26.2

I knew it was hopeless. At 3:15, I reached up to turn on the little halogen lights in the headboard, then reached over to pick up my phone and turn off the alarm. 5:00 would get here soon enough. That’s the thing about events that play out over exceedingly long time horizons—as you approach the end point, time seems to slide into an exponential mode. The difference between “you have two weeks to write this paper” and “it’s due tomorrow morning” illustrates the point, as does an important presidential election being four years away vs two weeks out. I don’t know if time is a flat circle, but it sure as hell isn’t linear.

And so it was on the morning of the 46th Chicago Marathon, or the first Chicago Marathon, or the last Chicago Marathon, depending on your point of view. All three might even be true simultaneously. I lay in bed another hour, surfing nonsense, doing the day’s Wordle, trying to figure out if/how my hip was working, and going through some stretches and the diagnostic manipulations (as best as I could approximate them) the ortho had done. “Good enough,” was my considered opinion. I got out of bed.

I can confess it now: I don’t ever recall being more nervous in my life than I was in that hotel room that morning. Not playing in front of thousands of people, not witnessing the births of my children, not asking [name redacted] to go to the homecoming dance with me in 1982. My mouth was so dry I could barely swallow the high-calorie protein bar I’d brought. I forced it down along with as much Nuun-enhanced water as I could take, enduring the minutes ticking down ever more rapidly to 6:45, my intended departure from the hotel. I rolled, I stretched, I flipped on the local news to see their coverage from the empty chutes. Soon.

Walking over in the cool predawn air, though, I finally got over myself. Given the injury, I’d long since thrown out any goal except to finish. What I thought would be a realistic pace when I signed up, and then to where I downshifted expectations during training, didn’t matter now. Time to let it play out. All that was left was to run, a thing I’ve done with fair competence since age two.

The first major surprise was at the starting area. I’ve run plenty of races before and thought I’d seen it all, but I wasn’t ready to encounter over 50,000 other runners. I have nothing but kudos for the organizers for the way they pull this event off year after year, but they really botched one big thing: they wildly underestimated how many port-a-potties they would need. I had something like an hour until my corral would close and I knew beyond any doubt that if I got in that line, I’d miss that deadline and would have to start at the very end of the wave. I made my first major decision: it’d have to wait. It’s good to have a plan, but it’s better to be able to adapt under duress.

My heart was still pounding as I walked around Grant Park. To be honest I don’t remember a lot of the details from this part of the day. I put on some music I thought might calm and distract me. Didn’t work. Eventually I made it into my corral, about half full of runners at this point, and noticed dozens of folks sitting on the pavement. Not for this nervous old man with a stiff back and a bum hip, thanks. I moved in small circles and stretched until the corral filled in to the point where I couldn’t do that either. After that I marched in place. Took some pictures. Breathed in the rich, minty scent of Biofreeze all around me.

At about 8:25 they dropped the rope and we started walking to the start. It’s nearly a half-mile up Columbus Drive, stopping and starting, rush-hour traffic, vibrating with anticipation. Time here for some final stretches, starting my launch music, a watch check, ditching the sweatshirt I’d brought over the fence, and a last recitation of the Litany Against Fear. The horn sounded at 8:35 sharp and I was over the line at about 8:39.

This post is already kinda long, and I’m not done yet, so I’ll put the mile-by-mile recap of the actual race in another post you can (should!) read. TL;DR: it started OK, and then it hurt, and then it hurt more, but I got over the line eventually.

---

I have to mention the incredible sense of community that emerges from the combined energy of the runners and the crowd. I’ve seen this up close as a supporter and volunteer, but it hits different when you see it play out over the entire duration of the course, from the course. For hours on end. It’s overwhelming. Everyone really is in this together. There was a spot around mile 15 where some runner who was clearly bonking shouted out, “does anyone have a gel?” And I’m not exaggerating, a half-dozen runners reached into their pockets and offered him one, no questions asked. Earlier, I’d seen a woman who’d fallen and was bleeding, and a small crowd of runners stopped to wait with her until the medics got there. I saw a million signs, funny and inspirational, too many to recount.¹ I’m especially grateful for the people who were holding up signs with the live Bears/Jaguars scores from London. At points along the second half of route, fans were offering snacks, drinks, gels, pickles (!), and very late in the race, shots and beers. For a few hours it was possible to believe a million people were in something together. All differences are put aside. We have something meaningful to accomplish here. Sure would be nice to carry that on after the race is run.

Now that it’s in the rearview mirror, I can say completing the marathon was probably the most satisfying single thing I’ve ever done in my life. It’s true that the goals I originally set when I started planning for this went out the window with the hip injury. I set a simple, new one: finish. I can’t think of any other occasion where I set a massive, concrete project that took close to a year to accomplish, and then I executed it, even when shit got hard along the way: the training run where I got home delirious from heat and dehydration, the other one where my hip blew up and I had to call for a pickup, hell, even being too scared to eat the morning of the race. Any other number of things came up that would have served as comfortable off-ramps, and nobody was making me do this. The most ridiculous cliché is how things like this are accomplished by putting one foot in front of the other; in this case, it couldn’t be more literally true.

It’s said that you’re not the same person after running a marthon than you were before. Maybe. Other than the obvious (I broke part of my body and aged a decade) I feel like it’s hard to say. Maybe that’s the difference right there. In the past, I’ve been able to push through obstacles to get hard things done, but those things have all been through the force of mind. This time, maybe what I learned is that I can also push my body through severe hardship to get the job done.

If that kind of difficult circumstance arises again, though, it won’t be my choice. I’m already getting emails from the amazing folks at Camp One Step, the charity for which I ran, offering guaranteed early access for next year’s race. With nothing but admiration for them, and compassion for myself, I respectfully decline. I’ll be a year older and more broken down then, and while there is still a part of me that insists I can run it in an hour less than that took, I’m sure some other part would fall off or melt during training again. I get to say I’ve run a marathon, and that’s true whether it’s one, two, or fifty. The box is checked, the medal’s right here on my desk, mission accomplished.²

I want to close with some acknowledgements. It took a village to get me over that finish line. My cup truly runs over. It might even leak out through my eyes when I consider my good fortune:

• First and foremost, to Sharon, for not even batting an eye when I said I wanted to do this (well, maybe a brief eye-batting did occur), and for immediately understanding that I’d be basically off the grid for 18 straight Saturdays, as well as getting up at absurd hours for weekday pre-work runs. After an initial “are you sure?” she never uttered another skeptical word.
• Support on the track is vital. You count the miles until you know you’re going to see a friendly face. So to my daughter, Leah, and my sister, Julie, a million thanks for being the friendly faces I needed to see so badly.
• My incredible friend Mary literally walked the walk: when my hip and calf (plot twist! check the detailed post for more) kept me from running steadily, she jumped in and did the run/walk grind with me for almost the final third of the race, until the marshals rudely kicked her out with 500m to go.
• Kudos to the team that kept this body moving to the best of its capabilities: Dr. Riff at Illinois Bone & Joint Institute, Sam at Oak Park Training and Performance, and Nick at Body Gears PT.
• Brian, the coach/captain with the Team One Step runners, offered expert advice on how to handle this injury, and exceedingly positive words of encouragement when I needed them most.
• The Internet was there for me, in #fitness and #the-lobby, before, during, and after. You beautiful, nerdy bastards have been helping to make the days pass by for years, and on this occasion you made the miles pass by, too.
• A shout-out to Liz, the kind professor from Ireland whom I chatted with while eating spaghetti dinner at a bar the night before the race. You wouldn’t think talking American politics with a foreigner would be relaxing, but her sharp wit (and lilting accent) calmed me when I really needed it.
• To all the amazing folks who donated to Camp One Step! I raised almost $2500, in the top ten percent of their runners. And did I mention it’s not too late to donate?
• And to Dad, who unfortunately missed this, but who 1) was among the first to hear about and approve of this insane plan, and 2) came out of a long period of semi-consciousness last winter to hear me talking about the race with someone else in the room, and saying, “Jesus Christ, you talk about this thing all the damn time, just run already."