Pen versus pencil / Don’t slow down.
An endless chorus on an endless loop in an endless race. I’m having trouble focusing my thoughts now: they start at the chorus, then veer to my surroundings before checking in with my legs, and finally rounding back to the song at the same point where I started.
Glycogen depletion is nipping at the base of my brain. At this point, I am downing as much Gatorade as I can. Most of it just gets on my ratty homemade jersey, as if it couldn’t get any more soaked. At least the wetness is helping me manage the heat.
Man, what the hell am I doing here?
Despite the growing crowd, I am surrounding by a feeling of crushing loneliness. When rational thought fades late in a race, raw emotion takes over.
I trained by myself all winter for this day. I flew to Boston alone -- the first time I’ve ever flown to a race without a team. I slept solo in an overpriced hotel room with two beds, which just added insult to injury. I knew no one on the ominous bus ride out to Hopkinton, and I interacted with no one in the Athlete’s Village. 30,000 fellow runners in this damn event, and I have no one.
Hell, I don’t even have a real job. I scraped together just enough funds for the trip -- including a god damn $165 entry fee! -- by substitute teaching. I’m not even technically employed by the school district; I am just an individual contractor.
That guy in the gold singlet, still ten meters ahead of me? He’s paid to run. All he has to do is wake up, train, rest, train again, and rest some more. He can literally eat, sleep, and breathe running. I’m sure he has a team of coaches, physios, and managers helping him out. Not to mention all the other athletes that surely exist in his training group, pushing each other to be better every day.
Those two Kenyans running away with the race? They’re probably millionaires back home.
It hits me, crushingly, that none of the spectators are cheering for me. As the race has progressed, I have noticed more and more people out on the course, and with the exception of the Wellesely mile and Heartbreak hill, they have gotten louder and more excited each mile.
But they are not cheering for anyone in particular -- they are cheering for everyone. They are cheering for the spectacle, for the race itself. It doesn’t matter to these people who wins or how it plays out or what we are going through; all that matters is the event.
Then the realization hits: they’re not cheering for us, they’re cheering for the race. In the end, the marathon always wins. And they are on its side. Those sadistic motherfuckers.
What the fuck is the point of spectating if there is no one in particular you are rooting for? I usually race better with a crowd than without one, but now I just wish they would disappear and shut the hell up.
What I wouldn’t kill to have Amelia here in Boston.
As the course veers left through Cleveland Circle and onto Beacon Street, my right foot rolls over one of the cut-outs in a spider web of in-ground trolley tracks. My knee buckles and my opposite shoe scrape my calf, but I remain upright. I curse myself for losing focus on the race at hand.
My legs have been so locked in to this pace that it only takes one stride to recover, but something doesn’t feel quite the same.
My right foot is rubbed raw, heel and pinky toe both. Every time my foot strikes the ground, another little layer of flesh is torn off. Every time my foot recovers, lifting off the ground and following the pendulum of my knee, it aches just a little more. I can’t believe I continue to have blood to shed.
Tear, ache; tear, ache; repeat ad infinitum.
This is what my race has become: isolation in a sea of people; self-flagellation in a sport of health and fitness.
Don’t slow down. The chorus returns. I didn’t slow down, that was another mile in 5:00. Although, does it even matter anymore?
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Click here for the previous chapter: Mile 22
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