Meditations on a Marathon

9:32 am, Monday April 15th

Boston, MA

I watch them on the start line on TV and they are the most beautiful bodies I have ever seen, lithe and muscled and raring and Woman. They are here to pound the pavement from Hopkinton to Back Bay with their fierce, fiery feet, their greatest, their only weapon against the thunder this morning’s sky has delivered. Truly, they are the storm, thundering east from Newton. They are here to race and they carry this weather on their backs.

The Elite Women begin, then the Elite Men, then the Waves upon rainy Waves of the Everyone Else. They flow as a river of runners, pouring from the source someone said was The Beginning, and flooding the miles that lie ahead of them.

They are gristmills, grinding—30,000 race stories unfolding in simultaneity, pressed and grated in this same inexorable mill. Someone is having the race of her life. Someone else, her worst. But they both keep going; it is all they can do.

I run out to Newbury and Hereford to watch them as they roll in. They are a trickle at first—we know who they are and we shout their names—and then they are a stream and then a flood—and we don’t know their names but we are cheering anyway. They are high-fiving and they are vomiting and they are crying and they are beaming. They are wearing Army Uniforms, tutus, a bib that reads 1979—the year she won this race four decades ago. They are flying and they are crawling and they are relentless. Some of them stop and I see in their eyes the flash of wanting to be still, to quit, and I know that feeling. We all know that feeling. So I cheer for them to keep going, because that is all I can do; forward motion must be their own decision. They pick up their feet and take another step and then another because that is all that makes sense. And I think I could be them. I am them. I see every incarnation of myself playing out in this race I have not yet run.

It is terrifying and exhilarating to watch a future that will soon be mine unfold before my eyes. I had thought that in the last few weeks, as I ramped up miles and felt my legs turn leaden, I had tasted the acrid burn of marathon pain, but I was wrong: here is the taste of marathon pain, pungent in this humid air. They are tasting in on their tongues, behind grins or grimaces, all of them who pass by me now.

Of course, I am witnessing only tiny pieces of these races. These runners flash in front of me, darting into and out of my field of vision before they make that last turn onto Boylston. I do not know the stories of the highs and lows they have been living for the past 25 miles. I do not know the stories they lived to get to the starting line. But I am beginning to understand that the marathon is much bigger than the miles that exist within it, than the handful of hours it takes to finish it.

For me, the gun has already sounded; I saw the smoke in the distance months ago. There are so many miles between me and June 22nd , but I’m already up to my neck in them. I’m already in the marathon—we all are, those of us wild enough to sign ourselves up for this foolhardy enterprise.

Perhaps it is strange for a race I have not yet run, in fact a distance I have not yet run (a fact I’m constantly reminded of when every Sunday is a new All-Time Long Run), to occupy so much of my mind. These 26.2 miles take up more than their share of space. And yet, they are already dear to me. They dictate my plans for 2019—and beyond. I wake up and I am breathing marathon. It’s the same air all those runners inhaled last Monday, filling their lungs with Boston and exhaling to propel themselves forward.

I hold that Marathon Monday in my heart, when I stood at the corner of Newbury and Hereford and the sun poured its light out in buckets and I felt proud of this city that every day feels more like my home. I felt grateful for the runners around me, the runners waiting for me in the morning at the Mass Ave Bridge or the Harvard Track, or, someday soon, the start line. They are lifting me from where I am standing. They are channeling grit in the face of doubt. They are running like hell. And I set off right after them.