The agony of the edge.

ABC's Wide World of Sports coined the phrase, "The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat."  Yesterday I finished my second marathon and experienced the agony of the edge.  I had my eyes set on running a 3:45 marathon and trained all summer with that goal in mind.  When the gun sounded at the start of the race my ego took over and I was convinced that I could catch up and run with the 3:40 group.  I mean really, what is five minutes faster over 26.2 miles?  A LOT!  I caught up to the group at mile five and felt amazing.  Here I was running out of my mind and feeling like a champ.  The rain had started to move in and began to pick up over the next few miles.  By mile eight we were running in the middle of a Minnesota monsoon with small rivers gushing down the gutters of the Parkway.  The rain really was an afterthought to the blistering pace 

that I had was maintaining.  

The superstar running bubble that I was living in began to deflate as the 3:40 pace group slowly inched away from me.  At the halfway mark I had turned in my fastest half marathon by over four minutes, but came face to face with the consequences from my previous actions.  If you have ever been driving too fast on a snowy/icy road and began to slide you experience the "UH OH" of terror.  You know you are going into the ditch, and there is nothing you can do but hold on and hope you are not injured.  I knew I had gone out WAY too fast and had pushed beyond my lactic threshold with 13 miles left to run.  As I reached the 19 mile mark and crossed over the Mississippi river, I was still on my 3:45 pace, but was running on fumes.  

The train derailed at mile 20 when my right quad knotted up tighter than a fishing line on a Bass Masters pole.  I had no choice but to pull over and try to massage/stretch out the cramp.  As I raised my leg to stretch my quad my hamstring balled up like a frightened armadillo.  In order to stretch my quads I had to stretch my hamstrings.  This process continued over the next six miles of the race.  Every half a mile I couldn't bear the pain any longer and was forced to stop and massage/stretch if I wanted to continue moving forward.  Spectators would try to encourage me as I stopped, but what they did not realize was that no amount of encouragement could overcome my cramping muscles.  Physiologically I was SPENT.  All I could think about was the eighteen months of getting up before the sun to log miles was all for naught.  I had wasted all of my training by allowing my ego to get me out of my race plan.  In the words of Napolean Dynamite, "You IDIOT!"

My pace had decreased from 8 minute miles to a 16 minute mile and I was broken.  Quit?  NEVER!  There was no way I was ever going to quit this race.  I had just watched "Touching the Void," a documentary about a European climber who broke his leg atop a peak in Peru, fell into a cravass and was left for dead by his partner.  He didn't quit.  He spent four days sliding himself down this mountain with a broken leg back to his camp so that he could live.  I was NOT going to quit.  As I crossed the finish line I was wrecked physically and emotionally.  All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball along the grass, but I knew I had to eat and keep moving.

  Once I saw Nikki and the kids I was brought back to reality.  I had just ran a marathon!  Nikki wanted to hug me, and the kids, in their costumes, just wanted their daddy to hold them.  They could have cared less if I had ran a 2:30 marathon of a 5:30 marathon.  They love me for who I am and are proud of what I had just accomplished, and that is what it is all about.  I tell people all the time that the marathon experience is far more about the journey than the destination.  It is about getting up at 4:30 to go run 24 miles on your day off.  It is about soaking in 55 degree ice baths to try to recover so you can run more tomorrow.  It is about doing something that you want to do and have to earn.  So I sit here one day removed from my train wreck and ask myself one thing, what marathon will I run next?