Today is the first day for Boston Marathon 2019 registrations. To submit a time today though you’d need to have beaten the qualifying time by 20 minutes or more. That’s not me for sure.
According to the BAA’s registration date calculator, I could try and submit my time a week from today, assuming there are still bibs available.
I’ve got a BQ time from late 2017 that would count, as well as one from a bit earlier that requires a bit of documentation to verify its eligibility. I might even make the cushion buffer to get in with those times, albeit most likely by the hairs on my chinny, chin, chin.
And yet, my times now are so much slower than my 2017 PR. And even before today, I had already pretty much resigned myself to skipping the throwing of my proverbial hat into the ring… especially since if you read yesterday’s blog post, I really don’t do hats well.
To be honest, the marathon in Poland seemed to mirror the Kubler-Ross Model of the five stages of grief. I’m sure others more witty and insightful have made a similar comparison as there are heaps of “what it’s like to run a marathon” articles, testimonials, and advice columns floating around on the internet, not to mention experts in bookstores, juice shops, and at FitBit HQ. But even though I’m sure, as with nearly everything and quite possibly everything I’ve ever written, that this is just rehashing what has come before, well, <shrug>, I might as well put some thoughts down. My wandering tourist plans for the day have been sabotaged by my own failures to plan; clearly my “I’ll just wing it” attitude on this trip may not have been the best strategy after all.
But I digress.
The five stages of grief are:
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
There’s also a seven stage variation but I’m sticking to five for now as I’m more familiar with it. Still, caveat emptor — various critiques have pointed out regarding whichever rubric one uses that grief isn’t processed via an easily delineated roadmap. To be fair, neither really is any facet of life – it’s all pretty messy and unique and while there are commonalities and shared traits and elements of similarities, there’s also a fair bit of irrational, subjective, individualistic, and truly human variables.
Again, I digress.
So yesterday’s 42.195KM run through the streets of Wroclaw began with me in full denial. I was sure the pain I had endured in my left leg and hip would be fine – I was walking okay. I mean, sure, I had done a couple of training runs here and there to see how recovery was going and my body’s consensus had been almost universally, “Uh… no. This still hurts. A lot.” But I ignored it and kept going as, well, I had paid to run this thing… and I was here… and what else was I going to do? It’s not like I could book a tour.
Which leads to anger – I was mad at myself for slowing up, for feeling the pain, for falling behind, and for even being out there on the course. I yelled at myself, trying to rally, trying to get my head to focus on something other than the pain. And it went… well, poorly.
Hence, the need for bargaining. I tried to convince myself to just get through to the halfway point… or to the next kilometer marker, or, hell, just to that street sign up ahead. The one all in Polish. No, not that one… it’s too far away… how about this street sign? The one right… here. Yeah, let’s walk a bit here. I’ve earned it, right? The struggle is real and I…
And that’s when the depression hit. The pain was throbbing and chronic and in the same spot as it had been for weeks now. I pretty much had resigned myself to the idea that I was not going to sign up for any more races in 2019, that I’d run what I’d already booked which was about through the 1st quarter of ’19, and then I’d back off, try and recover, try and regroup. But I found myself worrying about my mental state without the running, and realizing that I’m struggling with weight issues now and that’s with all this running. I also found myself reflecting on the past few days, weeks, months, maybe even years and recalling the wallowing self-pity inherent in even the motivated times of my life. And I realized I sounded like an angst ridden teenage girl on an Afterschool Special dealing with eating disorders, identity crises, and bruising self-esteem issues. And that only made me more depressed as the kilometers slowly… and I do mean slowly… ticked by.
I had pretty much accepted that it was time to look not toward doing more down the road but instead to embrace doing less, to acknowledge the diminishing capabilities and recoveries, to understand that distance and time were per mathematical truisms impacting my speed… and that as the years and mileage took their toll, I’d be slowing down ever more in the future.
As I slowly came through the closing kilometers of Wroclaw, my paper red cone dwarf hat disintegrated on my head as I sweated out hopes for a 3:15, 3:30, or 3:45 time. I was in a lot of pain, nauseous from lack of food on the course and possibly from as I said in the photo gallery yesterday, my own body feeding off itself to get through to the end. I reeked of rot, the last time I smelled that on me was in Madagascar when another runner lectured me on the course about how he sniffed my dehydration and mentally psyched me out because he wanted to pass me… or maybe he was legitimately concerned… albeit as I recall from the awards ceremony later that night he was one of those runners I hope to never see again. The smell and the fear and the sense of failure got to me…
…at best I was doing a very slow jog as I stumbled across the finish line. I walked my way out of the stadium to grab some chalk water and food… and I realized that even though I had jostled my leg quite badly and stupidly and selfishly and arrogantly for the past 3 hours and 49 minutes, even though I had been in denial and anger over it for hours on end… and even though I had bargained my way into further depression, I realized I had come to the wrong acceptance. Yes, yes. I’d cut back on races next year for any number of reasons. But as I walked and felt the pain subside with each passing step, I realized that though the running gait and stride might not be ideal for recovery, I wasn’t crippled when I reverted to walking. A wiser person than I would say if it hurts “when I do this,” that I should just stop doing that. But considering that even though it hurts when I run, I’m not that much worse off when I walk it off after the fact than I was before I started. Maybe then it’s not that I should “stop doing that” and instead should “be smarter about doing that.”
I’m still planning on curtailing the races in 2019; I think I should see about building in some more recovery time to try and fix this physical and mental deterioration. Boston is therefore definitely out.
However, I may still go in search of something new and different and strange and unique.
Because life is messy.
And I’m about as messy as they get. It may be time, now more than ever, to accept that.