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Since there’s likely some sort of actual time limit insofar as how long after an event one is able to ‘brag’ about their accomplishments, I felt like a ‘race recap’ was in order for what I’d now like to suggest is a maximum six-week window for an after-the-fact singing of my own praises…
So… here’s wha’ ha’ happened… At some point during the second half of 2006, I caught ‘wind’ of the fact that the fabled ‘ING Marathon’ event was planning on starting to include Atlanta as one the cities in which they hold a huge annual marathon and half-marathon race… The storied New York Marathon is an ING event, as is, I believe, the Miami Marathon… and anyhoo… I guess this is just to say that this event carried with it the additional credibility of being hosted/endorsed by a major sponsor like ING… and since I’d been on the lookout for a marathon to run sometime in the waning moments of my late twenties (so as to make the list of events I accomplished to mark the advent of my turning 30), it seemed that a March 25th, 2007 race date would work out for me quite well…
So, once I had decided in my head that I was a likely participant, I basically spent the next few months (which were the last few months of 2006) doing a whole lot of nothing… seriously… I mean nothing in the way of running or training or even keeping my body in basically healthy shape… I think it’s something about that Thanksgiving / Christmas / holiday time of year that makes me feel wholly justified in staying inside where it’s warm and keeping myself well fed on a diet of ice-cream and girl scout cookies… And even knowing that I absolutely had to start my training at the four-month-ahead-of-time point, I breezed through that date with the idea that I’d somehow still effectively train my body in three months instead of the well-established four months upon which the ‘running community’ has conclusively agreed is necessary…
So, about six weeks before the race, I decided I might want to consider giving up my casual smoking and ‘partying’ at large, in the slim hopes that I might actually finish this race in some approximately upright fashion. I also made one other crucial decision… Although I rarely look for a middle-ground scenario (as it’s so much more fun and more my typical style to ‘go big’), I opted to then sign up and pay my registration fee for the 13.1 mile half-marathon rather than the 26.2 full marathon… I felt like a bit of a loser for a few days after making the final decision, but since I still, at that point, hadn’t started the least bit of training, I really thought it was better than deciding that I had waited too long to begin my preparation and should instead find another race later in the year… And at this point, I had at least gotten myself back into the habit of hitting the gym and doing my weight training twice a week… and of course, I had always continued my one night a week valeting… but there wasn’t yet any actual running in an effort to train for this race…
And this pretty much brings us to about three weeks before the race, where I mixed in a couple of three mile runs on the treadmill each week, until… before I knew it, I was rolling up on the weekend of the race… So, with only having hit the treadmill a handful of times, and having spent the entire day before the race day on my feet at Six Flags and out until far too late, I awoke this particular Sunday morning at 5am on four hours of sleep to find that I had left the milk out on the counter overnight and instead of my customary Special K, was less than delighted to substitute the only thing arguably edible left to be found in my fridge… a couple of hot dogs! I hopped in my car and drove myself to Marta, only leaving my car for the race with a few dollars for Marta tokens and my car key, as well as what turned out to be my own extra-special-secret-weapon, my treasured iPod shuffle, all tucked in a pouch in the back of my shorts…
Though the Marta train that I got on broke down on the tracks and was stalled with an angry hoard of anxious runners, I arrived downtown at about 6:45am, right on time for the 7:00am start time… It was still dark downtown and as I exited the Marta station, I found tens of thousands of people in a myriad of porta-potty lines… really, really, long porta-potty lines… So, I got myself through one of these long lines, and as race-ready as I could be… and though I wasn’t able to push myself through the huge crowds and up to the start line until about 7:14am, before I knew it, though it was still dark outside, I was now running… and it felt really good… I had music in my ears, I was running down Peachtree Street right at Five Points where I had about ten years earlier lived in the Muses lofts, and all was well…
It’s hard to describe all of the feelings this experience had to offer for me, but the feeling of running in the collective energy of such a large crowd including all of the cheering, supportive onlookers, with my music and the sunrise combining in such a remarkable way to create a truly unique moment in my life, I just kept running… and without any expectations for myself or any running partners to keep up with and through a bit of knee pain at about mile three… I just got it into my head that it was all mental and that I this was going to be a special moment in my life… and that whatever happened was going to happen… if I had to stop, I was going to stop… And even though I hadn’t had a training run more than four miles or ever run any distance more than a 10-K (6.2 miles - the 1995 Peachtree Road Race), I just kept running… and once I realized that I might actually pull it off, I started to build up a bit of self-encouragement, and I picked up the pace…
I somehow ran the second half of the race faster than the first half and ended up crossing the finishing line with a time of two hours, two minutes, and thirty-seven seconds… VICTORY!!! Though my body all but seized up in the moments following my spirited leap across the finish line (see video below), and I could barely walk for the next few days, I not only got myself home, but somehow made it home and showered and changed in time to get myself into the pews for my normal 11am Sunday morning church spot… I figured thanks was due… and that was certainly the right time and place for it…
So… that’s it really… you can view my official time here… and as the ‘chip’ I was wearing on my shoe recorded, I ran the first 10-K (6.2 miles) of the 13.1 mile distance in exactly one hour (1:00:00) and finished the race in the aforementioned 2:02:37, and given that I was just hoping to finish at all, I was incredibly happy with the results…
…and now I’m looking forward to finding and running my first marathon sometime later this year or early next year… only this time, I’ll be sure to actually train first…
