"Always believe that something wonderful is about to happen."
4:00AM hit and my feet were on the floor before my mind realized my head was no longer resting on a pillow and so this pattern would continue, power before reason, through the finish line of my third marathon. Gone were the doubts caused by tapering, ridiculous eating and hydration. Gone was the second guessing fueled mainly by Scott Jurek's Eat & Run preaching Vegan this and plant-based that. Instead, I had before me the realization that I was about to do something huge - my way - for the first time since the journey began. My training schedule; my meal plan; my timing; my sleeping; my routine; my mind; and, most importantly, my decisions.
And so I started moving and repeating:
As I got dressed: "I can do this."
As I made breakfast: "I can do this."
As I walked my pup: "I can do this."
As I layered up: "I can do this."
and kept it going, in the background, for 26.2 miles. "Well I wanted something different," I thought to myself as I coasted past a road-side group of cows and the 80th grain silo in the last few miles. The hills were rolling and, even at dawn, the landscape was both foreign and familiar. An uninterrupted sea of green rose and fell around me as I closed my eyes and thought, "Oh crap." It hit me as we parked the car that not only did I have to slow down my rapid heart, I had to wrap my head around the silence. Here, there was a lot of open space and cows but no people, no chatter, no bullhorns, no sneakers scratching at the pavement or other race sounds runners rely on.
I suppose the voices were hushed by the early April chill and the port-o-potty lines were too (wonderfully) short to produce any legitimate bonding time. All around me quiet fell like dew - covering everything and making the race, itself, appear shiny and new - completely untested. It dawned on me, as the sun came up over the strange scene, and with it rose the smell of manure, that this was the first race I'd run outside of Philly in the last 3 years. And in the immortal words of Gossip Girl, I thought, "sometimes you need to step outside, get some air, and remind yourself of who you are and where you want to be." This marathon was my first step. So I skipped...right into the heated tent placed mercifully next to the start line and found that there are truly so few pleasures in life, equally meaningful as they are practical, as this hot tent full of runners. Standing there felt like a hug from an old friend and stepping outside loose and empowered felt like the Rocky theme song was playing, on repeat, only for me.
Standing in the corral (there was one; it held all of us), I repeated what I knew, "I am strong enough. I am fast enough. I am ready for this." And then I looked toward the sky, caught a glimpse of an Octogenarian, in her nightgown, taking pictures of the crowd below with her iPhone, and laughed as my feet crossed the Start Line.
The Amish say that "good deeds have echos," and when a stranger plucks your gloves from a pile of manure you are inclined to believe them. It was mile 14 or 15 and the gloves had been a good idea for the first 10 miles. During mile 11, they turned sticky and came off. The first fell from my belt and was kicked into a field. Yards later, the second was tossed into the same field without so much as "goodbye." At mile 19, much to my surprise, the gloves reappeared, rolled up together like freshly laundered socks, in the hands of a tall stranger who'd been holding onto them and looking for me for more than an hour. Naturally, I cried. This good deed stayed with me for the next 7 miles in thought, strength, heart and wonder. Goodness so tangible is awe inspiring and, I found, exactly the fuel you need for crushing a marathon.
I can count on one hand the times in my life when I truly questioned whether I would survive something. The hill, or as the locals called it, "Mount Joy," that appeared before me at Mile 21 of this marathon was one of those times. Gradually, I noticed the fine line between black pavement and blue sky fading and wondered whether it would hurt when my face hit the gravel as my mind began to drift toward, "I can just slow down for a second," when I saw him: a loan photographer staring me down - rather, snap, snap, snapping away at me with his camera - and so I smiled. That smile propelled my mind into the next level of the race and on I soared feeling beautiful in my darkest moment.
Around mile 24, I found myself running beside an idyllic brook with an odd red moss lining the sides. Just as the brook turned away from the marathon course, I noticed a lone spectator about 50 years up the road. As I approached, I was able to make out the visor, the polo shirt and the pen behind the ear that, to me, has always meant, "Coach." 20 yards from him, I could hear the screaming, directed at the only runner on the road (me), "...great stride; you are doing this; you are under four hours at this pace; leave it all out there; do not turn around and look at me; go, go, GO!" As I passed this stranger, taking what he said into my core, I started sobbing so hard breathing became wheezing and wheezing became a struggle. There was no one to see it. This is strength: realizing that, despite pain and overwhelming emotion, you cannot cry - because you are on a deserted road, there are cows everywhere, and you cannot stop.
This finish and this PR is more than a broken record. It is more than validation of the way I'm running in 2013. It is the picture I see, when I close my eyes and think of this day, of the hundreds of little, colorful, running ants moving up hill after hill, miles in front of me, interrupting the perfectly still landscape, and the clapping of little hands at the end of big driveways. It is the colorful clothes lines stretching for football fields and the Amish bicycles without pedals. It is the perfect chocolate milkshake at the end and the hot coffee on the ride home. It is running free and far. And it is amazing.
