Coming Around

The first time I checked my mail after missing the Richmond Marathon, I found it: my official certificate of acceptance into the 2013 Boston Marathon. I stood on the sidewalk in front of my mailbox in the gloom of a late-autumn afternoon, and somehow, suddenly, the shadows around me softened. I thought of the orange post-it note stuck to the wall of my cubicle at work, with the word “Boston” written on it. I had put it up back in September. In the midst of an unusually hectic week, I had wanted to remind myself to look forward.

Now, filled with disappointment over Richmond, I saw another message in the timing of the letter’s arrival. Sometimes there are second chances. When I had to drop out of the 2009 Boston Marathon because of a stress fracture, I felt discouraged about my future prospects. And yet, here I held the opportunity to try for the Boston Marathon again. Disappointments are part of life—but they are not the whole story.

I forget that too easily; thus the need for my orange post-it, a more crucial reminder than the shopping lists I jot down and then leave folded up in my purse. It seems an endless chore to shove back my negativity and focus on the positive. Still, there are those moments of beauty that come unexpected and unbidden, when all that is required on my part is to notice and appreciate. The evening before Thanksgiving, I left the gym downtown after a workout and headed for the parking garage to retrieve my car. As I waited for the walk signal at an intersection, I caught sight of a Christmas decoration seemingly floating above the street. It was an arrangement of blue stars, glowing softly in the dusk, and it wasn’t really floating, and it wasn’t alone. One by one, other quiet blue twinklers caught my eye. Tired as I was, and anxious over details, I thought they were some of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

Thanksgiving morning, I was coming again from a run, driving down 14th Street in Washington, DC, in glorious sunshine. As I approached Freedom Plaza, I noticed people wearing exercise gear and number bibs, one person here and one there and then groups and then rivers of them. I stopped at a red light on the edge of the plaza and watched them flow across the street in front of me. The sunlight was so golden and beautiful and the number bibs so bright and the runners so energetic and happy that I wanted to leap out of my car and join them. Only where would I park? I wondered. So I drove on, smiling.

I was listening recently to some of the songs from my Susan Boyle CD, and I always like the following lines from “Who I Was Born To Be”: “Now I’m not a girl/I have known the taste of defeat/And I've finally grown to believe/It will all come around again.” With running, sometimes things hurt, and sometimes it’s exhilarating, and sometimes things don’t work out, and sometimes they do. It’s hard to remember during the sting of a defeat, but good times do come around again—and I don’t mean just in running, but in life.

I should put that on a post-it note.

My letter from the BAA, with the medal from my qualifying marathon in Brookings, SD

Running Out

The 2012 Richmond Marathon T-shirt is pretty cool—I think. It has long sleeves and a dark background, midnight blue or black. I’m not sure because I haven’t looked at it in daylight.

I have a few superstitions when it comes to marathons. One of my Very Important Rules is that I don’t own the T-shirt until I do the run. These days, T-shirts are almost always handed out ahead of time, at packed expos where runners steer through tangles of merchandise to pick up their race bibs and timing chips. But I don’t look at the shirt or handle it any more than necessary to stuff it into my “goody bag.”

Of course, I would never, ever wear the shirt before the run.

It’s too bad: I may never know exactly what the 2012 Richmond Marathon T-shirt looks like. It is lurking behind the chair in my living room, wadded up inside a bag prominently labeled Anthem, for the marathon sponsor. I’ll have to figure out what to do with it at some point, but I know for sure it can never belong to me, because I never did the run.

What happened? I kept asking myself on Sunday … why couldn’t I pull it together in the darkness of my bedroom on Saturday morning? How could I lie there and watch time moving forward, until it was finally, indisputably too late?

I made the prerace trip down to Richmond and back Thursday evening to pick up my race packet (and, thus, the T-shirt). For an event that offers no race-day packet pickup, it seemed like the best strategy—I didn’t want to drive down Friday and then again Saturday morning, and even the expense of gas for two trips didn’t justify booking a hotel room. I keep thinking of songs I heard on the radio on the way home Thursday night. I keep thinking.

If I could back up a few days, I could fix it all. I’d back up past Saturday morning, because my plans grew endangered before that. If I could redo Friday, maybe … Ugh, Friday, sitting in a meeting at work imagining crackers with cheese—no, wait, crackers with peanut butter. Crackers with cottage cheese? Peeling off the wrapper on a piece of Halloween candy made to resemble an eyeball. Part of my brain kept screaming, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!” And another, matter-of-fact part remarked, “You have bigger problems than this piece of chocolate.”

So, yeah, Friday didn’t go so well. But if I were really backing things up, I should go further. What about Thursday, when every minute of running strained me—not physically, but mentally, because my mind felt so tired. Hang in there, hang in there, it insists half-heartedly. And I just don’t want to hang in there any more. What about all the days before that, or the nights really, awake and miserable. Hmm, maybe I don’t want to go back that far after all. I’m not sure I could figure out how to fix that.

It’s hard letting go of the plans I had, even now that I’m left with no choice. But I’m telling myself to move on, direct resources toward the next marathon, on Kiawah Island. It makes me tired to think of traveling there. So then I worry, are my iron pills not working, is my “Be Positive” failing (see The Agony and the Ecstasy)?

Or am I just tired of running and running and never reaching that elusive finish line labeled “ENOUGH”?

Wow, think of the T-shirt they’d give out for finishers of that race.

Not to be