I ran the Pittsburgh Marathon this past Sunday.
In the movie Office Space, there’s an early scene in which
the main character, Peter, is in the office of a hypnotherapist. Peter explains to him: “So I'm sitting in my cubicle today and I
realized that ever since I started working, every single day of my life has
been worse than the day before it. So it means that every single day you see
me, that's on the worst day of my life.”
That’s sort of how I felt the last 8 miles or so of the marathon on
Sunday. Every single step hurt worse
than the step before it, so every step that I took was the most painful step I
had ever taken in my life. My hamstrings
started hurting, then my calves, then my feet.
Oww, my feet! It was like someone
was taking a sledgehammer to my feet with every step. My shins were the last to start hurting, but
when both your shins and your calves are hurting, there’s really no way you can
take a step that isn’t excruciating. So
this is how I spent the last hour and a half of the marathon: alternating walking and running, mouthing
obscenities most of the time, cursing the downhill trajectory of Liberty Avenue
as it goes from Bloomfield to the Strip District.
The first part of the race went pretty well. I kept right on my goal pace up to the 10K
mark—not letting adrenaline take over and push myself too hard or at the
beginning nor falling behind. I saw
members of my band Timbeleza playing around mile marker 8, and I was able to
smile and wave at them; I felt strong.
Trouble starts about mile 12 when you cross the Birmingham
Bridge from the Southside into Oakland.
It’s a long hill into Oakland, without much of a crowd, in the full
sun. I also started to get a really
painful side stitch at that point, something I had managed to avoid throughout
all of my training. I managed to make a
recovery around the halfway mark, with a time of 2:04—pretty good, I thought,
given that I had already conquered the largest hill in the course. Catharine came out to see me around Mile 15
when the course came fairly close to our house.
It was good to see her, and I was in reasonable shape at that
point. I knew I was going to make it to
the finish.
Passing through Homewood, I was happy to see that there were
spectators out on the street, people grilling and sitting out on lawnchairs,
along with a lot of kids giving high fives.
This is probably the least “nice” section of the course. It’s a poor, black neighborhood, with its
share of abandoned buildings and boarded-up houses. For my training, I ran through this part of
the course a lot, since it’s only a few miles from my house. It certainly boasts the best smell that I
encountered during my runs: there are a
few barbecue joints here that have smokers out on the street, and the smell is
incredible at about 10:30 a.m. on a cold Saturday morning.
From Homewood on, though, the wheels really fell off for
me. And I really like that metaphor,
because when the wheels fall off, it doesn’t mean that you can’t go
anymore. It just means that “going” is
no longer a smooth process; it now involves a lot of pushing and scraping and
friction. Which is basically how the
last 8 miles went.
But anyway, I managed a sort of Frankensteinian shuffle to
the finish. You reach a certain point
where it’s like, even if you quit, you still have to walk back to your car and
drive home before you can get some Advil, an ice pack, and crawl into bed. So you may as well head towards the finish
line and get your medal first. And so I
did.
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