New Personal Worst Marathon Time

Warning: this story is going to get ugly. No pretty pictures to accompany this blog.

I have been running marathons since 2002. It’s never been about the time, although I try not to embarrass myself and generally finish around the middle of the pack for my age group. I haven’t even kept track of how many marathons I’ve completed, although I know it’s more than 20. But setting a goal of running a marathon in a few months’ time forces me to train for it, and the discipline of running three or five or six times a week benefits my physical and emotional and spiritual health. And as a bonus, it’s an activity I share with Judy, my wife.

When people hear that Judy and I run marathons, we are invariably asked, “Have you run Boston?”—“Boston” being the Boston Marathon, the world’s oldest annual marathon, the apogee of all marathons. The answer is “No”—we’ve never achieved the qualifying time for admission. It’s on my bucket list, but until this year I hadn’t made a serious attempt to qualify. At the beginning of the year, I began to think it was time to get serious. I’ve been running for 15 years, largely injury-free, but my body may not stand up to the abuse of running forever. And so, in January, Judy and I did something we’ve never done before—we enrolled in a marathon training clinic in preparation for the Toledo Marathon on April 23. I was determined that this would be the year that I finally qualified for Boston, although I didn’t expect to attain the necessary qualifying time (for my age group) of 3:55 until the fall.

Through the winter months, I trained harder than I ever have before. The training schedule set out by our coach, the accountability of the group, and the opportunity to challenge myself to keep pace with faster runners resulted in rapid improvement. I ran through blizzards in January and I ran on vacation in Hawaii. I ran in shorts in February. I began to lower my marathon goal time—from 4:05 to sub-4 hours. But then, just before Easter, the wheels fell off my training plan.

An hour after I returned from a business trip on Holy Thursday, I began to feel ill. I spent Good Friday in bed and by that night I had developed a lung-racking cough to go along with a headache and body aches. By Saturday, I acknowledged that I had the flu. Easter dinner plans were cancelled. The fever and headache subsided by Monday but the cough continued for several more days. Running was pretty much out of the question, which didn’t seem as if it would matter since we had started to “taper”—i.e., reduce the length of our training runs in preparation for the marathon. I contemplated transferring my registration to the half-marathon distance, but I had invested so much in training for this event that I wanted to give my body a chance to show me what it could do.

*Between mile 20 and 21. Still running, but in pain– head down, shoulders hunched.*

And it did. On race day, I started off strong, on pace for the sub-4 hour finish I was hoping for. But by the 12 mile mark I could feel the strength leaving my legs. Later on, I was to learn that the flu virus directly infects and then destroys muscle cells. I struggled on, at a much slower pace, for another few miles until I ran into more trouble. I developed a searing pain in my groin that was aggravated by every stride. My bladder constantly felt full but when I tried to pee I couldn’t produce anything. Intense sciatic nerve pain radiated down my right leg, leaving my foot feeling heavy and numb. I tried to will myself to keep running, but by mile 21, I conceded that I would need to walk the final five miles of the race.

Those five miles seemed to go on forever. Dizzy with pain and exhaustion, I wandered from side to side on the trail. At one point, I tried to rest on a park bench but as soon as I sat down, waves of nausea washed over me and I knew I would faint if I didn’t stand up and keep moving. I was determined to finish—in 15 years of running marathons I’ve never DNF’d (DNF=Did Not Finish). Finally, five hours and eight minutes after I crossed the start line, I stumbled over the timing mats at the finish– a new personal record for worst marathon time.

So what’s the point of this story? Here it is– my experience that day sucked big-time, but I have to embrace the suck and move on. Embrace the suck. It’s an inelegant expression, apparently originating as military jargon, that says, “The situation is bad. Now deal with it.” In life, and leadership, there will be many occasions when it’s necessary to embrace the suck.

Pain lets us know that we are alive.

How do we embrace the suck?

1. Get used to pain. From the moment of birth, pain underscores the human experience. (No one knows this better than the women who gave us birth.) Pain lets us know that we are alive. Unlike chronic pain sufferers (for whom I have great respect), endurance athletes choose pain, and great athletes manage it effectively through a variety of associative and dissociative techniques. When I’m in the “pain cave” I break the race down into small segments—getting to the next mile or kilometer marker, or even the next lamp post. Good leaders acknowledge that leadership is hard, tough and painful, and have developed the mental and emotional toughness to persist through difficult relationships, setbacks and failures.
2. Remember that it’s about the journey, not the destination. Qualifying for Boston this year is probably out of the question now, but I’m training for my next marathon with a goal of achieving that sub-4 time. I’m waiting to see a specialist to get an opinion on the source of the pain I experienced in Toledo, but in the meantime I’ve completed a half marathon and two 25k trail races. No one’s journey through life is a straight line. As Dr. John Campbell (who suffered from a chronic illness) wrote in his book A Journey: Creative Grieving and Healing, “Any long journey includes unexpected events, delays, challenges and sometimes disasters. This should be expected. Planning for a journey is essential, but changes of plan must occur regularly and inevitably as circumstances change.”
  
  Planning for a journey is essential, but changes of plan must occur regularly and inevitably as circumstances change.
  
  If we forget that life is a journey and not a destination, we risk missing the merciful gifts scattered along the wayside. As time goes on, the memory of the pain I was battling on that long five mile walk fades, but other memories are vivid: the ethereal beauty of redbud trees blooming in the nature preserve we traversed; the solicitous inquiries of other runners asking, “Are you OK?”; the encouraging words of spectators as I stumbled along, “You’re doing awesome!” To the friend who kindly offered me Miller Lite at mile 22: I regret not accepting it from you. It might have helped.
  
  Nearing the end of my five mile walk of agony and despondency.
3. Know that every finisher gets a medal. The six top runners at the Toledo marathon shared a small prize purse; the rest of us, all 1,063 of us, got a medal. All of us. Even the person who finished an hour and ten minutes after me. I could have quit that day in Toledo; but in my mind, it wasn’t an option. Over and over again on my five-mile walk of agony and despondency, I told myself, “All that matters is that I finish”. Sometimes, when we face unexpected challenges in life and leadership, the best we can do is reach down deep inside and find the resiliency and determination to keep putting one foot in front of the other. We can do this assured of a finisher’s medal. As St. Paul said near the end of his life, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. And now the prize awaits me (2 Timothy 4:7,8).