April 10, 2023
Greetings from the persistent,
Scattered around the globe are a group of people with whom I share a kinship that is hard to describe, but when I woke up this morning it felt like I should try.
In seven days, they will run the Boston Marathon. In the mornings between this one and that one they will go a little crazy. They will obsess over little pains, rethink their training, recalculate what to eat this week, and obsessively check the weather for next Monday.
They are tapering now, maybe have been for a week, a time of forced rest. Tapering produces a special kind of madness where your body argues with your mind. “Why aren’t we still running?” it demands. It is an ironic debate because, in the weeks previous, the body asked, “Why are we STILL running?”
When I woke up this morning I thought of them, these people I know, these people I have never met. I am sore in some of the same places they are, have looked at the history of hundreds of miles of training, tended to injuries, worn out shoes, in much the same way as they have. I’ve eaten and stretched and rested and tried harder and backed off and followed proven strategies and sometimes just did what felt right. We have these things in common.
We have run to run faster, and longer, and longer, faster. We cross-trained and rehabbed and suffered setbacks and we have fallen down and gotten lost and ran in circles so we can round off the last tenth of a mile on a 15-mile run. We eat to run, we organize our social life around runs, we plan vacations around running, we choose doctors who understand runners. That is just a taste of the passion, and the madness, we share.
One thing I won’t have in common with these thirty thousand close friends is that I won’t be running Boston, not this year. That little experience I do share with many Boston marathoners: some years we stay home.
It is a challenge to run Boston, one of the more demanding courses in marathons. But before you can even step up to the starting line, there are a few other challenges. Before you run, you have to qualify, to prove you are worthy by running a fast time in another certified marathon within a specific window of time before the next Boston. It’s a quirky thing, but it’s part of understanding this connection.
I haven’t done the math, but I think I have failed twice as often as I’ve succeeded. I’ve missed my qualifying time by minutes, by a leg cramp, by a poor start, or a lull in the middle, or a headwind, or an unfortunate pit stop. Most of the time, I missed it because I wasn’t ready.
And more than a few times, I did all the work, trained and raced and ran fast enough to qualify, but there were other runners who were faster. We are all competing for a place in the race, and the fastest marathoners in each age group get in. And so, some years others ran, and I stayed home. That is part of the kinship too.
I am not going to pretend that this is always a delight. I’ve trained for two years or more to go to Boston and had that dream dissolve for many reasons. I’ll admit I haven’t always reacted well, and maybe that sounds a little obsessive to those who are observing. But the experience of being a long-distance runner, and a Boston marathoner, is complicated. Not all the powerful things that happen to runners occur during the race.
George Sheehan once said: “If the marathon is to measure a man, it should synchronize with the cycles of his growth. Maturity is an uneven, discouraging process. Becoming who you are is not done on schedule. There are years when nothing seems to happen.”
Running any marathon, including Boston, makes changes in a person. But getting there, getting to the place where you are ready to run, is where the building happens, where the studying is done, where we learn and relearn. It is also where we discover how not to quit.
Not long ago, I told my wife that there would come a time when I would run my last Boston. I mean, I’m not getting any younger, and it’s just inevitable. She was kind, saying how that would be a good process too, how I could run marathons, or other races, without thinking about qualifying or racking up tons of miles, and I could relax and enjoy wherever it was I was running.
I didn’t tell her I was just kidding.
Hope this finds you running toward your dream,
David
Copyright © 2023 David Smith
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