Why I was bleeding is a bit more difficult to explain.
Despite what one might expect, I was not bleeding from my nipples. I was not
that first time marathoner. I was bleeding from my right shin. About three
weeks before the race I had been hit by a shard of glass from a Molotov
cocktail that someone had tossed off of the roof of my fraternity house. It
happens. You get your stitches and go on with life. Unfortunately, my doctor
had recommended I not run for at least 4 weeks so that the gash could heel up.
The glass had punched through to the bone so all I had was the skin tied
together by the stitches with nothing behind. I was no smarter back then than I
am now. I took the next couple weeks off from running (which wasn’t really that
difficult because I hadn’t really been training for this marathon) but then ran
the race. About 8 miles into the race I twisted my ankle missing the edge of
the road’s shoulder while moving out of the way of a car. When I found my way
to my feet I noticed that the gash had torn open again.
I figured that if I turned around and went back to the start
that I would have gone 16 miles with nothing to show for it. If I kept on going
then it was only an extra 10 miles and I would have finished my first marathon
(and incidentally, my first run longer than 15 miles). I was still running when
I got to the half marathon mark but by then runners were already streaming by
me like…like…well, like runners who know what the hell they’re doing running
past a 20 year old kid with a bum leg who thought that running a 6 minute mile
for the first mile of his first race which happened to be a marathon would be a
good idea.
It was a cool but not cold day for October in New Hampshire
but I wasn’t generating the heat that I needed. I had skipped breakfast and was
soaked in sweat from the start of the race when I had burned myself out. The
sweat had rapidly cooled and between the hunger, the dehydration and the
exhaustion I could not stop from shivering. I began to forget a time before the
marathon. I began to forget that there was anyone else running this race. It
was just me, trudging along somewhere between a limp and a jog, slowly inching
toward a finish line that I no longer believed existed.
I didn’t own a watch or an mp3 player so I had no concept of
time but as eternity gave way to more endless road I somewhat suddenly came
upon downtown Bristol, New Hampshire. This told me that the end was near but it
never seemed to come any closer. I cannot describe the eternity of agony that I
endured between the Mile 26 marker and the finish line. Surely there had never been a longer 0.22 mile long piece of road.
Looking back at the standings I see that there was someone
only 4 seconds ahead of me at the finish and someone just 26 seconds behind but
I have no recollection of either of them. I don’t have any memory of crossing
the finish line. I recall the endlessness of the tarmac and I recall standing
in the field near the finish line, wrapped in my parent’s blue car blanket with
my finisher medal around my neck. There is no time in between those two times
but in that gap the tears had welled up and I could not speak.
Thirty people finished that race slower than me so the
course was still open but there wasn’t that much going on around the finish
line more than two hours after the winners had come through so we got back into
the car. I still could not speak, the best I could manage was to nod or shake
my head, and I was still shivering but I had a slice of pizza and I had a new
goal: qualify for and run Boston before I age out of the Men’s Open division.
On that day there was no real indication that I would ever
run the 3:10:59 that I needed to qualify for Boston but I had 15 years before I
turned 35 and the qualifying time would get slightly longer. A year later I
went back to Bristol to run the New Hampshire Marathon and surprised myself
with a big PR of 3:51:01. Of all of my marathons, this is the only one that I
have no specific memories from. It just sort of happened. I recall joking with
my college friends after that if I kept cutting 1:06:38 off of my marathon PR every
year I would qualify for Boston in one year, break the world record the year
after and quite soon break the speed of light.
Your improvement is never linear. It may be for a very small
time (in fact it always is if you only look at 2 races)
but it doesn’t stay that way for long. The next year I went back to Bristol for
my third race and clocked 4:12:00. In 2006 I returned to the New Hampshire
Marathon for my final crack at this running thing. I had finished three
marathons already, I didn’t have anything to prove to anyone else, I just
wanted to go out with a sub 4 marathon and call it a running career. I finished
in 3:33:00, 19 seconds later the Women’s winner crossed the finish line.
“Damn, I’m actually pretty fast,” I thought to myself. I got
a flyer in the mail for the Feaster 5 and decided that since I was so fast at
the marathon I should go try to win this little 5 miler. I had just run a
3:33:00 marathon, how hard could a 5 mile race be?
I ran 37:03. It was faster than I thought people could run a
5 miler. It was faster than 7:30/mile pace for god’s sake! If you’re reading
this blog then you know as well as I do now that this is not that fast. I was
beaten by 301 runners and very nearly threw up on the course. I was over a mile
and a half from the finish line when the race was won. It didn’t matter. I had
run faster than 8 min/mile for a distance race and had placed in the top 20%. I
wanted more. Again, I wanted Boston. |
| The 2006 Feaster 5 gave me my first race photo! |
I was lucky that they had race day registration. Despite the
hangover I crossed the finish line in 3:24:05. I was really starting to think
that Boston was a possibility soon. I only needed to shave 13:06 off of my time
to qualify and I had already cut over an hour and a half from my first race.
After that race, the marathon changed for me. I now expected
to qualify for Boston and wanted to do so in sub 3 fashion. A month later I ran
4:45:16. Then I had a DNS at Hyannis 2009, a DNF at Rotterdam 2009, a DNS at
Outer Banks 2009, DNS at New York City 2010, DNS at Cape Cod 2011, a 3:48:32 at
Napoli 2012 and a 3:40:31 at Cape Cod 2012. In that same time span the
qualification time for Boston had tightened to 3:05:00. My confidence of
qualifying in the Men’s Open division was at an all-time low.
Well, it eventually happened last spring. I got a qualifier
with a BQ-2:13 and the cut-off to get into Boston for 2014 turned out to be
BQ-1:38. I got my email saying that I was in during a process characterization
meeting. I read the email after the meeting and texted Sarah: “In”.
I did not yet know how to sum up my feelings about getting
into Boston so all I sent were those two characters. Days later, I still don’t
think that I can sum up my feelings any better than: “In”.
It has been a long road for me to get into Boston. I have
run 6026.10 miles (that I know of, I started keeping a log in December 2009)
and completed 180 races and have 2 DNFs and 6 DNSs. (One could argue that there
were many more than 6 races that I have not started, but I define a DNS as a
race I paid to enter and then for whatever reason did not run).
Almost everyone who runs has a deeply personal connection of
some sort to the Boston Marathon and this year more so than any other year. I
do not “deserve” to have one of the 36,000 numbers that will be handed out for
this race. I did not get in because I ran a qualifier; I got in not because of
what my time was at the Maine Coast Marathon but because of what other people’s
marathon times were relative to a somewhat arbitrary standard based on their
gender and age.
When I was young, the first two Super Bowls that I remember
watching pitted first the Pittsburgh Steelers against the Dallas Cowboys and
then the Green Bay Packers against the New England Patriots. These games were
events unto themselves; they were greater than just football games. There were
fireworks, there were rock concerts, and they were really something. The next
year I watched the Denver Broncos beat the Green Bay Packers. Looking back on
those three games now; the best football game was the third. The Packers and
the Broncos fought it out right down to the last second of the game but at the
time I found myself disappointed with that Super Bowl even before it started.
 |
| I stole this photo from somewhere on the internet. I do not have express written consent from ABC and the NFL |
When the Packers played the Broncos it was an outdoor game
in southern California. The sun was shining, the flags were waving in the wind
and I realized for the first time that the Super Bowl was just a football game.
When the superfluous pageantry was stripped away from the game it was still a
100 yard long by 50 yard wide bit of turf and the clock still ran for 60
minutes just like in the regular season. At that moment I felt like something
was stolen from me. I felt like this thing, this event, the “magic” of the
Super Bowl was gone forever and I would always see it just as another football
game.
Now I understand that it wasn’t something that was stolen
from me. It was something that was given.
Perhaps I would have called it a moment of clarity if I was
a drunk, but being a high school freshman at that time I was neither drunk nor
aware of the phrase “moment of clarity”.
The Boston Marathon is no different.
There are qualifying standards to get into Boston just as
there are playoffs to get into the Super Bowl but when you strip aside the
media attention, the advertising dollars, the awards, the internet discussions,
the medals and crowd along the side of the course what you are left with is
26.22 miles of pavement just like every other marathon.
I have heard some people say that the marathon is just
another long run. I have heard other people say that the marathon is just a
celebration of your hard work. Yet others have been heard claiming that the
Boston Marathon is a victory lap for your qualifying race. The marathon is none
of these and yet all of them.
What the marathon IS
depends far less on the race course, the race director or even the history or
pedigree of the race. What the marathon IS
depends solely on the runner.
For me the marathon is agony and ecstasy. It is fear,
aggression, rage and calm contemplation. It is every human emotion that exists
in life condensed into one infinitesimally small blip in my life. It is a race.
The swag doesn’t matter. The media coverage doesn’t matter. The crowd vanishes
from my view no matter how close they stand or how loud they cheer. It is only
me and 26.22 miles of my old friend: public road. It is a race and that next
singlet in front of me is either getting closer of farther away. All that
matters is closing the gap on that singlet and moving on to the next one.
Since I have been accepted into Boston, I will have to
filter out all of the meaningless noise that comes with the Boston Marathon so
that I can focus on training and racing. Had I not been accepted into Boston, the
only difference is that I would be racing against a different field.
So I will not celebrate my acceptance into Boston. I will
not celebrate finishing Boston and if I PR at Boston I may not celebrate that
PR. Boston, like every other race, is just another step in preparing for the
next race to come after.
Whether you are training for Boston or some other race; best
of luck training injury free!
