901PT

I knew the drill. In my younger days, running 13.1 miles in 120 minutes was no challenge at all. I knew the times I had to keep mile after mile. I knew the cadence, the fueling schedule, and all the millions of small details whose knowledge had been bought with countless half marathon races run across more than a dozen years.

My older, heavier body, however, had something to say about my goal. All my joints had more than a half century of wear and tear on them. Muscles atrophy with age. Extra weight has found its way to my waistline. Knowledge is valuable but is not always enough by itself to overcome the physical realities that come with time. This race would literally be a battle between the body and the mind. The results were far from certain. After the race started, I forced myself into that familiar goal pace. At first, I felt like I was straining my limits. But after a few minutes I settled down and did my best to keep myself distracted from all the things my body was complaining about. Fortunately, I found that balance quickly and quieted those voices in the back of my head that wondered if I could maintain this pace for the duration.

At the half-way point, things were still uncertain. I was a minute or so behind the time I needed, so I would have to negative-split the race if I was to meet my goal. I would have to run the second half of the race faster than the first half, a rare event for me.

Here was where my experience would help me. I knew this course well and I knew it was an out-and-back course with a net uphill for the first half. What comes up must come down. The second half goes sharply down after mile eight, and I love running downhill.

I pushed myself at the start of that downward slope and never relented until things levelled out at mile ten. My efforts were rewarded and for the first time I had a little cushion on my goal. Now I had to face the last 5K and the theme there would be about holding onto those precious moments of hard-won time.

It wasn’t easy. Nausea swept over me. My legs wobbled uncertainly with every uphill and I was forced to pick things up on the downhills. I counted down the miles as my fatigue grew.

At last, I passed a greatly anticipated landmark, a hill-top church that marked the final homestretch of the race. The nausea that had bedeviled me for so long was finally gone, left me alone at last. There was an unstoppable desire to finish this thing, and that energy propelled me forward with an ever-increasing sense of urgency. The finish-line clock came into view and I sprinted toward it, spending whatever reserves I had left. Each second on the clock face slowly ticked away like some kind of sadistic slow-motion movie. My mind was focused on one thing, that first digit on the clock. To my utter surprise it still read “1” as I passed under the MRTC arch that marked the finish line.

I’d done it! Against all odds I pushed my body to just one more sub-two-hour finish.

Sometimes mind can still win out over matter. I went over to a fine-looking patch of dormant grass and laid myself out on the ground for a welldeserved rest. I was totally at peace with myself for the first time in a long time. I could lie down knowing I had accomplished something beyond what should have been possible. I wanted to savor that magic moment forever. I wanted to remember every small detail, the light breeze, the cheering spectators, the thud of other runners’ strides as they struck the asphalt. I relished the warm embrace of the fall sun as it sent its golden rays through the crystal blue sky onto my broadly smiling face.

Back to the Back

There is something about the power of numbers to most runners. They hold some kind of deeper meaning to us even when they are nothing but random coincidences. For example, my wife knew the power of wearing the number 40 as her road race series bib number during the MRTC’s 40th anniversary year. It placed an extra special responsibility on her to be a finisher of the series, even though that meant conquering a half marathon for which she was woefully undertrained.

She had had good intentions at the start. The RRS was supposed to motivate her to keep in shape and develop some kind of a training plan that would improve her fitness. But somehow there was always something that seemed to conspire against her good intentions.

Truth be told, some excuses were more legitimate than others. And there was always tomorrow – until one day there were no more tomorrows. The days that had once amply spread out before the half marathon evaporated away like snowballs on a warm summer’s day. Half marathon day arrived in what seemed like no time at all to her, and her training had added up to almost nothing.

Ready or not, she was now facing her day of reckoning. Despite the obvious hardship facing her, she was determined to run the 13.1 miles by any