirit that I was looking for earlier this year in Jackson, MS. Who knew we would find such mansions here in the frigid and inland north? Leann and I both admire the widow’s walks that adorn many of the homes along this stretch of the route. It’s early; we have plenty of energy to notice such features. We do manage to catch the mile two marker; we’ve accumulated a time of 19:04 so far. We both do the math (just over 9:30 per mile), and are both happy with our start. We go back to chattering away.
By now, we’re running north again, soon to transverse the pedestrian mall on Church Street for our first time, and to cross the start area for our second time of the day. The DJ is still spewing on with whatever DJs find to spew on about. By now, we’ve clearly missed the 3 mile marker, and we’re starting to wonder if the course is only marked every other mile? The rain, which was light at the start and for the first few miles, is now falling with more of a sense of urgency.
The next section of the course takes us on our first serious foray up north of the downtown section of town. As the rain falls more heavily, and as we leave the downtown area for the second time, I hear my name from the side of the road. It’s incredible, but there she is – Emily, a woman I met in Laramie a week ago at a 5k, and she’s shouting my name. Emily is a younger woman, a native of Laramie in exile in Vermont at present; the Professor introduced us at the 5k in Laramie, and I just mentioned that I would be running in Burlington this weekend. Emily is – obviously – not running today, but came out to support another friend of hers (also from Laramie) who is also running today. With nearly 8000 runners in this race, the odds of spotting her – especially on this rain-sodden course – are incredibly small. And yet, there she is, shouting my name. It’s a great early-race boost.
This section is one that Leann and I neglected to drive yesterday, so it’s all new discovery today. The road (highway 127) is completely closed to traffic, which makes it nice. The rain is falling pretty seriously, which makes it not so nice. But this is a clear out-and-back route, so Leann and I start watching seriously – in both directions – to see if we can spot Doug. Unfortunately, we don’t see him. But, with so many runners, and this early in the race, it’s difficult to scan each runner’s face as they go by.
The turnaround comes just before the mile 6 marker; by now, Leann and I have gotten into a rhythm of catching each marker as we pass it. Without noticing, we’ve gradually sped up from our initial 9:32/mile pace to one of 9:11. My heart rate – the guiding light for my pacing in marathons – is so low that it’s not even a factor or concern today. The rain – and accompanying cool temps – can take all the credit. The rain has lessened as we head back into the downtown area just after mile 8, but now the puddles on the road are an issue. I look intently for Emily again, but don’t spot her. That’s okay; I’m so busy trying to keep my shoes from becoming waterlogged that watching the side of the road takes substantial effort.
We soon pass the start area for our third time of the day, and, thankfully, the DJ has stopped broadcasting. It’s a good thing, or else I think Leann might have taken drastic measures. We retrace our steps and end up heading down the pedestrian mall on Church Street again, now in the opposite direction. Leann is, quite suddenly, spouting gibberish: New York! Beijing! I think that perhaps the rain and the early miles have fried her brain. But then she points under our feet, and I see the city names carved in the granite tiles we’re running on. Aha.
Now we head out for our serious loop down south. This time, instead of the genteel mansions with the widow’s walks, we follow an industrial street. We no longer have the full use of the road, and the standing water from the rain is an on-going issue. But it’s okay; we’re on familiar ground – this is a part of the course that Leann and I have covered in our course tour (not to mention comings and goings) over the last day.
The rain lets up some; we run on; we talk. After our burst of semi-speed in the north loop, our pace just naturally scales back to a more manageable 9:30 or so level. We’re very comfortably trotting along, but the new challenge is the road surface itself. We noticed this during yesterday’s tour: the road is quite broken and potholed here, so it requires some serious attention to footing. The scenery along this stretch is probably the least interesting of the entire course, so watching the road is not all that difficult.
Around mile 11, we veer westward, over to Lake Champlain, and on to some of the prettiest 15 miles that any marathon can offer. The good news is that we’re finally off that miserable stretch of road. The bad news is that now we’re on a much narrower bike path. The views along the bike path are quite lovely, especially on the stretches that front the lake. But with 8000 runners (3000 in the marathon and 5000 in the relays), that makes a lot of traffic on a narrow path. The rain stops altogether, then spits and feints a bit, and finally starts again as we head back into the downtown area. This time around, it’s a bit of a relief, as we’ve been dreading warmer temperatures. The rain keeps things nice and cool.
And cool is good, as we approach the toughest part of the course: the Assault on Battery. That is how the race literature refers to the 6 block stretch along Battery Street right at mile 15, where the road climbs precipitously. The bad news is that this is clearly the steepest and longest climb of the race. The good news is that it’s only 6 blocks long. The better news is that we’re right back in downtown Burlington, so there are lots of people here to cheer us up the hill. The best news of all is that there is a crew of drummers out at the base of the hill, beating out a rhythm that does nothing less than propel you straight up the hill. Even today, in what has become a steady rain again, the drummers are pounding away, the most invigorating beat imaginable. Leann – who humiliates this Rocky Mountain denizen with her mountain goat climbing ability – says “see you at the top”, and takes off to truly assault Battery. As for me, I’m a little intimidated until the beating of the drums gets under my skin, and then that energy just starts my legs churning. I’ve been afraid that Leann will totally embarrass me, but I’m able to keep her in sight, and reach the crest of the hill after she’s had just a short recovery period, waiting for me. I think, if that’s the worst that the day has to throw at us, life is good.
And, indeed, life is good from here on out. Although we’ve barely passed the halfway point in the race, it feels like the hardest work is done. We head north again, on a long slog of roadway that Leann and I drove yesterday. Today, I’m grateful for the detours off this main thoroughfare that take us through some nice, homey, tree-lined residential areas. I’m impressed by the number of people out in one of the cutout sections – an entire subdivision with tailgate parties happening, despite the early wet conditions. (When I visit these new locations for races, I always assess the area; would I, could I live here? The answer for this race – for Vermont in general, and this particular residential stretch in particular – is a resounding yes!) The rain finally stops altogether, and the sun makes its (somewhat unwelcome) appearance. Leann immediately protests this occurrence – she has much more experience with rain, sun, heat, and humidity. But the streets are (mostly) treelined, so the steam room effect is not nearly as bad as it might be.
Back out on the main, heavily traveled road, we see the guys in front of us pushing a car across the road. Yes, those are racers, complete with bib numbers and chips on their shoes, but they’re pushing a car. Wha??? This happens almost directly in front of us. We see, very quickly, what has happened: a car with a poorly set parking brake has lost its mooring in a driveway across the street, and drifted onto the race course. We applaud the guys – who could have just let the car block the race path, but who took time (and not a small amount of effort) to put things right again.
Now we’re at the northernmost place on the course, and we have a short and steep downhill pitch – on badly pitted and potholed asphalt – to the bike path that will take us back south to the finish line. A guy passes us – one of the few people we will concede ground to in the second half of the race – and he just seems to be having a great time. He assaults the downhill, and we follow suit.
We are at mile 22, and the rest of the course is just absolutely beautiful. The bike path follows the contours of Lake Champlain, and provides ample views of the waterfront. It doesn’t hurt that we’re on a gradual downhill grade to the finish. By the time we hit mile 20, we’re on a solid 9:30 or so per mile pace, with very minor deviation. It’s felt like a very good, comfortable pace for some time. But now, with the sun shining, and heat radiating off the ground, it’s a bit harder going. We pick up the effort for the next few miles, although our pace for miles 22 and 23 are right on track with the previous 21 miles. It’s tougher going now, owing to the fact that the bike path is narrow and a bit uneven, and we’re passing lots and lots of runners who have run out of steam. Leann has drawn the tougher duty on this section of the race, needing to weave more than I do to avoid the people we’re passing. This stuff takes concentration! We’re not talking much, just working on getting to the finish.
For a while now, people have been shouting out “Go 4-6-7!” as we pass them. I finally glance over at my running partner and confirm that it’s her bib number. Nobody yells “Go 2-4-3-5!” (my bib number), and I wonder (not for the first time) if maybe I really shouldn’t put my name on my shirt one of these days.
We hit splits for mile 23 (9:36), and Leann calls for mercy. Same effort + tougher conditions (heat, humidity, dodging people) = roughly the same pace. We back off the pace almost imperceptibly (mile 24 is 9:44), and it helps us both recover a little. But now we can almost smell that finish line. We are churning along through mile 25 (9:09 – at this point, our second fastest mile of the day), and then somehow we pour it on for mile 26. This finish is convoluted – we scoped it out yesterday – the race course does a big u-turn at the end, and sends us from the asphalt bike path onto a wooden boardwalk (briefly, thank God), then across some grass, and then onto a concrete path for the finish. As we hit the wood (my huge fear – long story from a million years ago: falling on a wooden boardwalk, splitting my chin, winding up in an emergency room, etc.), we see the 26 mile mark, and we both hit our split buttons: 8:56, our fastest mile of the day. Leann manages to grunt out “stupid”, and from deep recess in my brain, I respond with “Stupid is as stupid does”. But at least no hospital visit today. So much for an easy training run. We’re both now racing for the finish – not really racing each other, or even the clock, but making that plunge for the line. How can you not plunge for the line? People are calling out “go blue!”, and I realize that they are cheering for both of us, since we are – completely unwittingly – dressed almost identically. We look like the freaking Bobbsey Twins, if you get right down to it. Why did it take 26 miles for me to realize this?
The finish line finally comes into sight after all these last minute twists and turns, and we lunge across it. More people yell “go 4-6-7!” If this race were to go much longer, I might get an inferiority complex! As it is, I’ll discover, through our finishing times and placement as well as the finish line photos, that Leann has the better finish line surge – she clearly bested me at the line. But I’m quite thrilled with a time of 4:07:21, which is far faster than I imagined running today. It’s now sunny and warm, and my marathon partner and I can finally enjoy the beautiful day that it’s become.
The finish of the Vermont City Marathon is, amazingly large and crowded. The organizers put on a fine spread for the full marathoners (and they police the food tent so that the relay runners only have access to a smaller array of goodies). Leann and I head through the line, and I grab a little of almost everything – the sweetest orange slices ever, cookies, cereal bars, Dixie cups of chex mix, Vermont cheddar cheese in yet another Dixie cup – oh, yum!, and, of course, more Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. It almost pains me that we have a late lunch planned down the road from Burlington – the spread is among the best I’ve ever seen at a marathon finish.
But we do have more sight-seeing and partying to do, so we take the shuttle back to our hotel. After some quick showers, we head down the road to Waterbury and a great little brewpub, “The Alchemist”. A couple of friends of mine – people I used to work with in New Hampshire – live in Vermont now, and we meet them for some great brews and food while catching up. The scenery along the way there and back is everything you might wish for Vermont: mountains all around, a road that follows a winding river, picturesque villages and buildings, and green everywhere. (Don’t ask about the whale tails sculpture.) It’s still light and pleasant when we get back to Burlington, so we park the car downtown and take a stroll along the streets that we ran on earlier today. Naturally, we find ourselves at the (we believe original) Ben & Jerry’s shop for a “nightcap”, and we peek in some storefronts as we enjoy our second helping of ice cream for the day. Travel, I think to myself, to somewhere as wonderful as Vermont, is quite delightful.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Boston 2009: the year of cold hands
What can you say about a race that you’ve run seven times previously? That you love the thing? That it makes you crazy? That the travel is difficult, and expensive, and always worrisome? That the course itself is very challenging, and it can kick your butt, but that the fans are like no other fans in the world? That on either end of the 26.2 miles – either in Hopkinton (town motto: “where it all begins”) on race morning, or along Boylston Street at the end – and for every step along the way, it’s a celebration of running?
That’s how Mick described my addiction to this race a year ago, when I was puzzling over my crazy compulsion to come back to Boston year after year. “It’s a runners’ festival”, he said, and I immediately knew he was right. It’s like gaining membership to one of the greatest running clubs in the world, and then being invited back year after year. Even after seven – now eight - years of running the Boston Marathon, I can still barely believe my good fortune each year when I get my confirmation card in the mail.
It was easy to play mental games in those early years. I ran my first Boston in April 2002 in a time of 4:00:55 after just squeaking in with a qualifying time of 3:55:59. To be clear: that qualifier left not a second to spare. Early that year, I broke a rib (skiing, Beaver Creek, steep bumps) in the critical stages of my Boston training, and wasn’t at all sure I could even make it to “the show”. I startled myself with that performance – I went out and ran a comfortable pace on a reputedly tough course, with sub-optimal training – and yet I still ran the second fastest marathon of my (then very short) marathoning career. Lucky for me, the next year Boston changed qualifying standards, easing my previous 3:55 requirement to 4:00, so I had, once again, just squeaked in. Barely able to believe my good fortune, I vowed to go back to Boston to vindicate myself and shave off a mere 56 seconds so that I could say I had run Boston “sub-4”. Why did I choose that goal? Who knows. It was an easy number to quantify, I guess. And, I think, in retrospect, one that seemed imminently doable at the time.
But it turned out not to be quite so easy. The next three years were all hot, and I don’t do so well on hot days. I suffered through 2003 and 2004 in 4:16:41 and 4:29:34, and felt like death warmed over at the end of each race. It seemed so wrong, so unfair, to be training harder each year, and yet to be going backwards in the final standings. The third hot year – 2005 – I managed my race much better, but still finished in a disappointing 4:04:00. The consolation prize that year was the fact of my highest age-group placing to date. Still, it wasn’t sub-4.
2006 looked like the year it would happen; the weather was almost picture perfect – by marathoners’ standards, anyway. Cool and cloudy all the way. My training was solid. But it just wasn’t my day, and I knew it all the way, so when I crossed the finish line that year, I felt like I had failed. That I had run a time identical to the previous year (4:04:00) was no consolation. I should have been much, much faster!
The next year, 2007, was the year that Boston almost didn’t happen, owing to a Nor’easter that rampaged in New England during marathon week. This was also my first Boston without Mick. Given the cold, wet conditions, and the absence of my biggest cheerleader, I had low expectations for the day. So, of course, dear reader, you see the punch line before I can even type it: I ran a breakthrough Boston time of 3:57:25. Finally. I had my sub-4 at Boston. Time to retire from the race.
But, of course, with addiction, there is always a reason to have just one more go at it, one more excuse to repeat the experience. In 2008, I had serious health issues, and thought I might have to retire from running altogether, or, at the very least, retire from marathons. So, I justified to myself that I needed to return to Boston “just one more time”. It was, I told my friends and family, my “Boston Swan Song”. I would carry my camera and capture photos of every landmark along the way that had come to represent the Boston experience to me. I would stop and smell the flowers. I would have a beer on Heartbreak Hill. I would high five every kid along the route, and kiss the girls at Wellesley. Yes, I did all this, and ran my slowest Boston to date (4:38:59), and followed it all up with an emergency appendectomy back in Denver a day or so later.
Ever in search of a new reason to return to the Runners Festival, in 2009 I settled on one that would – possibly, with luck and some hard work – serve me for the next three years: a goal to run Boston ten times in a row. After all, 2008 marked my seventh consecutive, so I just need three more. At the St. George Marathon in October 2008, I ran a qualifying time for Boston 2010. Now the pressure hit: to be able to show up healthy enough to finish a marathon on April 20th, and then, later in 2009, to run just one more qualifying time. If all goes well, I won’t even have to think about a new raison d’etre until sometime after April 2011.
And so, in April 2009, I board a flight headed eastward. We marathoners typically fret over the race day forecasts; this time around, I find myself in the unusual position of fretting over the local forecast. Our mild spring has turned, on the eve of my departure for Beantown, into a veritable winter wonderland, with nothing short of a blizzard in the forecast for my travel day. Being a Nervous Nellie about travel and connections and such, I consider, for a short time, heading to the airport on Friday afternoon in hopes of getting out of town a bit early, but it’s just not gonna happen: I can’t get my act together that quickly. Lucky for me, that works out just fine. I time my Saturday morning drive to the airport earlier than normal, and when I get there, it seems that all systems are go. The plane I’m on – the one that takes off eastward only a few minutes late – is full of people who sat on the tarmac for hours and hours Friday night, only to be turned back because of weather and crew schedules. Happily, I land in Boston (with an easy connection through LaGuardia) right on time late Saturday afternoon.
It turns out that this is to be the weekend of easy connections – airline and otherwise. While negotiating the connection at LaGuardia (not a simple one, requiring a shuttle bus ride and a second trip through security), I meet up with another Boston-bound runner, a woman from Denver. It’s my good fortune to make a friend simply by offering to share the complex connection experience with her, and we exchange contact information for potential races back in Colorado after this weekend. Once on the ground in Boston, I have one of those six-degrees-of-separation experiences that can make you become a true believer if you’re not already so inclined: folks from Chattanooga (obviously in town for the marathon) that I meet on the T turn out to be friends with Ian (No Twitch), one of my Taper Madness buddies. Even better, they know my hotel at Kenmore Square, and, once off the T, they point me in the right direction. It all seems easy and familiar and very, very homey.
It’s too late at my arrival on Saturday for me to accomplish much other than a quick walk to a grocery store for some supplies. My hotel room does, quite accidentally, look out over Fenway Park. Although I’m not a huge baseball fan, there’s something about the energy of the Saturday night game that is just undeniable, so I open my curtains and take a few photos of the bright lights of the stadium. One thing is clear: I’m in Boston again!
Sunday is all about friends and connections. Just as it should be. My good friend Nan drives down from Maine to share brunch with me, and to fill me in on her plans to enter a PhD program in the fall. Nan drops me off at the Hynes Center so that I can hit the race packet pick-up and expo. I’m able to coordinate this with Michele (1L) and her friend Jody, so the three of us have a successful (read: spend lots of money) shopping experience (of course, all – ahem – essential running gear). (Note to self: shopping at an expo with like-minded friends is not so easy on the credit card.) The day passes in a blur of activity. Michele and I practically walk right into Paul (Stihl Going) as we make our way back to the hotel after our expo experience; Paul and his friends are just leaving the Sunday afternoon Red Sox game, and are passing directly in front of our hotel.
Sunday night finds us at a pasta dinner that Michele has arranged, another Taper Madness event, along with a few other running friends we’ve all collected along the way. It’s my first chance to meet Betsy and Matt, and another chance to see Beth, as well as the rest of the crew. The pasta is great, the shared wine is unexpected and tasty (thank you Betsy for ordering!), and the company is, as expected, exhilarating. But we all have a race to run Monday morning, so the evening ends early, and Michele and I head back to our hotel, the Buckminster.
Michele – a native of Natick (the fourth town along the Boston Marathon course) – has run the race countless times, but has never taken part in the downtown Boston experience with the requisite yellow school bus ride out to Hopkinton and the hours in Athletes’ Village there. So this year, she has joined me at the Buckminster, and together we make our plans for race day morning. This Sunday night, we both assemble our gear for the morning. Everything is going just fine, with only one problem: I can’t find my gloves for race morning. I’m certain that I packed them; in fact, I can actually see myself pulling them out of the basket in my bedroom back in Denver, and dropping them into my suitcase. Then where the heck are they? I empty my suitcase for an umpteenth time, doublecheck the dresser drawers in the hotel, but they are just plain missing. Dang. The expo is long since closed, so that’s not an option. Dang again.
On race morning, Michele and I stop at the Dunkin Donuts just a few steps down from the hotel for giant cups of joe to go, and then hoof it to Boston Commons to catch our bus. It’s cold – a good thing on race morning. But I’m annoyed that I have no gloves. I try to keep my hands warm around the big coffee cup, but it’s too well insulated, so it’s a poor provider of warmth. By now, Jody has joined us, and we start the long wait for buses. I watch all the people around us, envious of the gloves that everyone seems to be wearing. Everyone, that is, except me.
Eventually we make it onto a bus, and then out to Hopkinton and Athletes’ Village. Have I mentioned that I’m nervous before a race? Well, yeah. That, combined with my seven years experience at this race, makes me anxious to get to the start line as early as I can. We spend a little time in the village, have lots of photos taken together, and then I dump my extra clothes at the baggage bus, wish Michele and Jody good luck, and head up to my corral. Have I mentioned that it’s (blissfully) cold this morning? Well, yeah. That fact, if it holds, might make this a great race. If only I had gloves – I would be extremely happy!
The race gets underway, and then I’m on autopilot. This all feels so familiar – in a very good way. Still, it has an aura, one of the ultimate running event. I can’t quite believe my good fortune to be here yet again. Every year, as we start to run this stretch out of Hopkinton, I feel like a bit of an imposter. Every year, as we run this stretch, the crowds on the side of the road make me feel welcome and at home.
My expectations for the day are not really even formed as we start running; what do I want out of this day? Well, hopefully, to run somewhat faster than last year, when I took my time and made a photo journal of the course. Also, hopefully, to run a bit faster than my last several marathons, which have all been pathetically slow, but each one has been just a bit faster than the last. Finally, as always, I just want to have a good marathon day – which means I pray to not have a death march at the finish, and to finish strong. That might not seem so much to ask, but – and trust me on this – anyone who has ever run a marathon can attest to the fact that it’s huge.
Somehow, I end up on the left hand side of the road coming out of Hopkinton, right in the middle of the crowd. That has never happened before, and it screws up my ritual of high-fiving all the folks who line the road on the right hand side of the road there. Rather than darting across the road, I just settle in and run along. It is going to be, I’m already recognizing, one of those days where the race just happens on its own.
There is a beeper going off somewhere near me, and I figure that somebody has configured a watch or heart rate monitor to sound at some interval. There is so much noise at first – the announcers, the crowds, the people around me – that you can’t hear it clearly. But once we get out of the crowded start area, I hear it more definitively. It’s really annoying. The noise seems to come from directly behind me, and I keep expecting the owner of the noise to pass me along this stretch, and then the annoyance will end. But other then a few brief silent interludes, it keeps sounding. So very annoying.
The first mile marker comes up, and I’m pleased to see a time of 9:07 on my new Polar watch. My old trusty Timex died on the weekend of the Little Rock Marathon, and I thought it just needed a new battery. By the time I replaced the battery and realized that the entire watch was kaput, not just the battery, it was too late to get a replacement from Timex in time for Boston. So the replacement I bought just last week is a Polar watch (largely because of the heart rate monitor), but I haven’t really had time to get to know it at all yet. I consider myself lucky to have even gotten the thing configured with the HRM today, and I feel good that I can take a split with it.
Other than that incessant beeping that seems to be coming from a source near me, my only other complaint in the opening mile of this race is the fact that my hands are cold. I’ve decided to wear a long-sleeved technical shirt, figuring that I can take it off and tie it around my waist later when (and if) it warms up. But my hands are still freezing. I look at the gloves that people have started to discard along the way, and have fleeting thoughts of stopping to pick up a pair to wear for a mile or two. But thoughts of my own perpetually runny nose and how I handle it with my own gloves prevent me from doing anything quite so foolish. I figure that I will just deal with the cold hand syndrome.
It’s not until midway in my second mile that I have a revelation: the annoying beeping is coming from my own watch. Oh crud!!! How in the world am I supposed to deal with that for 24+ more miles? I think that I should have spent some more time with the Polar manual before wearing it today. But I’m afraid of screwing up my splits for the day, so I dare not to press any buttons on the watch. I try to accept that I just have to live with the never-ending beeping. Lord, help me through this race! I pray that the people around me don’t find this nearly as annoying as it is to me.
For no reason in particular, I veer to the left of the course today. I feel like someone on a train, just taking in the scenery. The mile markers go by rhythmically; after the first mile, my next few splits are 8:59, 9:00, and 9:08. These times are far better than my previous four marathons this year. What makes it particularly sweet is that I don’t feel like I’m working at all, and my heart rate is staying nice and low. What a treat.
But really, today I’m more concerned with my splits every 5k along this course than I am about each mile. Boston has timing mats at every 5k mark along the course, and they post your time on the BAA website in real time as you cross each mat. My new beau, The Professor, is also a marathoner, so he knows the Boston drill. He has, for the last several weeks, been telling me that he will be “watching” me run this race by sitting at his desk and watching my 5k splits as they are posted. Vainly, I want to run nice even splits. When I cross the first 5k mat in 28:01, I know that I’ve started too quickly; it’s just not going to be possible to maintain that kind of pace on this rolling course, especially with those hills in the last half of the run.
The watch beeping continues. I finally decide to try to address it, so I start pressing buttons on the Polar. I never figure out how to turn off the damn beeping, but I do discover lots of interesting information, just not the controls I’m looking for. I’m still worried about screwing up my splits, so I finally give up on my quest. Besides, by now I’m starting to tune out the beeping. The headwind, in any case, is carrying the sound somewhere far to the west of the race course.
The 10k mat arrives, and I pass it in 57:23, which makes for a net time of 29:22 for this 5k. I think of The Professor, and wonder what he will make of the fact that I’ve slowed by more than a minute. But, quite honestly, I’m still fairly pleased with my splits, since these middling miles are always the toughest for me on this tough Boston course. Today, I do not feel left behind on the uphill surges quite as much as I normally do. Today, my heart rate is staying nice and low, and I’m feeling fine. Except, of course, for the fact that my hands are still cold. I still have not given in to the temptation to stoop down and pick up a pair of discarded gloves. But I can’t say it hasn’t been a temptation.
In every marathon, there are little goals or markers along the way that you look forward to. These goals make the miles melt away. Today, one of my markers is Michele’s mom. Michele has provided a description of her mom, and precisely where she will be, just outside of Natick at the “Entering Wellesley” sign, on the left hand side of the road. Maybe I’m running on this side of the road all day in anticipation of seeing her. Moments after I see the Wellesley sign, I see a woman who meets Michele’s description to a “T”: black jacket, short dark hair, old-fashioned webbed lawn chair. I make eye contact from a little distance, and the woman smiles at me. I smile back, and run directly up to her. “Hi!” I say. “Are you Michele’s mom?” The woman gives me a startled look, then shakes her head, saying no. Oops! And I was so certain. Ah well. I can practically hear the Wellesley women from here. It occurs to me that the purpose of a marker is to give you a place to run towards, and it doesn’t really matter all that much beyond that.
I’m on autopilot now, just enjoying the day. I enjoy the screaming of the Wellesley crowd, and than I watch guys get kisses from the Wellesley women. I love that last downhill stretch after the college into the town of Wellesley, and check my time at the halfway point: 2:03:22. This is, by far, my fastest marathon of the year, and also my most unexpected. I feel good; my heart rate is in check, and the day is still cool. What more could I ask for?
Well, I might ask for gloves, but that seems a bit out of the question. We have picked up a pretty substantial headwind, but my only complaint about that is the fact that my hands are still cold. I’m kicking myself for not wearing a pair of socks on my hands.
My 5k splits have settled into a consistent pattern. At 15k I clock a net 29:42, and at 20k 20:53. I think about The Professor “watching” me, and it’s like having a camera on my shoulder. My 25k mark is a net of 29:41, and I feel happy that I’ve stayed so consistent throughout.
But now I’m screaming down the hill into Newton and the 16 mile mark, always my most emotional place on the course. For my first 5 Bostons, this is the point where Mick would find me on the course. I had grown so accustomed to having this place to look forward to that I started to take it for granted. But two years ago, when he was first running for mayor, he did not come to Beantown with me. Last year – since I felt so lousy anyway, and he had a better offer in France for the same weekend – I had no expectations that he would be with me. Today, The Professor aside, there is nothing that I’d like to see more than his tall lanky body, wearing his dorky sunglasses and (no doubt) a goofy cap, waiting for me at the bottom of the hill here – or on the start of the climb that leads up and over the freeway, out of Newton. But, of course, that is a ship that has sailed. There is no Mick. Just a tough stretch in a tough marathon course.
But this is perhaps my favorite part of the Boston course, and perhaps why I keep coming back here, wanting to get it right. The uphill stretch starts here, and it’s a measure of your readiness for the race: how you handle these hills. People who started far in front of me, people who went screaming past me on the downhills, people who have the speed but not the guts: this is where I start to pass them. This is where they start to walk. This is where I’ve learned to start digging deep.
Perhaps that’s what I love about this race: that you are required to dig deep for five tough miles, but that you are rewarded far out of proportion in this stretch. The people who line the race route in Newton pay you back in spades for bothering to be out here today. It’s also here, at mile 20, that I see Beth – my second marker along the course. Today, Beth comes out and jogs up hill with me, and updates me on my fellow Tapir runners. Paul went by, she says, not having a great day. Michele is up ahead of me, as is Bill Rodgers – but Bill Rodgers is not so far ahead of me as is Michele. Running with her gives me a boost, and then she peels off.
I hit the 30k mark with a split of 30:56, which is, in my estimation, not bad for an uphill stretch. I think The Professor should be pleased when he sees that my 35k split is 30:49. Even though I’ve slowed from the start, anyone who knows this course will recognize that my splits are remarkably even. I’m starting to really look forward to talking with him about this race, especially since, at this point – cresting Heartbreak Hill and heading into the last 7k of the race, most of which is downhill – I’m feeling really strong. This is why we run these races – to have these incredible last 10k experiences. Today is the first time I’ve had one of these days in a long time. Today is the first time I’ve felt like I’m racing towards the finish in over a year.
People have started to encourage me with a cry of “Go Pink!” on account of the fact that I’m still wearing my long sleeved very pink shirt. I love it. I remember, out of nowhere, that I had planned to put my name on my shirt one of these days, but completely forgot today. Ah well. My 40k split is 28:42, which is the second fastest of the day, and I’m ecstatic. The Professor has got to love that!
Everything about this race is familiar, and yet each time I run it, it’s all new. Today I see the stretch past Fenway in a new way; I’ve been walking here these last few days. We run directly in front of my hotel, and despite my joking ahead of time, I’m not at all tempted to stop early. I can taste this day coming together, can taste this finish that I had no reason to even hope for. As the miles have melted away, I’ve tried to do the mental math, and a new goal has gradually planted itself in my brain: to run sub 4:10.
Now, that number has no particular significance, just any old number drawn out of a hat. Only that number is faster than anything I’ve run in some time now, and suddenly it’s taken on a significant meaning to me. It’s what makes me pick up the pace a bit (my last five miles are not my fastest of the day, but pretty close to it), and to run with all my heart for the finish line. It’s what makes me feel like I’ve just conquered Everest when I cross that line in 4:09:39. Success. It’s like the hokey motivational poster. This is what success looks like. It’s not a PR, or a BQ, or even one of my fastest races. But it is – by far – the best effort I could put together today. And I’m extremely happy with that.
But it’s chilly (good for racing, bad for standing around at the finish), so I get my bag from the bus, put on some warmer clothes, and start the walk back to my hotel. I call The Professor as I walk, imagining that he will be, if not impressed, at least pleased with my 5k splits. “Oh, are you done already?” he says. “I’ve been so busy at work that I forgot to look at your splits.” Ah, so that’s how this will go. But I don’t let this get to me – not yet, I can’t let anything get in the way of this good feeling. It was a good marathon. It’s a good day.
Michele and I get back to the Buckminster at almost exactly the same time (both she and Jody have had very good days, too), and we head out shortly (after quick showers) to meet up with the rest of the Tapir group. After a missed cue or two, we find Paul at the Cheers bar, and have a great time over beers and burgers. It’s cool and rainy when we leave the bar, and my legs are toast from all the running and now all of tonight’s walking. But the T stations along the race route are still closed, so we’re consigned to walking; we use this as an excuse to stop for ice cream on our way back to the hotel.
Michele has an early flight in the morning, so she’s up and out of the hotel while I’m still (mostly) asleep. But I need to get moving, too, so I get up shortly after she takes off, and shower and pack up my stuff. It’s always surprising how scattered my stuff can be around a hotel room after such a short time. I double check the closet, the bathroom, the dresser drawers. Certain that I have everything packed, I pick my suitcase off the floor as I put on my coat. There’s a dark blob on the carpet. I know, even as I bend down to check it out, what I’m going to find: my gloves. These will be so nice to have for the next race.
That’s how Mick described my addiction to this race a year ago, when I was puzzling over my crazy compulsion to come back to Boston year after year. “It’s a runners’ festival”, he said, and I immediately knew he was right. It’s like gaining membership to one of the greatest running clubs in the world, and then being invited back year after year. Even after seven – now eight - years of running the Boston Marathon, I can still barely believe my good fortune each year when I get my confirmation card in the mail.
It was easy to play mental games in those early years. I ran my first Boston in April 2002 in a time of 4:00:55 after just squeaking in with a qualifying time of 3:55:59. To be clear: that qualifier left not a second to spare. Early that year, I broke a rib (skiing, Beaver Creek, steep bumps) in the critical stages of my Boston training, and wasn’t at all sure I could even make it to “the show”. I startled myself with that performance – I went out and ran a comfortable pace on a reputedly tough course, with sub-optimal training – and yet I still ran the second fastest marathon of my (then very short) marathoning career. Lucky for me, the next year Boston changed qualifying standards, easing my previous 3:55 requirement to 4:00, so I had, once again, just squeaked in. Barely able to believe my good fortune, I vowed to go back to Boston to vindicate myself and shave off a mere 56 seconds so that I could say I had run Boston “sub-4”. Why did I choose that goal? Who knows. It was an easy number to quantify, I guess. And, I think, in retrospect, one that seemed imminently doable at the time.
But it turned out not to be quite so easy. The next three years were all hot, and I don’t do so well on hot days. I suffered through 2003 and 2004 in 4:16:41 and 4:29:34, and felt like death warmed over at the end of each race. It seemed so wrong, so unfair, to be training harder each year, and yet to be going backwards in the final standings. The third hot year – 2005 – I managed my race much better, but still finished in a disappointing 4:04:00. The consolation prize that year was the fact of my highest age-group placing to date. Still, it wasn’t sub-4.
2006 looked like the year it would happen; the weather was almost picture perfect – by marathoners’ standards, anyway. Cool and cloudy all the way. My training was solid. But it just wasn’t my day, and I knew it all the way, so when I crossed the finish line that year, I felt like I had failed. That I had run a time identical to the previous year (4:04:00) was no consolation. I should have been much, much faster!
The next year, 2007, was the year that Boston almost didn’t happen, owing to a Nor’easter that rampaged in New England during marathon week. This was also my first Boston without Mick. Given the cold, wet conditions, and the absence of my biggest cheerleader, I had low expectations for the day. So, of course, dear reader, you see the punch line before I can even type it: I ran a breakthrough Boston time of 3:57:25. Finally. I had my sub-4 at Boston. Time to retire from the race.
But, of course, with addiction, there is always a reason to have just one more go at it, one more excuse to repeat the experience. In 2008, I had serious health issues, and thought I might have to retire from running altogether, or, at the very least, retire from marathons. So, I justified to myself that I needed to return to Boston “just one more time”. It was, I told my friends and family, my “Boston Swan Song”. I would carry my camera and capture photos of every landmark along the way that had come to represent the Boston experience to me. I would stop and smell the flowers. I would have a beer on Heartbreak Hill. I would high five every kid along the route, and kiss the girls at Wellesley. Yes, I did all this, and ran my slowest Boston to date (4:38:59), and followed it all up with an emergency appendectomy back in Denver a day or so later.
Ever in search of a new reason to return to the Runners Festival, in 2009 I settled on one that would – possibly, with luck and some hard work – serve me for the next three years: a goal to run Boston ten times in a row. After all, 2008 marked my seventh consecutive, so I just need three more. At the St. George Marathon in October 2008, I ran a qualifying time for Boston 2010. Now the pressure hit: to be able to show up healthy enough to finish a marathon on April 20th, and then, later in 2009, to run just one more qualifying time. If all goes well, I won’t even have to think about a new raison d’etre until sometime after April 2011.
And so, in April 2009, I board a flight headed eastward. We marathoners typically fret over the race day forecasts; this time around, I find myself in the unusual position of fretting over the local forecast. Our mild spring has turned, on the eve of my departure for Beantown, into a veritable winter wonderland, with nothing short of a blizzard in the forecast for my travel day. Being a Nervous Nellie about travel and connections and such, I consider, for a short time, heading to the airport on Friday afternoon in hopes of getting out of town a bit early, but it’s just not gonna happen: I can’t get my act together that quickly. Lucky for me, that works out just fine. I time my Saturday morning drive to the airport earlier than normal, and when I get there, it seems that all systems are go. The plane I’m on – the one that takes off eastward only a few minutes late – is full of people who sat on the tarmac for hours and hours Friday night, only to be turned back because of weather and crew schedules. Happily, I land in Boston (with an easy connection through LaGuardia) right on time late Saturday afternoon.
It turns out that this is to be the weekend of easy connections – airline and otherwise. While negotiating the connection at LaGuardia (not a simple one, requiring a shuttle bus ride and a second trip through security), I meet up with another Boston-bound runner, a woman from Denver. It’s my good fortune to make a friend simply by offering to share the complex connection experience with her, and we exchange contact information for potential races back in Colorado after this weekend. Once on the ground in Boston, I have one of those six-degrees-of-separation experiences that can make you become a true believer if you’re not already so inclined: folks from Chattanooga (obviously in town for the marathon) that I meet on the T turn out to be friends with Ian (No Twitch), one of my Taper Madness buddies. Even better, they know my hotel at Kenmore Square, and, once off the T, they point me in the right direction. It all seems easy and familiar and very, very homey.
It’s too late at my arrival on Saturday for me to accomplish much other than a quick walk to a grocery store for some supplies. My hotel room does, quite accidentally, look out over Fenway Park. Although I’m not a huge baseball fan, there’s something about the energy of the Saturday night game that is just undeniable, so I open my curtains and take a few photos of the bright lights of the stadium. One thing is clear: I’m in Boston again!
Sunday is all about friends and connections. Just as it should be. My good friend Nan drives down from Maine to share brunch with me, and to fill me in on her plans to enter a PhD program in the fall. Nan drops me off at the Hynes Center so that I can hit the race packet pick-up and expo. I’m able to coordinate this with Michele (1L) and her friend Jody, so the three of us have a successful (read: spend lots of money) shopping experience (of course, all – ahem – essential running gear). (Note to self: shopping at an expo with like-minded friends is not so easy on the credit card.) The day passes in a blur of activity. Michele and I practically walk right into Paul (Stihl Going) as we make our way back to the hotel after our expo experience; Paul and his friends are just leaving the Sunday afternoon Red Sox game, and are passing directly in front of our hotel.
Sunday night finds us at a pasta dinner that Michele has arranged, another Taper Madness event, along with a few other running friends we’ve all collected along the way. It’s my first chance to meet Betsy and Matt, and another chance to see Beth, as well as the rest of the crew. The pasta is great, the shared wine is unexpected and tasty (thank you Betsy for ordering!), and the company is, as expected, exhilarating. But we all have a race to run Monday morning, so the evening ends early, and Michele and I head back to our hotel, the Buckminster.
Michele – a native of Natick (the fourth town along the Boston Marathon course) – has run the race countless times, but has never taken part in the downtown Boston experience with the requisite yellow school bus ride out to Hopkinton and the hours in Athletes’ Village there. So this year, she has joined me at the Buckminster, and together we make our plans for race day morning. This Sunday night, we both assemble our gear for the morning. Everything is going just fine, with only one problem: I can’t find my gloves for race morning. I’m certain that I packed them; in fact, I can actually see myself pulling them out of the basket in my bedroom back in Denver, and dropping them into my suitcase. Then where the heck are they? I empty my suitcase for an umpteenth time, doublecheck the dresser drawers in the hotel, but they are just plain missing. Dang. The expo is long since closed, so that’s not an option. Dang again.
On race morning, Michele and I stop at the Dunkin Donuts just a few steps down from the hotel for giant cups of joe to go, and then hoof it to Boston Commons to catch our bus. It’s cold – a good thing on race morning. But I’m annoyed that I have no gloves. I try to keep my hands warm around the big coffee cup, but it’s too well insulated, so it’s a poor provider of warmth. By now, Jody has joined us, and we start the long wait for buses. I watch all the people around us, envious of the gloves that everyone seems to be wearing. Everyone, that is, except me.
Eventually we make it onto a bus, and then out to Hopkinton and Athletes’ Village. Have I mentioned that I’m nervous before a race? Well, yeah. That, combined with my seven years experience at this race, makes me anxious to get to the start line as early as I can. We spend a little time in the village, have lots of photos taken together, and then I dump my extra clothes at the baggage bus, wish Michele and Jody good luck, and head up to my corral. Have I mentioned that it’s (blissfully) cold this morning? Well, yeah. That fact, if it holds, might make this a great race. If only I had gloves – I would be extremely happy!
The race gets underway, and then I’m on autopilot. This all feels so familiar – in a very good way. Still, it has an aura, one of the ultimate running event. I can’t quite believe my good fortune to be here yet again. Every year, as we start to run this stretch out of Hopkinton, I feel like a bit of an imposter. Every year, as we run this stretch, the crowds on the side of the road make me feel welcome and at home.
My expectations for the day are not really even formed as we start running; what do I want out of this day? Well, hopefully, to run somewhat faster than last year, when I took my time and made a photo journal of the course. Also, hopefully, to run a bit faster than my last several marathons, which have all been pathetically slow, but each one has been just a bit faster than the last. Finally, as always, I just want to have a good marathon day – which means I pray to not have a death march at the finish, and to finish strong. That might not seem so much to ask, but – and trust me on this – anyone who has ever run a marathon can attest to the fact that it’s huge.
Somehow, I end up on the left hand side of the road coming out of Hopkinton, right in the middle of the crowd. That has never happened before, and it screws up my ritual of high-fiving all the folks who line the road on the right hand side of the road there. Rather than darting across the road, I just settle in and run along. It is going to be, I’m already recognizing, one of those days where the race just happens on its own.
There is a beeper going off somewhere near me, and I figure that somebody has configured a watch or heart rate monitor to sound at some interval. There is so much noise at first – the announcers, the crowds, the people around me – that you can’t hear it clearly. But once we get out of the crowded start area, I hear it more definitively. It’s really annoying. The noise seems to come from directly behind me, and I keep expecting the owner of the noise to pass me along this stretch, and then the annoyance will end. But other then a few brief silent interludes, it keeps sounding. So very annoying.
The first mile marker comes up, and I’m pleased to see a time of 9:07 on my new Polar watch. My old trusty Timex died on the weekend of the Little Rock Marathon, and I thought it just needed a new battery. By the time I replaced the battery and realized that the entire watch was kaput, not just the battery, it was too late to get a replacement from Timex in time for Boston. So the replacement I bought just last week is a Polar watch (largely because of the heart rate monitor), but I haven’t really had time to get to know it at all yet. I consider myself lucky to have even gotten the thing configured with the HRM today, and I feel good that I can take a split with it.
Other than that incessant beeping that seems to be coming from a source near me, my only other complaint in the opening mile of this race is the fact that my hands are cold. I’ve decided to wear a long-sleeved technical shirt, figuring that I can take it off and tie it around my waist later when (and if) it warms up. But my hands are still freezing. I look at the gloves that people have started to discard along the way, and have fleeting thoughts of stopping to pick up a pair to wear for a mile or two. But thoughts of my own perpetually runny nose and how I handle it with my own gloves prevent me from doing anything quite so foolish. I figure that I will just deal with the cold hand syndrome.
It’s not until midway in my second mile that I have a revelation: the annoying beeping is coming from my own watch. Oh crud!!! How in the world am I supposed to deal with that for 24+ more miles? I think that I should have spent some more time with the Polar manual before wearing it today. But I’m afraid of screwing up my splits for the day, so I dare not to press any buttons on the watch. I try to accept that I just have to live with the never-ending beeping. Lord, help me through this race! I pray that the people around me don’t find this nearly as annoying as it is to me.
For no reason in particular, I veer to the left of the course today. I feel like someone on a train, just taking in the scenery. The mile markers go by rhythmically; after the first mile, my next few splits are 8:59, 9:00, and 9:08. These times are far better than my previous four marathons this year. What makes it particularly sweet is that I don’t feel like I’m working at all, and my heart rate is staying nice and low. What a treat.
But really, today I’m more concerned with my splits every 5k along this course than I am about each mile. Boston has timing mats at every 5k mark along the course, and they post your time on the BAA website in real time as you cross each mat. My new beau, The Professor, is also a marathoner, so he knows the Boston drill. He has, for the last several weeks, been telling me that he will be “watching” me run this race by sitting at his desk and watching my 5k splits as they are posted. Vainly, I want to run nice even splits. When I cross the first 5k mat in 28:01, I know that I’ve started too quickly; it’s just not going to be possible to maintain that kind of pace on this rolling course, especially with those hills in the last half of the run.
The watch beeping continues. I finally decide to try to address it, so I start pressing buttons on the Polar. I never figure out how to turn off the damn beeping, but I do discover lots of interesting information, just not the controls I’m looking for. I’m still worried about screwing up my splits, so I finally give up on my quest. Besides, by now I’m starting to tune out the beeping. The headwind, in any case, is carrying the sound somewhere far to the west of the race course.
The 10k mat arrives, and I pass it in 57:23, which makes for a net time of 29:22 for this 5k. I think of The Professor, and wonder what he will make of the fact that I’ve slowed by more than a minute. But, quite honestly, I’m still fairly pleased with my splits, since these middling miles are always the toughest for me on this tough Boston course. Today, I do not feel left behind on the uphill surges quite as much as I normally do. Today, my heart rate is staying nice and low, and I’m feeling fine. Except, of course, for the fact that my hands are still cold. I still have not given in to the temptation to stoop down and pick up a pair of discarded gloves. But I can’t say it hasn’t been a temptation.
In every marathon, there are little goals or markers along the way that you look forward to. These goals make the miles melt away. Today, one of my markers is Michele’s mom. Michele has provided a description of her mom, and precisely where she will be, just outside of Natick at the “Entering Wellesley” sign, on the left hand side of the road. Maybe I’m running on this side of the road all day in anticipation of seeing her. Moments after I see the Wellesley sign, I see a woman who meets Michele’s description to a “T”: black jacket, short dark hair, old-fashioned webbed lawn chair. I make eye contact from a little distance, and the woman smiles at me. I smile back, and run directly up to her. “Hi!” I say. “Are you Michele’s mom?” The woman gives me a startled look, then shakes her head, saying no. Oops! And I was so certain. Ah well. I can practically hear the Wellesley women from here. It occurs to me that the purpose of a marker is to give you a place to run towards, and it doesn’t really matter all that much beyond that.
I’m on autopilot now, just enjoying the day. I enjoy the screaming of the Wellesley crowd, and than I watch guys get kisses from the Wellesley women. I love that last downhill stretch after the college into the town of Wellesley, and check my time at the halfway point: 2:03:22. This is, by far, my fastest marathon of the year, and also my most unexpected. I feel good; my heart rate is in check, and the day is still cool. What more could I ask for?
Well, I might ask for gloves, but that seems a bit out of the question. We have picked up a pretty substantial headwind, but my only complaint about that is the fact that my hands are still cold. I’m kicking myself for not wearing a pair of socks on my hands.
My 5k splits have settled into a consistent pattern. At 15k I clock a net 29:42, and at 20k 20:53. I think about The Professor “watching” me, and it’s like having a camera on my shoulder. My 25k mark is a net of 29:41, and I feel happy that I’ve stayed so consistent throughout.
But now I’m screaming down the hill into Newton and the 16 mile mark, always my most emotional place on the course. For my first 5 Bostons, this is the point where Mick would find me on the course. I had grown so accustomed to having this place to look forward to that I started to take it for granted. But two years ago, when he was first running for mayor, he did not come to Beantown with me. Last year – since I felt so lousy anyway, and he had a better offer in France for the same weekend – I had no expectations that he would be with me. Today, The Professor aside, there is nothing that I’d like to see more than his tall lanky body, wearing his dorky sunglasses and (no doubt) a goofy cap, waiting for me at the bottom of the hill here – or on the start of the climb that leads up and over the freeway, out of Newton. But, of course, that is a ship that has sailed. There is no Mick. Just a tough stretch in a tough marathon course.
But this is perhaps my favorite part of the Boston course, and perhaps why I keep coming back here, wanting to get it right. The uphill stretch starts here, and it’s a measure of your readiness for the race: how you handle these hills. People who started far in front of me, people who went screaming past me on the downhills, people who have the speed but not the guts: this is where I start to pass them. This is where they start to walk. This is where I’ve learned to start digging deep.
Perhaps that’s what I love about this race: that you are required to dig deep for five tough miles, but that you are rewarded far out of proportion in this stretch. The people who line the race route in Newton pay you back in spades for bothering to be out here today. It’s also here, at mile 20, that I see Beth – my second marker along the course. Today, Beth comes out and jogs up hill with me, and updates me on my fellow Tapir runners. Paul went by, she says, not having a great day. Michele is up ahead of me, as is Bill Rodgers – but Bill Rodgers is not so far ahead of me as is Michele. Running with her gives me a boost, and then she peels off.
I hit the 30k mark with a split of 30:56, which is, in my estimation, not bad for an uphill stretch. I think The Professor should be pleased when he sees that my 35k split is 30:49. Even though I’ve slowed from the start, anyone who knows this course will recognize that my splits are remarkably even. I’m starting to really look forward to talking with him about this race, especially since, at this point – cresting Heartbreak Hill and heading into the last 7k of the race, most of which is downhill – I’m feeling really strong. This is why we run these races – to have these incredible last 10k experiences. Today is the first time I’ve had one of these days in a long time. Today is the first time I’ve felt like I’m racing towards the finish in over a year.
People have started to encourage me with a cry of “Go Pink!” on account of the fact that I’m still wearing my long sleeved very pink shirt. I love it. I remember, out of nowhere, that I had planned to put my name on my shirt one of these days, but completely forgot today. Ah well. My 40k split is 28:42, which is the second fastest of the day, and I’m ecstatic. The Professor has got to love that!
Everything about this race is familiar, and yet each time I run it, it’s all new. Today I see the stretch past Fenway in a new way; I’ve been walking here these last few days. We run directly in front of my hotel, and despite my joking ahead of time, I’m not at all tempted to stop early. I can taste this day coming together, can taste this finish that I had no reason to even hope for. As the miles have melted away, I’ve tried to do the mental math, and a new goal has gradually planted itself in my brain: to run sub 4:10.
Now, that number has no particular significance, just any old number drawn out of a hat. Only that number is faster than anything I’ve run in some time now, and suddenly it’s taken on a significant meaning to me. It’s what makes me pick up the pace a bit (my last five miles are not my fastest of the day, but pretty close to it), and to run with all my heart for the finish line. It’s what makes me feel like I’ve just conquered Everest when I cross that line in 4:09:39. Success. It’s like the hokey motivational poster. This is what success looks like. It’s not a PR, or a BQ, or even one of my fastest races. But it is – by far – the best effort I could put together today. And I’m extremely happy with that.
But it’s chilly (good for racing, bad for standing around at the finish), so I get my bag from the bus, put on some warmer clothes, and start the walk back to my hotel. I call The Professor as I walk, imagining that he will be, if not impressed, at least pleased with my 5k splits. “Oh, are you done already?” he says. “I’ve been so busy at work that I forgot to look at your splits.” Ah, so that’s how this will go. But I don’t let this get to me – not yet, I can’t let anything get in the way of this good feeling. It was a good marathon. It’s a good day.
Michele and I get back to the Buckminster at almost exactly the same time (both she and Jody have had very good days, too), and we head out shortly (after quick showers) to meet up with the rest of the Tapir group. After a missed cue or two, we find Paul at the Cheers bar, and have a great time over beers and burgers. It’s cool and rainy when we leave the bar, and my legs are toast from all the running and now all of tonight’s walking. But the T stations along the race route are still closed, so we’re consigned to walking; we use this as an excuse to stop for ice cream on our way back to the hotel.
Michele has an early flight in the morning, so she’s up and out of the hotel while I’m still (mostly) asleep. But I need to get moving, too, so I get up shortly after she takes off, and shower and pack up my stuff. It’s always surprising how scattered my stuff can be around a hotel room after such a short time. I double check the closet, the bathroom, the dresser drawers. Certain that I have everything packed, I pick my suitcase off the floor as I put on my coat. There’s a dark blob on the carpet. I know, even as I bend down to check it out, what I’m going to find: my gloves. These will be so nice to have for the next race.
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