tapering (five days to go)

so many nights, stuff gets so deep that all i've wanted to do was go out to Congress Avenue, find the old "S" spray painted into the asphalt, toe it, close my eyes, hear the horn, and start running.

i find in the race the same thing i find in a game of basketball. the universe is partitioned for that bit of time, that bit of space, and the task is simple. play basketball. run.

sometimes, i need my life to be no more complicated than to be at the starting line, waiting to run, and running. left, right, left, right, for hours and hours, driving relentlessly to the finish line. sometimes, my muscles and bones and lung scream for wanting the finish, but my heart does not. my heart hates the finish, because i know that purpose will be lost, and i will be just a person standing there, tired and sweaty, the same person that toed the line almost five hours earlier.

it isn't fair that life is not that simple.

anyway. i wrote this in 2006, when i was in a very different place. then, as now, it was five days until the Chicago Marathon.


emails are flying between my friends and me. no work is getting done. emotions are high. we want to be in chicago right damned now, regardless of the weather (though we update each other on the forecast twice a day). we want to be running it now.

marathoners call it "taper madness" - the wackiness that ensues during the two or three week period before a marathon when we back off the mileage and let our bodies repair and become ready. i ask melissa, a psychologist, and a friend going to run chicago with me, if there's a biochemical basis for the weird psychosis. hours pass, i get more emails reminiscing about our favorite coaches, about weather, and finally, "sure. but you are asking me to think in order to formulate an intelligent answer to that. and, i just can't do that right now."

so, i'm left to my own devices. i eat a banana, and stare at the whopping third document i've reviewed today. a normal pace would have me at 60 or so. why are we all losing our minds?

simply put, running is a natural ability, but training for and running a marathon is not a natural thing to do.

we train for 23 weeks. close to a thousand miles run - 30, 40, 50, 60 miles a week. we run four or five days a week. an hour monday, an hour tuesday, a hard workout for an hour and a half on wednesday, cross training or a half hour run on thursday, over an hour on friday, long runs for hours on saturdays.

those hours are squeezed into mornings before work, appended to the end of workdays when you feel like you only have the energy to open a beer and keep the couch from floating away.

people that choose and stick with this path are not likely to say, "I can't," and the training reinforces that. on the other hand, we say it more now than ever - "I can't, gotta run." "I can't, I have a race."

we push ourselves six days a week, for 23 weeks. exertion and fatigue become constants, as does the simple act of consistently, persistently, committing ourselves to creating discomfort in our bodies and pressing on anyway.

"The will to win means nothing if you haven't the will to prepare." - Juma Ikangaa, 1989 NYC Marathon winner

it's a compulsion, and if it didn't start as one, it became one along the way. every run says something about us, who we are and what we can do - not about our speed but about our will. sometimes, we're disappointed by how slow we were on a run or in a race, because we're competitive and because sometimes we lose sight of the fact that the time doesn't matter so much as how hard we pushed ourselves to get it.

one day, during a particularly hard workout on the Austin High School track, a kid leaned out a passing car's window, yelling some line i recognized from a movie about the day of judgment being on us, and asking, "how will ye be judged?"

the immediate response yelled back as i turned down onto the stratghtaway - "by what i do here today."

we watch the chicago marathon highlight video, and the sight of the runners and the cheering crowds shakes us. to some extent, it's adrenaline - fight or flight response positively subverted, adrenaline charges as we recognize the scenario. but we can't do anything with it right now, sitting at our desks, or at home.

we want the race, the pre-run jitters, we want to be surrounded by 40,000 other people who have made the same journey thus far, the same hegira from doubt and unchallenged limitations.

we don't know each other, we might not even like each other if we did, but almost everyone out there "gets it," and we are finishing a journey together, whether it takes us 2:10 or 6:10 to do it.

the hundreds of thousands of spectators lining the course watch people go by, see the determination and pain, and to some extent, they "get it." some of them will be motivated, as i was two years ago, to make that same commitment, to see what they can make themselves do.

i think again of our head coach, steve sisson, saying that whether it's the first time you cross the finish line, or the 50th, you are not the same person that started it.

the clock, the calendar, are running too slow. my friends and i want and need sunday to get here, so we can do what we have worked so hard to do, as best as we can on that given day. we want to run, so we can cross the finish line and see who we will have become.