I swear, during the warm up for one of my marathon workouts on Lake Mary Road this fall, I saw the shaggy silhouette of a wolf trotting across the crest of a hill. I was at least half a mile away, and looking up the hill from the bottom of it, so I couldn’t be completely sure. My perception of scale was off, and the sun was in my eyes. Still, I stopped running and stared at its progress across the pavement, at the way whatever-it-was picked its feet up and placed them down. I jogged hard back to the spot where I thought I’d seen the wolf disappear at the side of the road and stood in the grass, swiveling my head, looking for any sign of an animal. There was nothing. I wanted to share the moment with someone–with anyone–but nobody was around.
I ran the rest of the way back to my three-mile-mark starting point by myself, and began the workout.
During my 12-week training block before the New York City marathon, I was mostly out there alone. There were so many moments when I wanted to be able to turn to someone running next to me, and ask:
-Did you see that?
-Was that actually a wolf?
-Did I really just go out in a 5:56 mile?
-Is this way too slow?
-Will I be able to finish this rep?
-Does it smell weird right here?
-Why does wind exist?
I wanted to share the exhilarating, (literally) breathless moments I experienced with another person. But maybe, probably, those moments would have been inherently, entirely different if it hadn’t been just me.
Friends were injured or out of shape, my daily schedule as a graduate student and teacher was incompatible, and there just wasn’t an abundance of people running at a pace around mine. A few times, I was able to con my boyfriend into joining me for a progression run or some two-mile repeats.
Largely, though, it was me, my thoughts, a watch, and the pavement. Birds flew overhead in circles–sometimes ravens, and sometimes hawks. I let them give me a jolt of energy; they were good omens, I told myself. I let the views of a drying Arizonan lake surrounded by yellowed-out fields and trees numb my mind when I needed to. And I searched inside my mind for inspiration in the moment. I thought about the outrageous, almost completely unfounded goal I’d vocalized to a few friends. Sub 2:45. Olympic Trials marathon qualification. But, processing what that meant was abstract and largely impossible. Running as fast as I could–racing all out–for over 26 miles. It was incomprehensible.
In literature, the concept of the sublime is something equally beautiful and terrifying; it is awe-filling. It’s something so great, infinite, or obscure that it’s inconceivable. This fall, that, for me, described the marathon distance. It towered somewhere in the sky, above anything else I’d tried to accomplish before. I made myself think about the numbers, about the concrete things I was able to begin to understand. 26.2 is 13.1 + 13.1. I’d raced two 13.1s before. Now it was time to put them together.
To coax my brain away from the sublime, I needed a mantra. Something less lofty, something manageable.
Be positive. Curve lips upward into a smile. Be relaxed. Lower shoulders down, melt them into the back. Be strong. Tilt sacrum under, engage core. I tied a specific action to each imperative. I forced my body to absorb the words. I thought them during the beginnings of workouts to stay calm, and I tried hard to bring them back at the ends of workouts, too. Don’t forget to swing wide around the dead skunk’s entrails in a quarter mile. Be positive, be relaxed, be strong.
Self talk was crucial. The weirder the better. One Wednesday afternoon, driving out to the three mile mark on Lake Mary, I watched the houses and traffic lights slip away as I got farther away from town. I traced the rolling hills ahead, through my windshield. I thought about the workout my coach had written for that day, and I thought about how scary and awful and impossible it was for a few seconds. Then, I thought about being a princess warrior.
I’d heard through friends that professional middle-distance runner Justine Fedronic developed a sort of alter-ego to slip into for racing and working out. She thinks of herself as a warrior: as a combination of endurance hunter and warrior princess who is capable of competing at her maximum with grace and vulnerability, with power and confidence. This is what I told myself. That I was capable of that. Because I was not simply my normal self, I was more than that, I was a warrior and the marathon–or at least this specific workout–was my chosen battle.
I knew the race was going to be painful, I knew I’d need to willingly run toward the pain, embrace it. I knew I wanted to be scared of it, but not too scared. There were so many things to know that I actually had no way of knowing besides just wholeheartedly believing what I’d read, heard, or been told.
On the day of the last hard workout, I went out way too fast. Sub-6-minutes for the first mile, and there it went, the correct version of the workout: floating out of my body, spiraling across the traffic lines painted on the ground and into a ditch on the other side of the road. I had ostensibly ruined the whole effort. There was no way I could keep getting faster. And I wish this was one of those stories where I somehow found a separate plane of myself that managed to run times I shouldn’t have been able to, and finished the workout on pace, or even, miraculously, faster than how it was supposed to go.
This isn’t that story. I ran a slow middle interval. I rationalized (sometimes you have to) and conceded to myself that it was OK. I was still averaging out to about goal pace. Then, I turned around and stared at where I’d parked the car; where the last interval would finish. I could see it–a white speck in the distance. It barely looked like a car.
I kept my eyes on it and I told myself: this is how the last five or six miles of the race was going to feel. Like a sinking feeling in my chest that knew I had messed something up and couldn’t fix it, couldn’t even finish at all maybe. But, here was my chance to practice fighting against and through that.
Then, I started my watch and ran toward the car. It was not easy or pretty. The first part was off-pace, I was running too slow. And suddenly, the interval was almost over. I pictured the end of the race, moving my legs toward Central Park and I didn’t want all the time and focus and emotions and energy I’d already poured into the last three months to be pointless. I closed in a 6:01 mile.
I made it through. I made it through 12 weeks in one piece. I’d run a lot. I’d only taken a day or two off. I’d done it all in almost-secrecy. Only my coach truly knew exactly what I’d done every day and exactly how it had gone. I didn’t bore anyone else with the specific details of each and every single run. And there was something strangely redeeming in that isolation. I had done it by myself and I had accomplished what I needed to. I knew that I could and had hit scary warrior times and there was at least one other person out there who knew it too. It turns out, that was maybe all I needed.
The sublime became less and more sublime on the day of the race. There were too many people around me. More than any other race before. Too many for my mind to handle. So many that the race seemed to fall away. I didn’t think about it. I thought only about how many more minutes until the start. About whether I should push through the crowd to get right to the line. About how much I loved the Verrazzano bridge. (Which is itself, one of the utmost sublime things.)
And then the race started and my legs hit the ground beneath me and they felt good. Really pretty truly good and smooth. And it felt good to feel good. I was pleasantly surprised that my arms and legs and feet all felt very strong and capable. Until they didn’t. And then it was over. So fast. Too fast for me to spend enough time thinking about everyone who had wished me luck or helped me prepare or not said,
“you’re crazy” when I said, “I want to break 2:45 and hit 2:44.”
They could have said you’re crazy. They would not have been far off. Because I did not hit that time.
I ran 2:45:20. I knew as I was finishing the race it would be really close. With four and then three and then two miles to go, I was certain that I’d either be right under or just over. My pace and splits had gotten thrown off by losing GPS signal on my watch, but its cumulative time was still running and even with the limited oxygen making it to my brain, I could see that I was going to be hovering around the edge of the 2:45 bubble.
I tried my hardest to go go go just a little harder, a little faster. Sprint toward the end, comeeee onnnn. At times, I think I was able to sprint a few steps. It took almost every fiber of any determination I’d cultiavted over my entire life to kick at the end. It was like I was moving through a wind tunnel. Mainly, I remember thinking how hard it was to lift my knees and feet and place them back down again. I wanted to simply drag my toes and feet behind me. I didn’t.
I finished and looked at the clock and knew I hadn’t broken 2:45. I didn’t know then how close I’d come, but I knew it was too slow.
In that moment, I wasn’t upset. I wasn’t able to be upset, because I had come so so close and I was exhausted, but happy with that exhaustion and that effort. I was happy I’d finished. It’s frustrating maybe, it’s annoying, sure. It’s like when you get a tiny pen mark on your favorite pair of pants ever. But they’re still the best pair of pants you’ve ever owned and you still like wearing them as much as you can. So you do.
Ultimately, I wanted to break 2:45 because it was the arbitrary number that had been designated as the barrier to entry for the U.S. Marathon Olympic Trials by some USATF committee. I can’t find it in myself to be heartbroken that I didn’t accomplish this in my first ever marathon. If I’d gone out with the objective of merely running fast, I would have felt I achieved it.
I didn’t meet my arbitrary goal, but it was still important to let myself be content with what I’d accomplished. If I hadn’t, I’m afraid, all the hard work and dedication would quickly, retroactively have become joyless, soulless, resentable. I think I had to find the fun, the satisfaction, the bliss in what I’d done–for myself and my own sanity. In order to continue working in the future. In order to have not tortured myself.
I crossed the line twenty seconds behind my goal, but I was, and am right there–right on the edge of the sublime, of being able to wrap my mind around the reality of racing a marathon. And what’s lucky is: I have the power to say, hey you silly warrior princess, right there is good enough. Be happy. For now.
- By Jeanne Mack for Voltwomen
