It’s been a week since the TCS New York City Marathon and I’m still walking on sunshine. Better than that, I’m still walking! (Pain-free!)
And I’m still processing how special that race was and how lucky I am to have run it. It wasn’t the race I planned on having when I signed up many months ago. It was untrained, and about 45 minutes slower than I’d hoped, but in a lot of ways it was also more and better than I originally hoped.
Instead of pushing my legs to move their fastest, I had to pull myself back and prioritize my health and future running career over instant gratification. Rather than bemoan my bones that keep letting me down and holding me back, I had to thank my body for the amazing thing it was doing and letting me do. I know how to push myself to the (literal) breaking point. I know how to run as fast as I can. I know that a healthy me has potential beyond the limitations my osteopenia has put on my race career; and I can and do curse my weaknesses and mortality constantly. This race was a chance to put my health situation into perspective, and, rather than belittle my body, to celebrate and thank it. A marathon is serious physical business for a healthy, run-trained body. For one coming off (still on) an injury which has lost all run-conditioning it is a (probably cruel) shock to the system and a monumental ask.
In the weeks leading up to race day I hit a lot of emotional peaks and valleys thinking ahead to whether I’d be able to finish at all. I was terrified the ankle would scream from the first step and that I wouldn’t even make it over the Verrazano Bridge into Brooklyn. If my ankle held out I was afraid my muscles that have been through fewer than twenty running miles since August would cramp and seize from the shock of it all. I crested a few high points where I thought, nahh, my adrenaline and fitness and muscle memory will get me through it. At really delusional high moments (high in so many senses of the word) I thought I could even still manage a sub-4. Intellectually I knew that was idiotic, but I don’t really run with my brain.
Scott and I took Amtrak up to NYC the Friday before the race, which happened to be my birthday, which also happens to be the birthday of my friend Mo, in whose memory I was fundraising and running. It makes for a bittersweet day.
Scott of course showed me an amazing time, with dinner and Hamilton round two. (I am so disgustingly lucky to have seen this show not once, but twice. Seriously second-mortgage your house, sell your kids or organs, do whatever you need to. Just. Go. See. It. [After poop and my fear of my own bicycle, I’m trying to make a musical about the founding fathers the most talked-about item in my race blog!]) After the show we met up with some of my old theatre friends and stayed up till 1:30, which for us is CRAZY late. (But my actor friends are CRAZY fun too – and also just plain CRAZY!)
The next day was devoted mainly to expo and race-prepping. The expo was at the Javitz Center, which happens to be where I took the bar exam back in 2010. (Painting Saturday also bittersweet but in a different way.)
After I picked up my number and packet, Scott went and found a bench to hang out and read a book so that I could buy all the things. (How do people who are not married to Scott get through race weekends???) Getting to the expo on its final day meant a lot of the XS sizes had already been consumed, so I only ended up buying most of the things. That’s probably for the best. (I did buy three more pairs of socks. Stop buying socks, Liz!)
Once I’d just about melted through my plastic (and of course changed into an NYC Marathon branded outfit) Scott and I had a few hours to kill before we were meeting one of my incredibly speedy cousins for a pre-race buffet. Fortunately it was college football’o’clock and we weren’t far from the USC alumni bar, Pennsylvania 6.
We arrived a little before kickoff so we grabbed awesome seats, and I squirmed bit, embarrassed I’d opted for shameless marathon branding over USC. (I wasn’t thinking when I packed!) I bought myself SoCal cred by proclaiming loudly to the bartender that I too was a Trojan, and screaming wildly for every moderately decent play. Proclaiming my ambivalence about my run time the next day, I also had a beer and a half, two enormous soft pretzels, and wings. I almost regretted my pre-dinner recklessness once we met up with cousin Carol at the buffet, but those pretzels were so good.
I’ve got several cousins who are all mini like me, who run three hour and sub-3 marathons. I think they are the coolest ever, and I loved seeing Carol before the race. She’s done NYC seven times and in my mind she’s a total race celebrity. After indulging as much as I could stand in the Marriott Marquis pre-marathon buffet Scott and I headed downtown to a hotel near the Staten Island Ferry launch, where I’d have to be at 6am the following morning.
By this point I was fully fueled physically, but I was starting to fall apart mentally…
…While the weeks preceding race day had seen altitudinal shifts – as many peaks as valleys – as the moment of run-reckoning crept closer, those peaks became entirely obscured. By the time I was fifteen hours out I was instead living solely between valleys and those kind moments when I forgot I was running the next day.
Every time I remembered I was running became a low point. I told Scott about my amnesia-dread mental ping-pong. He started asking me every so often how I was feeling, and each time I’d respond ‘trough’. By the end of the evening, after buying bagels, peanut butter, and bananas for the morning at a bodega near the hotel, I had begun to unprovoked blurt out, ‘Trough!’ every fifteen minutes or so – which was about how often thoughts of what I was sure was impending race catastrophe collided with my emotional fortitude.
I went through the pre-race motions of laying out clothes and race-fuel, breakfast and everything else I would need in a few hours. I have a button shaped like a heart and inscribed with a cursive M that Mo’s family had made for all her friends – Team Maureen – when she was diagnosed for the final time. That was carefully affixed to my tights. If anything could lift me out of the pre-race troughs it was to think about the bigger picture.
I finished my night-before ritualizing, including the crucial task of cutting the sleeves off my Gilda’s Club race tee. The team shirt was really nice: cute, well-made, and actually small enough for me. But I can’t run in short-sleeves. I have to have either long sleeves or a tank top. I find short sleeves really uncomfortable. They rub between my bicep and torso, (probably because my guns are so huge, right?) bunch up uncomfortably around my arm band, and, depending on the weather and level of exertion, leave me overheated. So, feeling a little guilty but needing to honor the part of myself that is a total meathead, I sliced and diced my team tee into a tank top.
It was about 11pm when I finally drifted to sleep – though thanks to a well-timed daylight savings, I told myself that it was really 10pm. In bed at 10 with a 5am wake-up meant I was getting 30-60 minutes more sleep than most nights, so given my race-pace ambivalence, I felt pretty good about my REM-cycle prognosis.
The early pre-ferry morning was uneventful. I was out the door and in an uber by 5:45. And then at the ferry by 5:47 because I had not realized just how close it was. (Cheapest uber ever but the driver was nice about it!)
I was signed up for the 5:45 ferry, because for some reason charity runners got the shaft and got to pref our race transportation after everyone else already had. I was in Wave 1 which didn’t start till 9:50am, and 5:45 was the latest ferry still available when it was my turn to sign up. However I learned from Carol and other NYC veterans that no one cares or checks. This was completely true, and I walked right onto the 6am with a couple hundred other runners no problem.
Usually I steer clear of coffee before a race, given my nervous tummy. But with almost four chilly and sure-to-be-boring hours to digest before the gun would go off I thought some warm caffeine on the boat might be in order. And I was shocked to discover it was really good! I was happy to have the yummy, heated wake-up.
The ferry was pretty funny, because its human composition was 99.999999% runners, and a few very confused-looking morning-after revellers wrapping up their Saturday nights. The race was Nov. 1, so these post-party stragglers were all in costume – most of them rocking gory zombie face paint and other festive accoutrements. They probably expected to slink quietly home, unnoticed, before the sun was fully up to sleep it off. Instead they were on a boat with hundreds of excited and decidedly sober marathoners. I felt a little bad for our confused undead shipmates, but I couldn’t help laughing at them too.
The ride to Staten Island was about twenty minutes. Once off the ferry, everyone is loaded onto buses for another thirty minute ride to the start line festival. We arrived there around 7am and immediately encountered airport-style security – with the obvious exception that we could keep our water bottles. (Actually the guy in front of me tried to leave his behind like at TSA, and the police called to him that he should take it because it’s important to hydrate before a marathon.)
As expected, I got to spend almost two hours bored out of my skull but too cold to sleep before it was even time to hit my corral. Happily it was not as cold and windy as last year apparently, and between my long tights, long sleeved running shrug, the disposable jacket I bought at the expo, (the best $10 I spent there) and the fleece beanies Dunkin’ Donuts was handing out (life-savers!) I wasn’t too uncomfortable. I did wish that I’d remembered the old junky sweats I was going to wear and pitch, but hearing war stories of the race-day wind in 2014, I could not complain.
A little before 9am I joined one of the many porta potty lines (this race was well-stocked with bathroom options). In line I met a woman who’d come up to do her first marathon from Uruguay which was very cool. While hanging out all morning I heard many languages spoken. With just under 50% of racers hailing from the US, I loved how international and inclusive the event felt.
International things I didn’t love as much: the testicles of the French men standing ten feet from me most of the morning, who pulled their very loose and leggy shorts all the way up to apply anti-chaffing cream. I’m not kidding, I saw multi-cultural scrotum on Staten Island at 8am. I generally love endurance athletes’ lack of body shame, but that was a oui (get it?) bit much for moi.
The NYC Marathon is the world’s largest, with over 50,000 runners. To handle the crowds, racers are split into slightly different courses for the first 8 miles – designated by color (green, orange, or blue.) I was in orange, and had been hanging out in the start line festival area designated for my fellow orange bibbers. It took about 10 minutes to walk from there to the actual corral to line up.
I got to the Wave 1 Corral D Orange corral (got all that?) around 9:15, whereupon I commenced more waiting! There were lots of antsy runners crammed into a smaller space, so at least I wasn’t as cold anymore. I ate my second banana and mini bagel with peanut butter (two of each plus coffee, and a bottle of Nuun were my pre-race breakfast) just in time for the slow march to the actual start line.
As we shuffled around trailers and grandstands, the Verrazano Bridge came into view, and I was lifted out of my trough by waves of excitement and gratitude.
I’d wondered for weeks if this were a good idea – if this would be worth it. Right then I knew it was – if only for that moment. I’ve never felt a crowd of thousands stir to life at the exact same emotional moment like that. The first of many tears that day began to spill. I wasn’t cold anymore, and I wasn’t worried. Whatever happened I was a part of something special and far Far FAR bigger than myself.