Posts Tagged → Running

I am a marathon runner.

In 2012, I ran the Chevron Houston Marathon – my third marathon – hoping to qualify under new requirements for the April 2013 Boston Marathon.  I fell short by approximately 2 minutes – had I not stopped to go to the bathroom, slowed down for a cup of water, or stretched my legs in the last few miles, I would be in Boston today running with the legions of dedicated athletes.  I thought of this particular race today as I read about the tragedies unfolding at the finish line of the world’s most famous long-distance rate – not because I think of my story as one of coincidences and close calls, but as a narrative of why I run and will continue to run.

By the tenth mile of my first marathon in San Francisco, I was absolutely captivated by the sport.  I continued to run races in Houston and San Francisco not because of clocks, or times, or medals, but because I could find no atmosphere like the final two miles of a marathon.  I want to tell you what happens in the final stretch of an officiated long-distance race because it is so beautiful – so beautiful that I simply refuse to let the circumstances of Boston today become the predominant narrative of marathon running.

When the crux of an activity is pure endurance and resiliency – a test of mental and physical rigor as you attempt to traverse a 26.2-mile course – it becomes irrelevant if you finish the race in 2 hours, 4 hours, or 6 hours.  The crowd will cheer for you whether you are an elite, world-class runner, a 101-year-old man, or a first-time competitor in your mid-twenties.  The noise is a raucous blend of cheering, music, clapping, loud speakers, and noisemakers that resonates for all competitors.  When a runner falls, there is a collective level of concern – I have witnessed men and women literally stop in the middle of their strides and let time slip away to help their colleagues continue the course.  This is the splendor of long-distance running:  we are not a community that awards medals solely on time, but on finish.  In the eyes of the sport, a race is a race, and a finish, with very little exception, is a finish.

When an activity values endurance over time, it fosters a level of camaraderie, energy, and exhilaration that I have yet to feel in spaces other than starting and finish lines.  When I stand at the starting block anticipating a long and inevitably excruciating run, I also stand in solidarity with the thousands of runners who will do the same.  I will place my hand over my heart to listen to the National Anthem echo into the morning air.  I will, as the sun rises, bow my head for the Morning Prayer.  I will start and finish this race with everyone else – place and pace at the whim of my own body alone.

Thus a finish is almost indescribable – you and your fellow runners have endured over two-dozen miles of terrain.  Everything is counterintuitive.  Your body tells you to stop, yet you override the pain because your mother is waiting with a sign, ready to hug you as you stumble to the finish.  You want to scream in anguish, but you continue ever so slowly because a stranger has caught glimpse of your name printed across your bib and is screaming it in encouragement.  You want to collapse in the moment, but there are colorful, outlandish signs telling you how crazy, ridiculous, wonderful, and incredible you are.  There are countless faces of people you have never met who are cheering for you, for him, for her, for everyone.

And just as you feel that you should give up, you see it – the finish line, where the crowd roars in such excitement that it drowns out every doubt of falling short.  There are children screaming for their mothers.  There are lovers waiting on the sidelines with rings and proposals (as it has happened each time I have run a race).  There are teenagers – twice my students – who give back to their community by volunteering at the finish line, handing out bagels and bananas to eager finishers.  There are reporters and photographers capturing it all for the small news article that will be clipped by thousands as memory of this beautiful occasion.  There are runners embracing each other for the feat that they just accomplished.  The finish line is a tapestry of all there is to love about the sport, the participants, and the throngs of supporters.

When a person decides to set off a bomb in the final few miles of a marathon, it is a moral transgression that I cannot begin to articulate nor understand.  Such a horrific event targets not just a race or a crowd, but an embodiment of resiliency and triumph.  Although I cannot comprehend the events of today, this much I know – I need to keep running.  Run for the athletes and the spectators we have lost.  Run to preserve the finish lines of future races.  Run because it is the embodiment of the sport itself – to continue in spite of a difficult, inconceivable stretch.

We need to keep running.

I am a runner.

By mile 5 of the Oakland Half Marathon, a woman held up a sign that evoked as much truth as a shoddily constructed piece of poster board with faded Sharpie can possibly relay: “Any idiot can run,” the poster board claimed.  “But it takes a special kind of idiot to run a [half] marathon.”

I chuckled because deep laughter from the belly would have surely caused me to yak all over the woman and the sign.  At worst, such a feat would have elicited public embarrassment for both parties – at best, I could stand by my claim that a Sharpie and puke laden sign is a far more credible, legitimate text than anything produced by the State of Texas.

Runners may not be morons, per se, but the activity we choose to dedicate our lives can be construed as counterintuitive.  For example, at mile 5, I was given a substance called “Gu.”  One would suppose, in the state of California, that something called “Gu” would have put me in a mild, psychedelic trance whereby I would feel compelled to pick up a glow stick and contemplate how stupid running 5 miles is.  In fact, “Gu” is universal in any decent long-distance race that cares about your being alive by the time mile 13.1 or 26.2 hits.  It is a 100-calorie, energy goo (Yes, aren’t we clever, marketing department?) wrapped in the same package that astronauts open to suck their food.  Except, rather than heaving a chicken in our respective mouths, runners are forced to digest a substance with the consistency of silly putty.  I know this because I am a moron, once a child, who ate silly putty.  Alas, those days have been replaced with running long distances.

By mile 6, the cups of water cease to be clear and turn into a transparent red.  For decent human beings, it is the color of cherry kool-aid – for recent college graduates who had frugal social lives, it is the hue of a well-mixed jungle juice served in a dilapidated house.  By this time, the body loses so much fluid that water retaining electrolytes, diluted in liquid, become the supposed drink of choice.  In all honesty, I like it because it tastes like cherry kool-aid and not jungle juice served to me by a drunken boy in lobster patterned shorts leaning on a fence that is about to fall over.  This, of course, is personal preference as some individuals attest to necessity of electrolyte ridden sports drinks.

This charade of consuming booger-like gel packets and brah-mixed drinks continues until mile 9.  By this time, legs begin to cramp and the normal word to profanity ratio begins to tip in favor of the latter.  By mile 10, a Korean Bar-B-Que parked on the side of the road, emanating smells of deliciousness becomes the subject of a “FUCK YOU, I AM RUNNING A RACE.”  By mile 11, the entire race ceases to be about the runner ahead of you – it becomes a psychological game based on endurance and distance rather than time or competition.  Every person has an Emilio Estevez in the folds of their psyche – that voice of indeterminate Latino origin wielding a hockey stick who beckons you to continue running for various reasons.  It pervades the mind, deafens the seventh rotation of “Imma Be” by the Black Eyed Peas.  I continued in the heat, dehydration and cramps under the auspice of, I kid you not, my own privilege: “Running this last mile is not hard,” I told myself.  “You know what is hard? Being a refugee. Your parents were fucking refugees.  On a boat.  ON A BOAT.”  Emilio, it is difficult to argue with you.

The question so becomes, why subject the body to incredible pressure, to horrendous music, and to guilt that white people like to burden themselves with?  Why participate in what is supposedly stupid, counterintuitive, and requires an unnatural exertion of the body?  Why partake in an activity that demands an enormous amount of time, energy, and concentration – that necessitates a near daily investment for returns understood by few (even among fellow runners)?

A half-marathon is 13.1 miles – by mile 13, the finish line comes into view.  It is one of the few moments in my life in which I find generic, Arial bold font to be utterly gorgeous.  A crowd lining the sides of last tenth mile roars in raucous noise – in screams, in drums, in horns, in Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing.”  Arms flail from the cluster of spectators, everyone is eager to high five the runners no matter the affiliation or the performance.  Someone screams, “Bob!” and you respond with a yell despite being named not Bob.  An empty stretcher rolls across the path during a gap between runners – it is humorous and ironic at mile 13 rather than onerous, terrifying, and possibly prophetic at mile 8.  To your peripheral vision on your right is a clock – it flashes the marathon time, the time of what could be.  On your left is half marathon split – the time that you had eagerly anticipated in both fear and excitement.  Imagine the euphoria of setting a goal that you perceived to be out of reach to the point of nearly recanting it minutes before start time – I saw a time that bested that goal by nearly 3 clock minutes or 5 chip minutes.

For many, running is not just a form of fitness.  It is not merely about burning calories, about passing time, or about finding a socially acceptable venue to play “Party in the USA.”  On a personal level, it is about trusting that this mind, this body, and these legs will take me the distance that I want to go – that when I say “13.1 miles” I will follow through and complete the 13.1 miles, that when I say “1:55:00,” I can somehow find the reserve of energy for “1:52:01.”  More often than not, I fall short.  I walk a hill.  I find an excuse to stretch.  I fumble with my iPod shuffle because Regina Spektor should be relegated to hipster make out sessions, rather than pacing.  These runs are infuriating and always end with a lament of how old and brittle I have become at 23.

Yet it is the few runs when everything aligns, when the fanciest of equipment and the extra electrolytes become irrelevant and secondary to will power, that reinforce the justification to continue the mileage.  Runners are special idiots that try hard, perhaps, because we are idiots.  At least this idiot is experiencing a wave of “runner’s high,” hinged on finally aligning thought and action – and avoided spewing Gu and electrolytes all over that woman.