race recap -- by abby

it's hard to figure out what to say when you know you are supposed to have something to say. you want a beginning, a middle, an end, and a thread or two hope will tie it all together. you want a neat, tidy package, something with imbued beauty and meaning: dulce et util.

you find yourself staring at a blank screen, cursor winking teasingly. and you realize that there are no words to adequately represent what it is that you want to say, just like there are no words to describe why you do what you do, what you're searching for, what nuggets of wisdom you hope you will glean ...

gerlinda and i spent saturday night arranging and rearranging our marathon stuff. the hotel beds were littered with gels, clif shot bloks, protein bars, sports beans, race numbers, race maps, tie thingies for our championchips. the air in the hotel room was heavy with our nervousness, which we tried to laugh off, and with the humidity of mid-florida, which i tried not to let drown me. my skin prickled with every breeze and my stomach lurched with each new minute, until i finally fell asleep trying to remind myself not to forget the Gu gels i'd stuck under my running pack.

at 4:45 sunday morning, we made our way down to the monorail, hoping we were in the right spot, hoping we had enough time, and well, just generally hoping. gerlinda worried about her championchip and ate a bagel while i sat on the train trying to think of encouraging things to say, trying to not to let the banana i'd eaten make its way back up and out.

at epcot, we followed a trickle of other runners who were winding toward the start. the lights were bright and the portapotties plentiful, and we stopped to pee and get our bearings. as we moved into the big parking lot full of sponsor tents and throngs of people, we got the overhead instructions to begin the 1/2 mile walk to the start area. in front of us, bodies parted the heavy mists like the opposites of ghosts -- alive, solid, breathing. strangers bound in the strangeness of this moment.

the road to the start led us along lush vegetation, and bright lights shown in our eyes. the starting corrals began to take shape in front of us, and we found, to our dismay, that there were only a few portapotties available, and those had long lines already. after a quick detour to take care of business in the woods, we trudged forward looking for corral G, and i was struck by a worst-case scenario moment: i leaned over to gerlinda and said, "what if this is, like, a death march or something? i mean, what if they are just lining us all up to shoot us?" which, roughly translated, means the worst thing that could happen would be that we die. but we aren't going to die. it's only a marathon. only.

and then, just in case, i sent up the last gasp of a prayer -- a misshapen pearl of a breath that wavered, floated, then disappeared into the heavy air of exterior disney world.

we stood in those corrals for a while, shifting and twitching as someone sang the star-spangled banner, tearing up as the wheelchair start when off with a bang. then, we began shuffling forward collectively -- a mass of likely and unlikely runners telling each other we'd be okay and messing with the chrono features our our watches. and finally, we crossed the start line, the electronics of our championchips beeping. i felt gerlinda trotting behind me. "have a good race," she said, as i turned around and shrugged, a grin of relief spreading over my face. the race isn't really all that bad; it's the anticipation that will kill a girl dead.

i don't really remember much about the race itself. i plowed forward, passing folks and trying not to think about how many miles were left. by mile 5 or so, i'd found my groove. i sent a little mental message to gerlinda, imagined the words flying back to her. around mile 10 we entered the magic kingdom and it was cool to see the crowds cheering. i took some energy from that and made a mad dash for the halfway point, where i ate a gu and took a quick walk break. by mile 18 i was feeling the fatigue of heat and sun, and 8 miles still felt like a really long way to go.

by mile 20 though, i noticed that a breeze was breaking the heat. i ate another gu and a banana and felt good enough to kick it up a little. by mile 23 i knew i was going faster than i should, but i didn't really feel like slowing down. i skipped through a water stop and just kept running. by mile 25, i could feel the finish, and when i finally rounded the last curve and entered the finish "chute," my heart was pounding with exhilaration instead of exhaustion. i threw my hands over my head as the announcer called out my name. someone cut off my championchip and steered me to the right. as i received my finisher's medal, i choked back a few tears, and sent the rest of my energy gerlinda's way ....

when i saw gerlinda a few minutes later, i gave her a sweaty hug and we stood there dripping and smiling for photos, looking slightly dazed but feeling pretty good, our sweat turning into tiny salt crystals. what else can i say? i'm proud of gerlinda -- for finishing, for training well, for starting this whole process in the first place. i'm proud of myself too, for staying on task and remembering to have a good time.

in the end, it's hard to say why we do the things we do. marathons? crazy. testing our bodies physically is bound to bleed some emotional result ... but what is it that we really crave?

i suppose we will always be seekers. answers might come to us as races or feathers or the way the light glances off a morning peak at sunhit or the way a wave curves itself into the shore ... but we'll never quit looking for whatever it is we're looking for. as for me, i can only keep hoping and believing. i can only keep culling from the stories and poems and songs and people that i love. their wisdoms become my wisdoms, grains of sand lighting up the darkest parts of me. to do my best is to continue to praise the mutilated world, to listen to the wild geese telling me that the world is open to my imagination, to reach out to my misfit and accomplish -- for the hushed breath of a moment -- some semblance of wholeness.

The Marathon - Gerlinda

My Asics sneakers lie on the ground, one bowled over on its side with the laces flapping. There is something I should have perhaps learned by now, something solemn and hallowed – but those sneakers defy me. They’re so light, with their orange piping and dayglow threads.

They ran a marathon last Sunday.

I put them on at 4AM, in the amber light of Disney’s Contemporary Hotel. My training partner, Abby, and I both had tension rising off our skin like steam, as we posed for pictures on the predawn balcony. We ate bananas and double checked the ticky red cable ties that bound our champion chips to our shoelaces. We talked about how we were clearly insane.

The monorail belched us out half a mile from the starting line. The air was liquid and velvet, perfect for lazing in a hammock at the beach – except it was shot through with portable streetlamp light and cluttered with laughing and footfall and the chatter of thousands of ordinary people.

Runners. Reedy, thready, ropey anemic runners. Outsized santa-bellied, Garmin-watch sporting runners. Runners looking out of place without their baby joggers. Tanned, muscled, compression shirt wearing runners. iPod Runners. Nervous, over-wrung runners. Tell-you-a-thing-or-two runners. And then, Me and Abby – two unlikely, songwriting, over-thinking, fish-out-of-water runners.

We told each other we’d be fine.

The lines at the port-o-potties were half an hour deep. At 15 minutes to race time, we abandoned the queue and joined the renegade bush-squatting contingent, even though it felt slightly sacrilegious to be relieving ourselves on naturally manicured landscaping in the Happiest Place On Earth. At least it was only #1.

We made our way to Corral G – the 2nd to last corral, home to those of us who predicted we’d finish in 6-6 ½ hours. Abby was there out of sympathy to me. When I’d registered, the only race I’d ever run was Disney’s Family Fun Run 5K the previous January, which took me almost 45 minutes to complete.

Since then, however, training for this marathon, bored one November day on the treadmill, I’d logged a 27:13 5K. The leaps I’d made were amazing, actually. I ran the Virginia Beach Rock n Roll half marathon in September (2:22:12) but, more recently I routinely ran 13.2 miles in just over 2 hours – if the spray painted mile markers on Atlanta’s Silver Comet Trail were accurate. (Authors Note: they are decidedly not accurate.)

True, there had been setbacks. For one thing, my band had a show the night before my 20 mile training run, and I forgot to eat dinner. I couldn’t understand why running was such a horrible drag the next morning. “Why” I asked myself, “Are you doing this?” And suddenly it was very clear how idiotic I was, how I could be nestled under a blanket on my couch, reading. I never recovered from that training run. Since early December, my training had gone to hell. I was terrified to lace up the Asics sneakers. What in the hell had I been thinking? Obviously, I would never be able to run 26.2 miles. I would collapse. I would cry. I would give in. I would give up. The last 3 weeks of my training were riddled with potato chips and holiday chocolate. I went out with friends, stayed up late, slept in, missed my training runs. My weekly mileage dropped to 15, then to 10, then to 5 – and not because I was tapering, but because I was scared out of my mind and doing everything within my power to numb myself, psych myself out, ruin everything.

But, I had trained too well for that. Until that terrible 20 miler in early December, I had trained relentlessly. If I missed a run, which was an extreme rarity, I made up for it later in the week. When I absolutely had to do a run on the treadmill, I punished myself by making myself run it faster than I’d ever run before. I didn’t think of it as a speed workout. I thought of it as payback for being a pussy. And I didn’t think I was being tough either – I thought I was a ridiculous sham of a runner, weak and slow. It made me feel like pounding my chest and roaring, to force myself to run to exhaustion, until my heart rate topped 180 and my head was light from panting.

I had a vague sense I was doing something good for myself. I got panicky sometimes, wondering what exactly that “good thing” was – that something solemn and hallowed I felt I was supposed to learn. After a long run, I wiped salt off of my skin and touched my toes while my leg muscles quivered and shook, and I felt calmer, for having tried, at least, to listen.

And now, here I was at the starting line of the 2007 Disney World Marathon, with everything happening in slow motion. There were fireworks. Corral G began walking forward. Abby leaned over and said, “What if this is, like, a death march? What if we’re all about to be lined up and shot dead?”

I looked at her and smiled, relieved that there was – at least – someone weirder than me in this world. We reached the starting line and broke into a jog. Way back in Corral G, it was a very easy jog indeed. It calmed me down. As Abby pulled away from me, I felt like maybe I would do this after all. As the 1 mile marker approached, I wasn’t even breathing hard. But then I looked at my watch – 11:56. Egad! I wasn’t even on a 5-hour pace to finish, and I would be damned, after all that work, if I didn’t finish in under 5 hours!

I started passing people. It wasn’t easy. Folks were walking and chatting, sometimes 4 abreast in the road. I said “Sorry” without looking at anyone, as I squeezed myself in and out of little breaks in the tide. I felt like I was spreading bad karma. I told myself to be nice, to get outside of my head, to look around, so that I would remember, so that I would feel a part of this experience I’d chosen to have.

But the first 6 miles passed in an utter blur. By mile 7, I was on pace to finish in 4:40, but I knew I needed to slow down. The down comforter was creeping in: the voice that says, “Why in the HELL are you doing this?”

But, I couldn’t slow down. I couldn’t look around. I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t take it in. At some point, the sun came up and it was an unwelcome thing – hot and beating down, illuminating mile after mile of pine tree barricades planted alongside highway cloverleaves. We did run through Cinderella’s castle, didn’t we? I don’t really remember anything until Mile 18.

I’ll call Mile 18 “The Lost Mile.” I think I walked almost half of it. I’d been trying, fairly successfully, to keep my pace, but suddenly I realized I had choice: I could kill myself trying, but I was still going to fail. Or, I could slow down, get out of my head, and try to remember why I signed up for this race in the first place:

My father was dying.

I don’t know what it felt like to him, but to me it felt just like this race. I couldn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t stop to take any of it in. I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t think. I knew there was something solemn and hallowed that was happening to me and my father and everyone in my entire family. I trusted somehow that one day I would understand. For now, I was showing up. I was putting one foot in front of the other. I was doing the best I could, and if it wasn’t good enough, it felt right – at least - to try.

That was three years ago. Dad died three years ago last November, and I still haven’t figured out the solemn, hallowed thing I’ve felt like I’m supposed to be learning. I’m still numb and scared, and I’m still hopelessly myself – with a fondness for potato chips and feather comforters and fiction novels. But somehow I know now, whether I want to or not, that it is up to me, to take matters into my own hands. My hands, after all (and I mean this metaphorically,) are a gift from God to me, and to the world.

It would be nice, perhaps, if God could be a bit clearer. A girl like me could use a set of instructions. Left to my own devices, I’m apt to do something overdramatic and crazy, like attempting to run a marathon.

Midway through Mile 18, I force myself into a trudging jog. It occurs to me that I have an Alleve in my pocket. I’ve never taken a painkiller on a run before, but what the heck? I pop it in. I open my eyes, I look around. There are a lot of other people walking. Most of them don’t look particularly dejected. In fact, they seem to be rather enjoying themselves. There are conversations, even giggles. One girl is dressed as Tinkerbell.

As Mile 20 comes and goes, and I realize I’m now running further than ever before, I do a gut check. After all, if I’m about to have a heart attack (there was that heart murmur, after all, that they detected in college and which I haven’t had looked at since,) I should really just stop this nonsense. But, truthfully, I feel fine. I feel good, actually - relatively speaking, of course, as my clothes are wringing wet and I can feel a sunburn taking root on my skin.

At Mile 22, I strike up a conversation with a guy who fell off training when he had to spend a month in Costa Rica, and is “paying for it now.” But he seems cheerful enough – I know he’ll finish the race.

Around Mile 23, I chat with a crazy woman who ran the half marathon yesterday and now is running the full marathon today. She’ll get a Goofy medal in addition to her Donald and Mickey medals. She, clearly, is bonkers. But she has a nice smile and we chat our way past Mount Everest in the Animal Kingdom.

At Mile 24, I’m drafting off Tinkerbell who has visible knots in her calves. We jog past the Boardwalk Villas, where I sat the previous January flush from completing my first 5K, and watched the marathoners go by. I remember I saw an apple-shaped woman jogging determinedly along in her purple Team in Training shirt, and I thought to myself, “I could do that.”

Who is looking at me now, I wonder, thinking the same thing? Wearing my own white-and-purple Team Hope, Pancreatic Cancer Action Network singlet, I am crossing over into Mile 25 of my first Marathon. Abby and have raised over $4,200 for PanCAN: Me in honor of my father, and her in honor of her Uncle.

We enter Epcot. I notice my breath is suddenly thready and slightly gasping, even though I am still jogging slowly. I feel invincible. I barely hurt. But maybe this marathon is taking its toll on me after all. I decide to walk a moment and a kind, older gentleman asks me if I’d like a gel. I break into a jog and pass him. I round Spaceship Earth and head out of the park, and suddenly, there is the finish line, straight ahead.

I take my Dad’s picture out of my pocket and hold it in my hand as I cross. I’m crying. I’m pressing my fists to my eyes. But I feel good. 4:57:43. Never once did it cross my mind that I wouldn’t finish.

Someone clips my champion chip off my Asics Sneaker with the orange piping and dayglow threads. Someone puts a medal around my neck. Someone hands me a bottle of water. I get a banana. I stretch. I wander through the tents, and there is Wendy – Abby’s partner – grabbing me by the fanny pack, seeming gleeful that I’m still alive. She guides me to Abby. We look at each other and look away, because we’re shy like that, and we haven’t been shot, after all. My hair has stiffened into a salt bush, and hers is a mass of curls in the back.

Just put one foot in front of the other, I guess. You’ll get somewhere soon enough.

eeeep! -- by abby

i talked to gerlinda a bit ago, and i think we agree that we are equally freaked / trying not to be freaked / glassy-eyed / committed.

sunday feels like a long way away and not so far away at all! personally, i have been trying to eat well, taking deep breaths and reading artemis fowl books for a distraction.

wish us luck -- in a few days this'll all be a history i hope we look back on fondly!

:D

not much - gerlinda

between the holidays and whatnot, it was all i could do last week to just get my booty out of bed for crossfit. Which is CRAZY! we had to do this thing last week that was almost like dancing like choreography:

• from a deep squat position, grasp a medicine ball using fingers as stabilizors only - b/c the momentum of exploding from the squat will actually lift the ball for you (in theory)
• continue upward exploding motion quickly and fluidly until you are on your toes with your shoulders shrugged up to your ears
• release the medicine ball
• drop down into a deep squat again FAST while flipping your hands palms up to receive the ball
• the above move is called "The Snatch"
• raise from the squat and bring the medicine ball to chest level (still holding it from the bottom, palms up)
• scissor your legs powerfully out while thrusting the medicine ball powerfully straight upward

there is a name for the second part of the move, but after about 100 false starts on this, b/c i am too uncoordinated to remember the "dance" and kept scissoring at the wrong moment and dropping the ball ... my legs were too wobbly and my brain was too fried to care or remember what the exercise was called...

i finishised last in the class on the speed time trial of these - mostly because i was getting remedial squatting instructions the whole time. in between sets of those, we also had to do jumping pullups and dips...

i woke up so sore the next day that i decided to bail on crossfit this week and just do some slow, easy runs instead... :)

i'm excited about the marathon because, this time come next week, it will be OVER. because of inconsistencies in my training this past month or so, i have no real idea what i can expect of myself in terms of race times, etc. i know it's going to be very difficult. i am prepared to break down in tears, if necessary. but i am as determined as ever to complete the race - even if it takes me the entire allotted 7 hours to do so.

like abby, i only have one appropriate pair of shorts... Our PanCAN shirts, which arrived in the mail last week, are white singlets with purple side panels. I get chaffed on my inner/upper arm when i wear sleeveless shirts, but i will remember to slather the seams and also my arm itself with body glide and hopefully i'll be ok! like abby, i'll be wearing my asics 2110's. i'm hoping the weather will be a little cloudy so that the sun isn't beating down on us... but, starting out at 7am should help with the heat. I predict Abby will be crossing the finish line around 11am!

when i was at disney to 5K last year, i walked down to the boardwalk saw the some of the marathoners. there was this one in particular who looked pretty out of shape - but she seemed strong and determined, and she was trotting along at a slow jog, while others around her were walking. it was then that i thought - if she can do this, then maybe i could too... flush from the victory of running my first 5K, i felt invincible. the rest is history: want it, check. go for it, check. do it - i'm checking that one off the list next weekend!