The longest five hours, thirty-nine minutes, and thirty-five seconds of my life

Books are so great, you know? It's so magical when the words you read are powerful enough to inspire you to make a direct translation into your own life. I can think of a small handful of written feats that have kindled a bright enough fire within me that its warmth still flowed through me long after the pages had burnt out. **moment of silence for the emo-ness of that sentence**

I'll never forget playing in my mother's old flower garden, trying hard to get lost in the six-inch tall poppies in a passionate remix of The Secret Garden. And of course there was the day I decided to eat tomato-and-mayo sandwiches (I hadn't converted to Vegenaise yet) and hide under the piano while writing copious notes about the doings of my siblings. Our living/dining room area didn't actually allow for me to be even remotely hidden, so in a very un-Harriet-the-Spy fashion I made eye contact with my subjects while writing smack-talk about them. However, I must give the highest possible credit to the miracle-worker slash author Christopher McDougall for drenching his book Born to Run in SO much lighter fluid that when a reader's spark of interest hits it, no amount of "The Ends" can possibly put the flame out. In fact, literary shaman McDougall actually convinced ME that not only did I WANT to run a marathon, but that I was MADE to run marathons, and denying that would be denying the very nature of my being. 

So on June 10th, 2010, I participated in the San Diego Rock 'N' Roll Full Marathon. 

I've always been a very big "sitter." By that I mean that my very favorite activities could all be done while sitting on a couch, or--oooh! better yet!-- sitting cross-legged on my bed with my blankets all tucked around me and my pillow propped up behind me!! God yes!! These activities aren't exactly what one might call "cool," but I figured that the frizziness factor of my hair had automatically canceled me out for that club at birth. Sticker collecting (raging boner!), letter-writing (boing!), drawing (!!), painting (!!!), singing along to Jewel while feeling compassion(!!!!)-- you get the point. I've been called "grandma" since age eleven because I'd pledged myself to a life of bed-rest and muscle atrophy (wait, do you have to first HAVE muscles in order for them to atrophy? And can you truly use that word as a noun AND a verb?!!) So you see, for someone to summon the Holy Spirit down on me and not only make me WALK again but fully try to go out there and kinda jog a little bit...??!!! Now THAT is some perSUASive writing, my friends!

I started out really gung-ho about the training. It was pretty much three shorter runs a week and one long one, and every week the lengths of all these would increase. Duh. You get it. I'll never forget the point when I started feeling a little bit of "runner's high" during the ten-mile runs. It was a feeling of pure exhilaration and joy to be alive. Wait, damn, that sounds really nice right now. Shit, maybe I should try that aga--NOOO! CHRISTOPHER MCDOUGALL GET YOUR WIZARDRY PEN OUTTA MY HEAD!! Anyway, **deep breaths** in training your longest run is supposed to be twenty miles, and then you start decreasing your mileage until the 26.2-mile event. I was religiously following my training schedule up until the 14-mile run. After that, I started cheating on future me's success and pretending that whatever, it's fiiiiine, you don't reeeeeally need to do all that training bullshit. All of a sudden, my "runs" started turning into nice times to walk a lil bit and talk on the phone or listen to music. Running even ONE mile without stopping suddenly became not only impossible but en-TIRE-ly unnecessary. No worries! It's only 26.2 miles! If I get tired I'll just walk, but thanks for being concerned about how the fuck I'm going to pull it off.

When race day came, I was still in a deep fog of my reality's denial. I had rented my sister Hannah out as my personal assistant for the event, and we were up at 3 AM to get to the starting line. What we didn't realize was that we would be separated as soon as we got to the designated meeting place. I got on a bus with all the other competitors, while my Hannah, my sunscreen, and my innocence were left sadly behind in the pitch black parking lot. Hence, my motivation, my top four layers of skin, and my ability to dream were compromised horribly.

It took probably 45-minutes to start all the different waves of runners. When it was my turn to go, I remember feeling SO ready and SO capable and was SO wrong. 

The beginning of the race was great. I was all pumped up on endorphins and actually pushing myself for once. The miles seemed to just FLY by. I actually remember thinking-- and I'd like to single out the twelve cells of my brain that had this thought and wring their little cell necks-- that it was going by TOO fast, and I was sad that this memorable experience was going to be over all too quickly. BWAhahahahaha. After mile seven, I started walking for a minute. But hey--wait! Son of a bitch! The SECOND I started walking, five hundred people passed me, and it seemed like the entire race was getting away from me. The next five miles went along this way. Every time I tried to walk for any length of time, I got peer-pressured into (okay I'll stop calling it "running" now, I know I'm not fooling anyone) jogging immediately again for fear of falling behind. At some point I finally figured out that the reason there were 400-pounders waddling up the hill in front of me was NOT something to sob about dehydratedly. They were participants of the HALF marathon, and our paths were clumsily intertwined every once in a while just to wig me out. Phew. Just saying. Somewhere in the next four miles I accidentally dropped my ego, so I no longer cared when people ambled cheerily past me as I slowed to a walk. At mile sixteen, I remember a really nice woman had started running--oh okay jogging-- next to me, and she remarked that she was so impressed with my pace because she was just doing the RELAY and only had to go a few miles, and yay for me for keeping up with her. Unfortunately, that caused some inexplicable psychological effect within my sunburned brain, and I instantly fell behind her neon Nike soles. I bet SHE felt awkward. In this same memorable mile, I encountered another relay-er. This girl, however, could not have made any remarks to me had she wanted to. She was stumbling along so brokenhearted, like her cheating boyfriend were tottering nakedly and red-handedly behind her. However "red" wasn't the color that popped into my mind. No, no that was definitely brown. In honor of the fact that this girl had straight-up shit her white Adidas running pants and was still pushing her pooed-on thighs to take her to the freshly laundered next runner on her relay team. I wanted to... laugh? No, maybe... cry? For her? Well, I think what I REALLY wanted was to be able to point to her soiled bottom and have someone smile at me and wink, and that would have been enough. However, the only participants around me were the purple Team in Training people, and they were essentially the Mean Girls of marathons. Those broads have the largest-yet-still-exclusive clique I've ever seen. They have hundreds of thousands of fans stationed all along the race course, fans who make sure to specifically ONLY encourage their girls in purple and no one else: "Yay Molly! Team in Training! Woo! Go Sandra! Fuck you girl in generic yellowish top! Shoulda worn your sunscreen!"A few hours of their incessant cheerleading and I felt like Jan Brady.

The last six miles of that marathon.... Well, some unholy things started happening. For starters, I was loopy as fuck. All of a sudden, the only thing that made me feel even remotely human was to develop Tourette's and audibly mutter four-lettered words with every pounding footfall. I'd long ago given up on impressing anyone, so I didn't bother to care about how this might affect the runners on either side of me. My skin had taken on a scary beet-like hue, due to the fact that I'm semi-albino and don't EVER leave the house without two layers of SPF 50 forming a halo of forcefield over my whole body. That is, of course, unless I'm about to trample sweatily into direct sunlight for almost six hours. That's when I don't wear ANY sunscreen. 

I had my phone on me for the race to use for music, but when the battery started to die I turned it off to conserve it so I could at least let Hannah know when to be ready with my bodybag. The last two miles were so excruciating that I can't even remember them lucidly. It's like the dream scene for me in Gladiator when Maximus is running his hands through the field of tall wispy weeds. I remember the white sand under me. I remember the bay of water to my right, and the hill of thousands of pin points of color that were actually people cheering for the people already where I wanted to be. And I remember texting Hannah that I didn't think I could finish and could she come get me, please, and then my phone died. Walking was not an option. Walking equaled shooting, stabbing pains up through the bottoms of my feet like my feet had gone in to labor and were about to pop out little toe babies. Hobbling was the only way to go. I was in a pack of fellow hobblers. We shared an unspoken bond of artistry in the way we were contorting our bodies to find some tiny air bubble of comfort between our shrieking joints. Our shadows put Quasimoto to shame. 

When I finally, finallyfinallyfinally started nearing that last mile marker, I heard someone say that the finish line was that big white tent over there. Wait really? That one right there? I could DO this! I forced my legs to topple over one another at an increased rate, and my mantra of F-words started sputtering out of my blistered lips in a stream of pep talk that would've made Hitler cross himself. It turns out that "someone" was wrong. The white tent had NOTHING to do with the finish line. Luckily I was so mortally defeated from the previous four hours that I couldn't even feel the appropriate letdown at having even farther to go. I then saw the yellow banner, the giant timer, and the finish line. I reached within, to that place that people tell you they reach to for really hard things, and I managed to push myself to what I thought was a sprinting pace (Hannah nicely said later it was more like I was "falling," so I'm sure it actually resembled a dead-leg "trip"). Somewhere in the fog of my awareness Hannah's face materialized to my left holding my new red shiny camera, so I gave a liar thumbs up and attempted to smile at it, right before I heaved my corpse across the finish line. 5:39:35. Five numbers I'll NEVER forget, no matter HOW painful their memory is. Hannah didn't get that picture, by the way. She DID get several pictures of a skinned pig running with her eyes closed and a soft accepted frown framing her flaming red chin. Er, yeah, no I guess that was me. 

The aftermath: I wasn't acceptable to go into public for nearly two weeks. Between the sheets of dead skin flaking off every inch of me and the gargoyle-scrunch-foot shuffle I used to get around.... Let's just say if I went to work in the Italian restaurant I managed, people would be shrieking, shielding their children's eyes, and barfing up their garlic balls. 

It's been eight months, and I still get this icky feeling every time I think about that day. I know I should feel some huge sense of pride and accomplishment for finishing but... I guess I just feel like I failed. It seemed like yet another example of my procrastination and half-assing of everything I ever do. I guess what it did give me, though, was something I'd never known about myself before. It showed me that I am not a quitter. Despite the excruciating pain and heat and delirium I was experiencing that day, I kept that agreement with myself that I was going to finish that #$%*ing marathon even if it were the LAST thing I ever did. And trust me, I thought it would be. 

Here I am, fresh-skinned, able to walk, and you better believe that I'm sitting here cross-legged on my couch, wrapped safely in my blanket of pink fleece comfort, typing this blog to you. I might still be a "sitter"-- the marathon definitely didn't change that-- but in hindsight it was probably the catalyst that led me to take my sitting to Encinitas in search of a better me. So... thanks Christopher McDougall, you sorcerous composer of words-- thanks for tricking me into thinking I could run a marathon so that I could find the strength inside me to change what I didn't like about my life. I pray to God you never use your powers for evil.  

On a RELATED note: Born to Run highlighted the life of ultramarathoner Scott Jurek, who's apparently the best runner in the infinite universe. And guess what? That's right, he's vegan! If only he were a ginger, then I would find him and make him be the mythical ginger vegan boyfriend I'm holding out for. Anyway, I found his blog: http://www.scottjurek.com/blog/ Check it out!