This year I had to seriously confront why I run marathons.

 -a toothy grin courtesy Andrew Hetherington…

The first couple you run it’s new and it’s a challenge and you want to see if you can improve. So that’s good enough for numbers one and two. Three is where you know what you are getting in to and you realize that there is a limit to how fast you can run a marathon given the amount of time I wanted to commit to it and where I was physically at my age, the amount of capacity I had to stay healthy and train and not get injured.  And of course you do get injured every year, something starts getting creaky no matter how much you try to avoid it. Its not like I have been running for years, the body takes a long time to respond to training if you consider that against a lifetime of not training.

So going back to the basic question- why run this marathon, if I wasn’t getting any faster, and if I had nothing really to prove to myself, is it just about fun, is that enough? Aren’t there easier ways to have fun?

I knew I could do it, although the any given sunday rule applies, anything can happen while you are doing it. And I didn’t really know how my knee was going to fare. But you don’t go to the start line and think of 26.2 miles. You just think about getting warmed up, finding your comfortable pace, getting to whatever miles your friends are at, seeing whatever landmarks, halfway points, bridges, etc, you piece it out. You are just going from one place to the next.  And that’s how it gets done.

I really didn’t actually think about running a marathon and finishing until 400m from the end, when all efforts to stave off a cramp were failing, I think your body knows exactly what you are asking of it and at that point it is saying, ok, really now, this is enough. This is why in military training you’d do whatever stupid thing it was and they would let you think for a half a second, now we are done, and then they say, ok, now do it again…just so you understand that limits are all mental.

The last 6 miles I really pushed hard, doesn’t mean I was going any faster, but my splits were not tanking into the 9′s either. Mile 26 was actually my fifth fastest mile overall, (8:08!) so I was gaining ground, and I knew that slowing down would mean cramping so it was all about pushing harder not less.

And in that effort I found something strange, I kind of started to welcome the pain, it meant I was doing it right, that I was actuallygoing to finish the marathon…it was a surprise to me. As the legs got more and more leaden, I just pushed harder and harder and I think I realized that there is a whole other side beyond when you think you are done. I don’t want to get all mystical about it, as soon as I crossed the line I was incredibly happy to not be running but for those last 6 miles and especially the last 400 meters which for some crazy reason has to be uphill, the tightening of my right quadriceps into a vice-like cramp was not the real issue, even as it was happening it was not happening, it was over already, as long as I didn’t really focus on it. In reality, yes, it was real, probably another mile and it would have dropped me, but that’s not what had to happen, I just had to get to the top of the hill and that was alright by me.

So why run a marathon, the answer is so that you can experience pain in a different way. You want to lean into it. It means you are closer to succeeding than you think.

At least that is what I learned this year.

That and I’ve got a great bunch of friends and neighbours who supported me on and off the course- thank you all!