Peak Experiences (part 2)

(This is part two of this blog post.)

As I’ve previously written about, among the many hats that I wear is a hat labeled ‘long distance runner.’ I ran cross country and track in high school for four years, and I ran the Twin Cities Marathon in 2019 — then again in 2021 because I liked it so much. Autumn, to me, means running, and when I came to Oberlin, I couldn’t countenance the possibility of fall coming without weekly doses of the verve that comes with cross country meets. So last year, I decided to sign up to run the Toledo Marathon with a couple of friends from Oberlin.

Training for the marathon went a long way towards reminding me what I missed of high school cross country. (I’ve written more about training for the Toledo Marathon here.) But, as idyllic as early morning runs in Oberlin are — seriously, I highly recommend going on at least a walk or two around sunrise if or when you do find yourself in Oberlin — I definitely did not train enough. I’m a busy person by nature. I like to get involved in things.

In fact, I probably get involved in too many things. When marathon weekend finally came, I realized that I also had several other pretty major things happening in my life in the same week — most notably an event with the Oberlin Musical Theater Association that would end at 11:30 pm the night before the marathon. Toledo is an hour and a half from Oberlin. So I would need to get up at 4 am on race day.

My busy schedule had caught up to me. Could I run a marathon, with a critical lack of training, on four hours of sleep? I realized I was going to find out.

I remember that it was lightly raining when I woke up to my alarm at 3:55 am on race day. In my haste to get to bed after the musical theater event I had gone to, I had forgotten to close my window, and my windowsill — as well as my bed and the floor of my room — were soaked. Nevertheless, I had to get going. I packed up a few energy gels to eat during the race, my phone, car keys, and rain jacket, as well as a few muffins from the campus dining hall.

That last addition to my race day inventory may have been a mistake — I was nervous about the race, and forcing a breakfast pastry down definitely didn’t help. But as my body slowly adapted to being awake, I found my anxiety disappearing. The thought crept into my mind that either I’d finish or I wouldn’t — and that, really, all I’d have to do to finish would be to keep putting one foot in front of the other, which didn’t seem so hard. I met up with my friends, and we drove the hour and a half to Toledo.

The drive was peaceful — the kind of peaceful that only late nights and early mornings can do justice. When we got to Toledo, we walked the half mile to the start line and went through our pre-race rituals — stretches, short sprints to loosen up, using the bathroom, gulping down water. Fifteen minutes before the race started, I remembered that I had forgotten half of my energy gel in my car, but my fanny pack felt heavy anyway, so I forwent the extra gel.

Slowly, the rainy night turned into a muggy, overcast Midwestern morning, the type which epitomizes so many mornings in Oberlin. The sun was up by the time the race started, and although it was very cool out, I took my sweet time at the first water station we passed. I ran with my friends for the first three miles or so. I knew I was going to be happy if I even finished, but I knew that if I was going to beat my previous marathon PR, I needed to run nine-and-a-half minute miles at least.

So after three miles, I checked my phone… and my average mile pace read 7:35. I looked over at my friends, and they showed no signs of slowing down.

I decided I needed to make a judgment call. “I’m going to take this a bit slower,” I said. “I’ll see you at the finish… if I don’t pass you up first.” My friends smirked, but waved as I dropped back into the field of runners behind us.

The first few miles of the course took us on a tour of southern Toledo, and by mile six we were running in the western suburbs. I remember this part of the run fondly. It wasn’t raining or humid, it wasn’t too hot, and all of Toledo had taken to the streets to cheer on us runners, or to hand out lemonade or water or Gatorade, or to hold signs with snarky messages on them.

A brief side note: formulating a snarky message to put on your sign to cheer on a long distance running event is best approached as an art form. The best of the bunch range from the popular, evergreen options (“PUSH HERE FOR POWER,” accompanied by a large red button or some other highly visible target), to the snarky but encouraging (“FINISH FASTER — I’M TIRED OF HOLDING THIS SIGN”), to the personalized (“GO [PERSON’S NAME]! YOU’RE MY HERO!”), to the cruel (“ALMOST THERE!”… held by a person in the crowd at mile six). The energy in this section of the course reminded me of the streets of my hometown of Minneapolis on marathon day. I think I sped up by almost forty seconds per mile here.

Eventually the course ran out of tangled suburban streets and shifted onto a park road. Around mile nine, we briefly ran on a grassy trail that reminded me of my high school cross country days. Something else that reminded me of my high school cross country days was how at mile eleven, the course split in two, creating a large loop with two different exits, which ended up confusing a lot of people. There was a sign that said the second loop began at mile twenty-one — I remember hoping that I could think straight enough that late in the race to take the correct turn.

Mile eleven is also where I first registered being actually tired. Throughout my training, I had carefully monitored how many miles it took for me to start feeling tired, a number which fluctuated around seven or eight miles for a while before moving up to around ten. That meant on race day, I was expecting to feel tired, so it didn’t come as a shock to feel fatigue come. Overall, I remember feeling pretty good for about the first half of the marathon. But a quick look at the sky around mile twelve told me that the race was about to get harder.

I had eaten most of my energy gel by mile thirteen. By the half-marathon point, we were running on a bike trail that connected the park we had been in to the larger suburbs of Toledo. My phone buzzed at the halfway point, showing me that I had just run my third fastest half marathon it had recorded. And then I felt a raindrop.

What followed was a short but intense rainstorm. By the time I made it off the bike trail and onto a nearby road at mile fifteen, the storm had passed, but I was soaking wet. Soon, the course funneled us onto the shoulder of a four-lane suburban highway, half of which was still open to traffic. I had scouted out the course beforehand, and was prepared for this sudden change of scenery, but my energy levels still took a nosedive.

At a water stop, I ate my last few pieces of energy gel and put on a brave face. I knew that I had eleven miles left to go, and that each one was passing slower and slower. There’s a rule of thumb in marathon training: if you can run three quarters of a distance in training, you can run the full thing on race day. Three quarters of a marathon is eighteen miles. As I retied my shoes and left the water stop, I decided to focus on making it to mile eighteen.

Until then, my work was cut out for me. I just had to put one foot in front of another, running as much as possible and walking through the water stations. I remembered what mile fifteen from my last marathon felt like: I had injured my leg three weeks out from the race, and a doctor told me that though I could still run, it would hurt. Around mile fifteen it did indeed start hurting, and I considered dropping out, but decided to keep running at least to the end of the city park that the marathon cut through, so that it would be easier for my family to pick me up. By the time I made it to a good pick-up spot, though, my leg felt better, and I decided to keep running, ultimately finishing the race.

And I was knew I was going to finish the Toledo Marathon as well, by using the same strategy: breaking the remaining distance down into little pieces and focusing only on finishing one at a time. First I needed to get to mile eighteen, which was coming up slowly but surely. After that, at mile twenty-one the course would reenter the park road from before, and after mile twenty-four the course became a straight shot to the finish line.

Mile eighteen did come, and I caught something of a second wind. I started singing to myself. I must have looked crazy to all the spectators, but singing helped me keep my stride in a consistent tempo. I will acknowledge that the particular songs I chose to sing may have been unusual choices, however. The first song that came to mind, for some reason, was I was glad when they said unto me by Hubert Parry, a song I sang in Oberlin’s Musical Union in my first year. The choruses from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony — which I also sang with Musical Union — and Mahler’s Second Symphony were also on my mind.

Eventually, I made it to mile twenty-one. I had the presence of mind to take the correct turns to keep myself headed towards the finish line, and I was in relatively good spirits, even though the rain had returned. I ended up taking my glasses off somewhere around mile twenty-three because they kept fogging up. The rain never did let up, but I started to feel more and more excited. It was becoming increasingly obvious that I was going to finish the marathon.

The end of the Toledo Marathon is a sprint down a football field. ‘Sprint’ might not be the right word, I suppose — what I ended up settling for felt like a kind of waddle instead. But I finished the race, ten minutes faster than my second marathon.

My friends — who had finished about half an hour faster than me — brought me over to a covered area where some race volunteers were handing out snacks. I remember a sensation of pure relief flooding through my body as soon as I sat down. We made our way back to the car very, very slowly, and then drove off to celebrate finishing the race with some Italian food.

I’m glad I did end up running the marathon. I do wish I trained more for it, but I never really felt worried that I wasn’t going to finish. It’s very rewarding to see something you’ve worked on a while finally come to fruition, and seeing this happen is why I love long distance running. I think it can be easy to lose sight of that, especially when you find yourself busy all the time.

Speaking of busy all the time: after we enjoyed our pasta, we had to drive back to Oberlin right away. Of course we were tired, but I still had things to do. Specifically, I had an a cappella rehearsal.