Running Shorts

Slightly panicked by the abrupt shift in race dynamics, I hardly notice the 13th mile marker and then the 13.1 marker for halfway passing in quick succession. No time to think that we’re only halfway and I have to do all of this again. Or that 1:06:30 is the second fastest half marathon I’ve ever done, behind the 1:04:18 I ran last summer to qualify for the Olympic Trials. Or that, you know, my only other half marathons were part of that disastrous Trials race. One of those half splits was… Stay out of your head, man . No time to think in this situation; you can only react. At this point, a quarter of the way into the fourteenth mile, I can’t see the leader anymore. I can vaguely make out the media van and pace cars ahead on the road, but no longer can I make out the numbers on the race clock. For the first half of the race, seeing each second tick by made it hard to keep cool. Thinking about the more-than-two hours left of racing is daunting when you see the numbers cl...

The gap doesn’t close, though. As the cacophony of the Wellesley girls fades, I notice another creeping silence: the other competitors aren’t making as much noise. Not because they’re backing off the pace -- they’re not -- but because there’s just the slightest separation between myself and that lead pack of a dozen runners. When you’re in a race -- I mean really in it , jostling for position in the pack -- it can be surprisingly noisy. You might not hear many (or any) spectators, but you’ll definitely hear your competitors. That guy off your shoulder has a very heavy, slappy stride. Every time his foot hits the ground, his shoes make a little slap. The guy in front of you? Pay attention to his breathing. How labored is it? You can use these sounds as feedback to judge your competitors. If you can’t hear them breathing, you know they’re relaxed and not really pushing it. The louder their breaths, the harder they’re working. And if you start to see their head tilt or their sho...

The twelfth mile starts innocently enough. The road, a two-lane highway bordered by woods, is quiet. All I can hear are staccato strides and short breaths. No one in the field really seems like they are truly exerting themselves yet. Myself excluded. As we crest a small rise, I can sense spectators again. Actually, I hear them before I see them. We’re entering the famous Wellesley scream tunnel. All of a sudden what used to be a pack of runners is now a line. Kelley and his companion extend their lead and, in doing so, string out the field. He’s a good enough runner -- and well-known enough -- that no one else will let him build up a lead gap. At least not this late into the race. Now we’re racing, and here I am left at the back just managing to hang on. This is a noticeable change of pace on a not-yet-noticeable decline. The Wellesley mile is so famous that I had been told about it by people who had never run Boston before. *** “A girl from my high sch...

In my first marathon, I didn’t have 16 more in. This mile, the 11th, was my last good one. My first marathon was at the U.S. Olympic Trials in New York. It was my first season out of collegiate competition and a perfect autumn day in New York City: a crisp, cool morning; slowly warming as the day progressed, no breeze whatsoever. A few of the professional runners started with a light long sleeve and shed it for their singlet midway through the race. I just had gloves and arm sleeves. To qualify for the Olympic Trials, you have to run faster than the time standard set by USA Track & Field, the national governing body for all things running in the U.S. The time standard was either at the marathon distance or the half marathon -- in a sense, I sort of lucked into the qualifying via the half. I initially hadn’t planned on qualifying; I was just starting to explore the post-collegiate road racing scene and didn’t really know what I was doing. I hopped into a race in the late s...