I took an extra day away from the computer and from school yesterday. It was actually nice to not blog for a bit. But classes have resumed, and I am back in my office on this early Tuesday morning, bleary-eyed but ready for the day. I’ve got a lecture on the history of women’s fashion magazines at 8:50; the fall of the Roman Republic at 10:25, and the conservative reaction after Napoleon’s defeat at 1:00PM.
Yesterday was the Boston Marathon. I wasn’t there, of course. I’ve never run it, though Lord knows, I’ve tried to get there. It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve been able to follow the goings-on on Patriot’s Day Monday without some considerable heartache.
In 1998-99, I tried three times to qualify for Boston. As most folks know, Boston is not open to anyone. To enter the race, you have to run a "qualifying time" at another marathon no more than eighteen months prior to the particular Boston in which you wish to compete. The qualifying times are graded by age and sex, and for men under 35 (which I was in the late ’90s), the qualifying time was 3:10.
I came closest at the 1999 Pittsburgh Marathon. I trained for this race for five months. I made the decision to hire an "online coach", and worked with Art Liberman, a fellow based about of South Carolina (who had once coached my cousin’s cross-country team at the College of Charleston). For over a year, Art and I talked twice weekly on the phone. He gave me workouts, and I did them. Dutifully. I wholeheartedly recommend Art’s coaching — it was magnificently helpful, and worth every penny.
In the past, my "longest long runs" in training had been 20 miles; for Pittsburgh, I took myself up to 23 miles twice. (A tactic that I can recommend, by the way.) I also did an enormous amount of speedwork, something that Art insisted upon. Every Wednesday morning for five months I went to the track at Cal Tech, and by myself, ran the assigned workouts. (My least favorite, by far, were the 800 meter repeats. My crowning achievement was when I did 10 of them, all under 3 minutes each.) It was brutally tiring, but exhilarating. I was still new to running, and enchanted by the way that the hard training was transforming my body.
On May 2,1999, I fell two minutes, fifty-two seconds short at Pittsburgh. I ran a 3:13:51 on an unseasonably warm day. For the first eighteen miles of the race, I had felt confident that I could break 3:10. But by mile 18, I was struggling so much that I realized that to maintain my current pace would have increased the chance of collapse. I remember that it occurred to me that Boston wasn’t worth my health, and I slowed. I set a "backup goal" of breaking 3:15, and cruised on in in the final miles, even briefly stopping to walk.
It was only after the race was over, when I had returned to my hotel room, that the reality of "falling short" hit me. I was very hard on myself. Had I given up too easily? Don’t great athletes push themselves over the brink in order to achieve their goals? Had I lacked the requisite mental toughness to get the job done? I called Art. I called my family and friends. I took myself out for a cheese steak (I’ve never had one in Philly, but I can report the ones in Pittsburgh are mighty fine), and I came to the conclusion that 3:13 was going to be perfectly okay. Hugo did not have to qualify for Boston in order to prove anything, I decided.
I tried again to qualify for Boston that autumn. I ran the ‘99 Silicon Valley Marathon, and this time, went out too fast. I tried to run a 3:05, and after posting a 1:32 opening half, hit the wall at mile twenty and had to stagger home in a time of 3:29. I couldn’t even use the excuse of the heat, as I had at Pittsburgh, to explain my poor performance. I remember crying as I drove away from the race, unable to comprehend that I had fallen short of my goal twice in one year.
I had a number of friends who ran the 2000 Boston Marathon, the one I was "supposed" to be at. I followed their progress on the internet, and tried not to be immensely envious that they were there. A few months before that race, a buddy who works for a Boston-affiliated charity told me he could get me an "exempted entry" into the marathon. (Charities use these to give to donors, an exempted entry means you don’t have to meet the qualifying time.) I turned him down politely. If I was going to ever run Boston, I would run it as a qualified athlete — or not at all.
I’m almost 38, and my qualifying time has dropped to 3:15. I am fairly certain that I could run a 3:15 if I were willing to train as I did years ago. But frankly, I’m not. I saw what I was like when I was a single-minded running devotee, and it wasn’t an appealing picture. At a chaotic time in my life, 65-mile weeks and loads of speedwork gave me structure. Today, by God’s grace, I’ve got too many other things to do to give that kind of time to running. When I run in San Diego on June 4, I’ll settle for anything under four hours. I’m just not interested in pushing myself to the limit to find out how fast I can run.
I’ve realized that trying to qualify for Boston was, at least to some extent, about trying to prove my manhood all over again. As someone who wasn’t athletic as a kid, I’ll be the first to confess that I had felt deeply insecure about my own physical abilities for years. I now understand that one of the reasons I wanted Boston was because qualifying for that race would have been a way of repudiating the ghosts of my youth, the ones that told me that I was fat, slow and clumsy. I wanted to be able to hold up Boston as evidence that I was not who I had feared that I was for so many years. It would be tangible proof that I had achieved something elusive and difficult. In that sense, it was perhaps a blessing that I never qualified, as it forced me to accept the futility of using these endurance events to make a statement to the world about my own masculinity.
But I’d be lying if I said that yesterday, as I followed the Boston Marathon on the internet and radio, I wasn’t still just a wee bit wistful.
Interesting–that’s part of the reason I run. You can prove to yourself that you’re tough, thereby wiping out a childhood of unathletic humiliation. It’s not the only reason, but it’s a big part of it.
I was only a 3:43-3:49 marathoner on my two tries–I’d be happy getting back to that fitness level and am currently trying, though nowadays part of the motivation is to see if age has slowed me down, or just lesser amounts of training. And yeah, life can change how much time you can put into this.
All that aside, though, the biggest thrill in running is just doing it outside on a nice spring/summer/fall day. (Winter running is a chore, outside or on the treadmill.)
It’s at this point, Donald, that I mercilessly point out that here in Los Angeles, we can run in winter too…;-)
Yeah, but what are you breathing in when you run in LA? My family moved from West Covina when I was a child partly to get my asthmatic lungs away from that thick crunchy thing they called an atmosphere out there. Hopefully things have gotten better since then.
Me too. Sigh. Came closest with a 3:18, but it is probably not in the cards for a while, if ever. With a baby on the way, I can’t devote so many hours to training.
In the winter, when it is 25-32 degrees and gently snowing it is an absolute pleasure to go for a run. When it is -10 and I go for run I know I’m tough ;) If it is freezing rain or sleet I keep my ass inside and do yoga and hope it is nicer tomorrow.
I’ve never trained for any race, or contemplated it (I enjoy running–seven or eight miles is nice, and then I get tired and my legs hurt, so I stop), but I’ve always been mystified by the dominant training logic, which is maxing out your “long runs” well short of the length of the race they’re running. That would freak me out–I’d want to prove to myself–probably more than once, relatively close to the race–that I really could make it that length. I know this goes against all training logic, though. Have any of you serious runners ever done this? Does it really have deleterious effects on your performance in the big race?
DJW, after running more than 20 miles, the damage to your muscles tissues can be pretty bad. There are degrees of course, some folks are just fine & the better trained you are, the quicker the recovery. Generally, you do so much more damage in that last 6 miles that it can take a week or more to recover. What happens to the over-trained is they never recover properly from the 26 mile training run, thus hampering their potential on race day. They may still fininsh, but could have done better. At roughly 18-22 miles, you can recover with just 2-3 days of light running. Also, generally you do your long runs at a slower pace than the race. Add in stopping to drink and snack and that 20 mile training run should take about as long as the race itself. So you build confidence by saying: “I just ran for 4 hours. I can do this”
Doesn’t always work out that way. I bonked a marathon in rural Maryland even though I was well, but not over, trained. If this was a city marathon, I’d have dropped out and taken a cab, but the only way back to my car was walk or run. I just didn’t think a 10 hour drive the day before would affect me as much as it did. I had a personal worst that day, coming in 30 minutes later than any other race. Since I let myself have a crappy race and basically stopped trying, the recovery was actually quite easy that time.
I’ve never trained for a race, and I’ve never run more than six miles at one time. But I’m hard on myself, and sometimes I come up with absurd goals. Like this summer, when I ran with my daughter and her boyfriend, and actually thought I was going to beat them.(Is this insane or what?) I came in five minutes behind them and I was really upset.__ You must be a perfectionist also Hugo, you are really hard on yourself.__ I read your article on the Pittsburgh Marathon, you should be very proud of your accomplishments as an athlete. They are actually amazing, especially since you weren’t an athlete in your youth.__ I think we all reach a point that we realize that we are happy with who we are, and we have nothing left to prove to ourselves anymore. Sounds like you have reached it.
Thanks Ron.
(Mental note: never, ever run a marathon…)
Ron, your advice is spot on. I don’t do pavement runs past 18 miles these days (except in a race itself). Anything really long is on soft dirt. No question, it’s the last few miles of the long runs that tear you up.
This post really resonates for me. When I was running marathons, I never got as close to qualifying as you did, but I made some respectable attempts. I haven’t run one since my sons were born, but I’ve been thinking that I want to give it one more try. But it feels terribly self-indulgent to take the time that a decent attempt would take.