Cal.E. The warden and Lucia took a road trip this weekend, so I will just go straight to chapter seventeen of “Beyond the Thirteenth Mile; The Iron Man Chronicles
CHAPTER 17:
RUNNING ON EMPTY
Run Course; Mile sixteen: Well, I am still on course to beat 14 hours. I feel okay, but my feet still hurt. They are beginning to feel numb, though. Even if I give it everything I have, I won’t beat my best marathon time. I DID finish that race strong, however, even though I could hear that old Jackson Browne song in my head during the last part of the race. I even beat my goal by 48 seconds! I really WAS running on empty at the end of that race…
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To paraphrase Yogi Berra — Ninety percent of running is physical; the other half is all mental. Never is this more true than in a marathon.
My third marathon was to be my best, by far. That may have been true to more intensive (speed) training on my part. I measured out a six and one-half mile route beginning at my house and challenged myself never to take more than an hour to run it. My average speed in this marathon was 6.53 miles per hour, giving credence to the motto ''you run like you train." My right knee had healed nicely, after only having to rest it for a little over a week.
My new magnetic knee brace improved my time by about 30 seconds per mile. This, over 26.2 miles, resulted in a dramatic improvement over my time in my first two marathons. (To anyone with knee problems, a good brace is well worth the money one must spend on it.)
Also, a new supplement that I had begun taking about six weeks before the marathon seemed to help me recover faster from long runs and bricks (doing two different aerobic workouts back-to-back.) There is an old saying, "plan your run and run your plan," and, for once, I had a plan. It didn't hurt that the weather also had decided to cooperate the day of the 2001 Houston Marathon. The temperature was in the low fifties, the sky was overcast, and, because the marathon's new sponsor was not offering prize money, the field shrank from about 7500 runners for the two previous years to about 5000 for this year.
My plan was to pace on Adam for as long as I possibly could. Adam, a good friend of both Nicole's and mine, was running his first marathon, even though he was in his early forties. However, Adam is a phenomenal natural athlete who can pick up on almost any sport in an instant. Running, it just so happened, proved to be Adam's natural sport (Adam is also a very good cyclist.) This was the first year that Adam's work schedule had allowed him to be in town for the marathon, and he intended to make the most of this opportunity. Adam had planned his run in even more minute detail than I had, writing his goals for his run-splits on his arm.
I paced on Adam for as long as I possibly could, to the thirteenth mile marker. At that point, I knew that I couldn't stay with him any longer. Adam was set on getting negative splits (running each mile a little faster than the one before) and his pace had become faster than I could run, and still finish the whole marathon.
Adam went on to run his negative splits until mile 22, after we both had started on about a nine-minute-per-mile pace. That is about as fast as I usually run my training runs. We even passed Joseph, although his plan was to run only half of the marathon. We still passed him before he had quit running. We also passed Jim and his wife, both of whom are capable of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.
Jim and Jill did pass me later, somewhere around the twenty-mile mark. I almost caught back up with them after they had decided to take a restroom break, but I didn't have enough energy left. To be honest, both Joseph and Jim were nursing nagging injuries that had been lingering for months; otherwise, I probably never would have seen either of them.
To reiterate, running is not my first love. I often ride extra miles on my bike or take extra laps in the pool to cut back on the amount of running I must do to keep up my training routine. Distance running is far down the list for me as far as things that I enjoy. However, getting in shape for a marathon is a good way to maximize one's training when it is too cold to swim outside and too windy to cycle.
Somewhere around mile twenty, though, I must have hit the ultimate "runner's high" (an unrealistic state of euphoria brought on by a massive release of endorphins, natural painkillers, by one's brain after running a long distance). "I'm going to p.r. (set a personal record) by an hour," I thought, as I glanced at my watch. Even elite distance runners (which I am certainly not) don't escape reality, though, and I was no exception to that rule. Not many marathon runners escape "hitting the wall" either (when all physical reserves are depleted) which I did, in spades, at mile 23. I've got nothing left," I thought at that point. A quick glance at my watch, however, along with some simple math, told me that I still had a chance of hitting my goal of four hours. “But," I thought, ''It will take everything that I have left in me."
Then again, what's the point of having aggressive goals if those goals don't require that you give your all to meet them? With this thought in mind, I started to run as hard as I could. I felt no cramps and my knee was fine, but I was really, really tired. At mile 24, I caught a slight chill, a sure sign of dehydration. "That's not good," I thought, trying to force down as much water and sports drink as I could. By mile 25, I knew that the only way that I could finish in less than 4 hours was to skip the last aid station and to run as hard as I possibly could. Coming off the last hill (that infamous place where I had tried to quit two years before), I gritted my teeth, and put every bit of energy I had left in my body into my run. Coming around the last turn, I could see the official clock.
At mile 26, I had exactly one minute to run 285 yards. This is a piece of cake under ordinary circumstances, but no mean feat after having run 26 miles. I started into (I thought) a dead out, no holds barred sprint. I passed under the finish line at four hours and twenty-two seconds, by the gun (from the time the starter's pistol sounded until I finished). However, my "chip time" (the time it took me to go from the starting line to the finish line, which is measured by an electronic chip) was three hours, fifty-nine minutes and twelve seconds, forty-eight seconds below my goal. Adam had finished just ten minutes before I had, admitting that he, too, had "hit the wall" at mile 23. He had walked most of the last three miles, the only reason I finished as close to him as I did. Clearly, for the last three miles, we were both "running on empty. "
I never realized how true that statement was until Adam, Nicole, and I went to lunch with some of our friends who had come to support both Adam and me. One, a veteran marathon runner who had chosen to sit this one out, looked me squarely in the eye and said, "Boy, Jed, coming around that last turn you looked as if you had absolutely, positively nothing left, and all you wanted to do was get across that finish line." Truer words were never spoken.
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