Marathon #1

About a week before my first marathon I was dressed in my Titanica costume putting on a spectacle for many of my friends as my roommates and I hosted another evening of G.L.O.W, (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling).  If you are a child of the 80’s you know exactly what this is, and I am proud to say that we represented loud and proud every time we suited up and took it to the living it to the living room floor.  My alter-ego was named Titanica, because I had a real obsession with that film, I saw it 9 times in the theater, and my tag line was, “Your heart won’t go on.”  I had graduated from CU about 3 weeks prior and was knee deep in my post graduate identity crisis of still living like a college student, but only weeks away from moving back home to Los Angeles to start my career in the entertainment industry. I was still living with my roommates in our dilapidated apartment, hustling at the local Dairy Queen, and training for my first marathon.   Luckily, my brother Peter was visiting and my crazy friends who had all fallen in love with him at one point or another through out the last 4 years, and would be driving back home to southern California with me to cheer me on for my race.  I was nervous for the marathon for many reasons, most of which was the unknown.  My longest training run was 19 miles, which is still 7 miles shorter than the 26.2 I would be running on race day, but I chose to take the “ignorance is bliss” approach, hence the weekend before “party time” with my friends.  However, a funny thing happened on the way to the starting line, I found my tribe.  Runners stretching in the grass, fidgeting in the Port-o-Potty line, and clapping in the starting line corrals, I felt connected to all of them, and honored to be among them.

When the gun went off, and the miles started to tick away, I never thought that I couldn’t do it; I just couldn’t believe that I was doing it.  I hooked up with a female runner a few years older than me at about mile 7, she was nice, but I ditched her when she said, “At this pace we should finish in about 5 hours.”   Yeah, no, I was aiming for under 4:45, so I sped up and disappeared into the crowd. 

 The race took place in San Diego, which is home to one of the largest Marine bases in the country, Camp Pendleton, and lucky for us runners, hundreds of Marines lined the streets to volunteer and cheer us on.  The most powerful image I remember was of a ripped, middle-aged Marine screaming at us, “Pain is weakness leaving your body!”  I felt honored to be among his presence, and unworthy that I was merely running a marathon compared to the real sacrifice he committed to by becoming a Marine, so I promised myself that I would never allow myself to succumb to fatigue during the race, instead I would use it as fuel to push me harder through the dark moments, I owed him that much at the very least.

I did veer off into “Lonely town” at the half-way mark, mile 13.1, where the course narrowed to a two lane bike path, both the runners and spectators had thinned, and I was forced to have a real conversation with myself.  I was not feeling tired, but rather an overwhelming sadness, because the single goal that I had been training for over the last six months was suddenly half-way over.  Then I realized that I needed to drink it all in, because it would be over soon, along with so much else; college, living with my best friends, and living in Colorado, but in that moment, running on exhausted legs, I felt ready for what was coming next.  It was like this race was a bridge from my adolescence, and of dependency, to becoming an adult, and making my life whatever I wanted it to be.

At about mile 22 I heard frantic shouting from a distance; it was Peter running out of Carl’s Jr. with a plastic order number in his hand, cheering me on, and yelling that my pace was faster than he thought, hence his assumption he had enough time to eat. Many of my fellow runners around me fed off of his energy too, as he promised to meet me at the finish line.  The last half mile of the course loops around an air base, and the finish line is hidden until you round a right corner, run under a tunnel, and miraculously it is a few hundred feet in front of you.  As I chased down those last few steps of the race I felt super human, like after running a marathon there was nothing I could not accomplish.  I had crossed the bridge, and was ready to truly start my life.