As I attempt the second draft of packing for Antarctica, it seemed like a great time to post a flashback race memory courtesy of my running quilt. So here’s a rundown on cell block E4 – The Austin Marathon, February 19, 2012.
This marathon was another Hanna Brothers marathon. Steve and I were going to meet up in Austin, TX, a town I had long been meaning to visit. It would turn out to be a love/hate scenario. For a town that strives to “keep Austin weird” via T-Shirts and actions, I can honestly say it proved to be a very, very weird stay.
My brother, who is the smartest guy I’ve ever met, wrote a “daily paragraph” about the marathon proper. He captures everything of import that happened that fateful trip. I’ve chosen therefore to cut and paste it here. I hope he’s okay with my sharing it. It’s true. All of it. The Dark Side. The Jedi. Brock. The food poisoning. They’re real.
Enjoy!
***Steve’s Daily Paragraph — Copied from a 2/20/2012 email. I’ve reformatted it for web-viewing and added in some photos for your web viewing pleasure.***
4:30, I believe, is when they told us to arrive for the 7:00 start time, by which they really mean 5:30, which is to say nobody really rolls in until at least 6. You’d think Kevin and I would be old hands at this by now, or at least you’d think Kevin would be, but still we arrived a little before 5:45, pulling into a nearly-deserted parking garage in the pitch-black and the cold, Kevin looking green around the gills and me trying my best to put a bright face on things.
I had slept far more than he had, having sacked out around seven the night before and thus gotten a few good hours’ sleep in before the guys next door started their party. I hadn’t been able to stomach much of the pasta dinner we tried to eat before that, however, and though he didn’t tell me about it until somewhere around mile fourteen, Kevin had puked up everything he’d put down just before we walked out the door.
We sat in the front seat of the car, both of us checking our email on our phones despairingly, looking for some excuse to wait just a few more minutes before going out into the cold. I imagine he was sending a note to Meg. I had no one to write to. Both of us, I think, wondered if maybe something awful was going to happen today.
By five after six I was standing in a mostly-empty street in front of a long row of porta-potties, waiting for Kevin who was, I imagine, retchingly yielding what was left of the fortification that was supposed to get him through this race into the unspeakable and noisome hole in its center. I felt my belly rumble hollowly, and looked up at the black night sky with its tiny sliver of crimson moon low over the eastern horizon, and scanned around, clocking the meager handful of runners shivering nearby. It was a very lonely feeling, and I found myself full of bad thoughts – I hated marathoning, and I hated Texas, and I hated myself, but maybe that first feeling is one every marathoner feels on marathon morning, and maybe the last one was just hunger redirected. We took a sad photograph in front of the lit-up capitol building, the Goddess of Liberty statue on top holding up a star of hope that neither of us felt, me clutching my shoulders in what I hoped would one day seem like a campy burlesque of the frigid truth of the situation.
At some point we noticed that a few people had taken shelter inside an unlocked enclosed area containing elevators down into the office buildings in the capitol’s bowels, and we made our way inside the brightly-lit, orange-stone lobby and sat forlornly on its floor for a while. Packed in so tightly that eventually I had to accept there was simply nowhere else to put my eyes except directly upon the shapely derriere of the woman stretching her calves in front of me, I went through the motions of preparing for the run, touching my toes and flexing my feet, and I think I tried to say a few things to Kevin, but he was silent, and for the most part I was silent too.
Before too long, we were all kicked out by a cop. He was very polite, but still he did nothing for the Texas-hating feeling that had gripped me. There was nothing more to do but to go and stand stupidly in our corral. I joked with Kevin that he should enjoy the novelty, since he probably hadn’t been back in the 4:45 starting area in a long time, but he didn’t see much humor in that, and frankly neither did I. I actually felt a bit of a fraud in that corral myself, when I knew I’d be lucky to hit that finishing time and probably should be a ways further back, but it seemed like a decent average between where I should be and where Kevin should.
By this point Kevin, looking quite bad, was doing nothing but staring at the ground. He wasn’t saying a word, and I was getting worried. I know it probably makes very little sense, given that I was in the middle of a crowd of almost twenty thousand people, but I felt extremely alone. The sky was brightening in the east, painfully slowly, and I remarked upon it, trying to convince myself that soon it would be warm and things would be better, but it was so quiet there that what I was saying didn’t seem true. The PA system wasn’t working properly, so we couldn’t hear the announcer trying to psych us up a million miles away, and it felt strongly like the sun’s efforts to come out were going to be just as unsuccessful.
In time the Star-Spangled Banner sputtered up over the loudspeakers, fitfully, and we all placed our hands limp over our hearts before beginning a shuffling walk, like sheep pushed into a cote, toward the official starting line, but none of this managed to happen before a depressingly cheery fellow nearby decided he wanted to be friends with us. His name was Brock, and he was of that burly linebacker-ish build of runner, not gaunt but rather squat, with the kind of pasted-on, tense smile that seems like an intentional mask for a natural meanness. Brock had run this marathon before, he crowed, back when it had a different course, and he spoke of the way the run used to be and the way it was now, and how the hard stretches were miles three through six and miles thirteen through sixteen. “I’m only doing the half today,” he explained, almost apologetic. “I’ve done a ton of halfs. I used to run a lot of marathons, but nowadays my knees won’t let me do more than one or two a year.” He laughed at this unfunny thing, way too hard, and I laughed too, also too hard. He asked if this was our first race, and I said I’d run five, while Kevin, the words sounding hoarse, like they hurt to get out, croaked that he’d run a few. I almost corrected him to say, proudly, that he’d actually run seventy-one, but I let him have his modesty.
Still, when Brock boasted that he’d run Pike’s Peak, I couldn’t help myself – in an effort to bring Kevin into a conversation he clearly didn’t want to be in any more than I did, I chirped, “Hey, Kevin’s run that one, right? Haven’t you?” Kevin managed to concede he’d run Leadville, which is, I gather, pretty much the only race more hardcore than Pike’s Peak, and it seemed to shut Brock up for a second. But only for a second – before long he was babbling about an ultramarathon he’d run once. “That was a tough one – a hundred miles, in thirty hours,” Brock said, one-upping Kevin, I guess, though a frowning, serious Kevin appeared rightly un-one-upped. “It was five twenty-mile loops,” Brock went on, unprompted, “and I remember taking a break just before the last one, at mile eighty, and the guy sitting next to me had just finished, and he passed right out, right next to me. His eyes rolled back into his head and everything. I started to get away, wanting to get back out there and not get caught up in it, but I heard the EMTs behind me reviving him, and asking if he knew where he was. And you know what he said? ‘I’m at that running thing…’” Brock cackled at this, pleased perhaps with his gasped-out impression of a nearly-dead ultramarathoner. I started repeating, dumbly, “A hundred miles… Gee whiz, a hundred miles… That’s crazy…”
I guess I thought this token show of being impressed might be enough.
It wasn’t.
“I once ran thirty-eight marathons in a row,” Brock rolled on, apparently feeling it was necessary, now that he had one-upped Kevin in his mind, to one-up himself as well. “They weren’t official marathons, of course, but I started here in Austin and I ran all the way to Pike’s Peak, a marathon a day for thirty-eight days. I’d just gone through a divorce, y’see, and I had a lot of anger…” This also merited a harsh laugh, which sounded like it was coming through gritted teeth even though Brock wore a forced smile as he did it. “Thirty-eight marathons,” I said several times. Apparently all I was capable of doing, in the cold and in the dark and in the hopeless certainty that terrible, terrible things lay ahead and I had to keep them at bay with fake upbeatness, was repeat numbers mechanically. “Thirty-eight. Wow.” Kevin said not a word.
We did make it through the marathon in the end, me keeping up the good spirits through the first half and Kevin rallying to provide motivation to get us through the next ten, when I collapsed into the wall and felt rather desperately like I couldn’t go on. The last three were a complete and wearing grind for both of us, and Kevin kept muttering, “I’m so sorry, Steve,” even though he didn’t need to be, as the course spat us out of an endless stretch of suburban homes with families sitting smilingly on their lawns sipping beer and blandly cheering on the runners and caressing the bright coats of their dogs, and into a lengthy and strangely deserted patch outside Longhorn Stadium and through the hilly and underpopulated streets around the capitol building.
I recall trying to motivate Kevin into a final burst of running near the very end – we had a single mile to go, and I pointed out that, “We’ll be done this thing in fifteen minutes even if we walk. Why don’t we speed it up just a little so we’re done in twelve instead?” It seemed like very sensible reasoning. We did find a final reserve of oomph after that, and I think I sprinted across the finish line at last out of a simple and pure and undiluted desperation to have this grueling race behind me. I leaned, broken, against the rail just past the line, half-expecting to be hassled away by another somber-faced and grimly-polite Texas cop, but no one bothered me, and I let myself cry just a little bit until I saw Kevin coming up behind – I’d parted from him at the very end, and he crossed twelve seconds after I did, both of us finishing in 5:06 and change. Honestly, finishing at all felt like something of a miracle. That Kevin, ill as he was, completed the thing is absolutely incredible, though to speak truthfully I feel like maybe I should have made him stop much earlier, given his condition. We walked on, and we were medaled, and we took bananas and sipped some water, and once we were back at our hotel we had a shower and a nap and then went for a sandwich back at the Central Market where I saw Guy Forsyth the other night – underslept and exhausted and having no food in my belly, sore and worn-out and not thinking straight, I literally couldn’t think of anywhere else in the entire town that served food, particularly since I’d irrationally grown to suspect all Austin restaurants, unilaterally, of poisoning the two of us.
As we sat, two emptied plates between us, me uneasily digesting my club sandwich and fries while Kevin’s foul-tempered belly gnashed over his mushroom burger with cheese, we found ourselves talking about the history of marathons. We were just blathering, for the most part, as we were both quite sick and our brains weren’t working properly. More than anything, we were congratulating each other ad infinitum on simply getting through, our repeated mutual assertions that “you did great, you should be really proud” seeming like they expressed some small fraction of the immense relief and amazement and flabbergastedness we felt at merely having survived, and then for some reason I found myself trying to remember the name of the man who ran the first marathon. I’m pretty sure Kevin knew it was Pheidippides who raced from the battle site back to Athens in 490 B.C., before dropping as dead as I thought, in all seriousness, somewhere around mile twenty, that we might, but he claimed modestly to be unsure, and I joked that we should have asked Brock, because Brock of all people would know. “Brock probably has no idea what that guy’s name was,”Kevin commented wryly, “but he’d tell it to you anyway.”
Later in the afternoon, stopping back by the capitol building for a final photograph with the Goddess of Liberty before we left Texas, which I still hated a little, and headed back to the airport, Kevin wordlessly staggered off to one side of the path and vomited up everything he’d eaten, right there on the State House lawn.
***
Perhaps it’s a bit of a Rosie Ruiz of me (inside running joke!) to cheat and use Steve’s email about the day, but it seemed oddly appropriate. Re-reading this now, I can’t help but feel pride at being Steve’s brother. The sheer gumption and grit he showed in getting me through this stomach-turning race is secondary though to the absolutely mind-blowing perfect wordsmithing he did in conveying what went down… and what came back up. That’s a vomit joke. Steve would never stoop so low but me? I couldn’t help myself.
The food poisoning was the reason I thought the shirt made it onto the quilt; in truth, it’s the memory of going through hell with my brother. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
To close out, here’s some snapshots of us in and around the weirdness of Austin.
