Bit of a warmup, then 26.2 from Hopkinton to Boston. I'll be posting something longer here later today, but for now, I will just give a brief recap.
Best marathon I've had in years. Not the fastest, but the best.
3 times I stopped because of GI issues, each time I jumped back in and picked up a little, but didn't try too hard to make up for lost time. 2 stops in the first 1/2 had me at 1:18:48, but then the second 1/2 I had one and so it was either even or close to it. Mostly under 6:00, some a little over, but back out the bathrooms and I was between 5:47 and 6:02 all day (save for a 6:17 heartbreak, which I'll take.)
2:38:15. Good for 26th Master, 229th overall. 2:36:47 actual moving time and while the BAA should not nor will they cite that as my time, I'll call it that, as there's nothing to be gained by running off the course and stopping to hit the head. Funny thing was that it left me with 2:39-range marathoners for most of the day and couple that with the fact that I actually stayed even, when most don't, and I had the false feeling of picking people off constantly. Kind of want to start my next chip-timed race way back to get the same feeling (um, maybe not.)
Closed with a 5:50 25th and a 6:03 26th, so I really am pretty happy with that.
Edit- This is the piece written for Level Renner and I'm posting it here as well simply because what happened later that day takes precedence over my race, but since this is a personal running blog, I feel this fits, as it's my personal reaction as a runner.
"Exhausted"
4/17/13
The mind remembers, but the body recalls and
the two
seemingly speak a different language in times of distress.
I ran a marathon two days ago. I always feel
tired after
running a marathon, in all ways. I always enter new territory
psychologically,
because I am not the person I was when I ran the last one.
I am older, though not wiser or less so. I am
built
differently, though neither faster nor slower. I am always
slightly more
fearful, no matter how well the previous one went, as if I feel
like I’m either
cheating the odds by hoping to have continuous “good” ones or
getting what
simply must eventually happen per order of the nature of the
beast.
But today, I am simply exhausted. My legs ache,
but I am
neither pained nor frustrated by that. My brain, normally a
whirlwind of
thought, creative processes, lists of tasks and anxiety about
things important
and trivial, is a shapeless bag of gray quiet.
My legs and my head began to speak illegible
bits of prose
to each other @ 3:00 p.m. on Monday. They haven’t communicated
properly since.
Is it because the legs are waiting in vain for
the joy from
the head to arrive, in order for them to feel ok about the pain?
Is it the head
all caught up in itself? Seeking to feel anything besides the
languid, wrung
out fatigue it’s working in and looking to the statistics on the
page to
relieve it?
Instead, all it sees is the look on my wife’s
face when we
heard the first blast. All it sees is my naivete reflected in her eyes when,
even after the
second one, some idiot inside my mouth actually said, “Maybe it
was a transformer
getting overloaded.” All it sees is her making a game out of
getting to the car
to try to distract our 15 year-old son from the fact that we were
both
panicked, frightened and claustrophobic.
We didn’t see smoke, as we were somewhere
behind the Copley.
We didn’t see panicked onlookers, as word hadn’t gotten to them
yet. We quickly
decided that the only thing to do was to get through the crowd,
get to the car
and try to make it out. It wasn’t “Every man for himself,” so much
as it was “I
want my family to be safe from whatever this is and oh my god I
love them.”
For two days I’ve talked about it, read about
it, listened
to everything I can about it. I’ve gone from trying to find out
details to
somehow make it more fathomable to looking for stories that can
prove to me
that the world has real, healing good left in it, not just slogans
pretending everything will
be ok. I need acts
that show me that the first instinct of the human animal is to
love, and to
love is to help and to help is to sacrifice. I keep watching the
video of Tommy
Meagher just instinctively going right in to help, without even
giving it a
second thought and I convince myself that there are more people
like him, even
though I’ve been quite certain for years there’s only one Tom
Meagher.
Would I have helped and sacrificed if I was
there and not a
mere 600 yards away? I won’t say “I’d like to think, yes,” I can
say, “Yes.”
But here I was, afraid of what came from a sound, a big sound that
rattled my
guts and forced me to run on legs that had sat unused on a
palatial, swallowing
mattress in a luxurious room at the Fairmont Copley.
I’ve been riddled with a feeling that is heavy
like guilt,
though I cannot for the life of me figure out why. It’s as if I
would prefer to
transmit the collective pain of this action through something
familiar, so I
try to call shame from incidents that litter my life as they do
anyone’s,
perhaps as an alternative to facing the full brunt of the reality
that is this
inexplicably cruel cowardice perpetrated on people who never knew
their own
killers.
But I don’t have the energy. Not now. I am
exhausted. So I
go back to the trivial, that which the legs and mind can agree on.
I ran a good race. Not my fastest, but the most
satisfying
marathon I’ve had in years. I don’t know why it felt like this. I
had to stop
three times to use the Bouse House. I never got a good groove
going. I felt
like I was carrying a large water balloon somewhere just north of
my bladder.
Somehow, it didn’t matter. I was satisfied, and tremendously so.
But of course,
this is all well before any of the bad stuff happened. I am no
believer in
anything besides this physical plane, but I do have a part of me
that wonders
if my body felt a hinting rhythm that it translated into “You
won’t be able to
enjoy any of this soon enough, so you’d better soak it all in
now.”
I usually follow a race with a lengthy poring
over of
statistics, stories of other’s travails, rehashed and
rehashed-again memories of
the tiniest minutia regarding the event. All running, all the
time.
I don’t want to know how the Sox did, I want to
see Reno
beaming about 2:47 at age 58, and Ian, and Chris and I want to
talk about how I
saw Brendan Lynch after the ½, because it’s not Boston without
seeing Brendan.
I want to hear about Sim. I want to know if Lindsay’s leg held up
(seems it
did.)
I want to hear the stories of people of all
shapes and
speeds and I love them, because to simply pay attention to my own
experience
amidst something so huge and shared en masse is little more than a
one-dimensional take on the whole thing. This is my recovery, this
is my
connection, this is my psychology, my massage, my stamina
returning. My legs
get the OK like a phone call from my brain and they start to feel
better, as
the aches that remain recall specific hills and the ones that
retreat brace
themselves for a return to them.
But that line is not there, or if it is, it’s
passing
information I cannot decipher. So I sit back as a bystander and
read the
papers, the newsfeeds and try to find a way through the bad to the
good, all
the while getting more and more tired and cynically unable to
avoid the
hammering mantra that none of this is really any of the latter, is
it? Is it?
Yes. It is. It’s just tough to see when the
mind and body
ache in a way that cannot simply be healed with time or Advil or
bananas or
recovery runs.
Time does nothing. Time is merely space
decreasing the
volume of a sound that has bludgeoned your ears and soon enough
becomes little
more than a taunting distant echo, but one that is seemingly
constant and you
can’t figure out why it won’t finally go away.
It’s because time doesn’t erase it, it just
moves it further
afield, spreads it out, allows it to become diluted and dispersed
into
everything. Just like the only way to get over the wall is to go
through it. If
you try to run around it, you’ll just keep making it wider.
To get over this pain, you’ve got to go through
it. But
going through anything takes energy, and for right now, that
energy is…
exhausted.
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