BayState Half Marathon 2019
Reduction and redemption
Many times we have said to friends about running a qualifying marathon, “It’s all mental”. But that’s the truth with any physical act. Getting out of bed in the morning is mental. Walking up the stairs is mental. Climbing out of your car is mental. It’s a throw away sentiment.
That’s not what we mean anyhow. Of course, it’s a physical act. Of course, you need to train in such a way as to be prepared to act. What we mean is that even though this thing is a physical act it is not a physical act alone. It is a physical act that may only be accomplished by a mental condition.
The physic nature of this thing is a given. The physical element is table stakes. It is the mental that tips the balance. A good marathon effort is the great coming together of the mental and that physical preparation.
What we mean is that without the mental part you don’t stand a chance.
The mental part is believing that you are capable, that you have trained well, that you can overcome what comes. This mental condition spans the whole enterprise. It can’t just arrive on race day. It is a thing born out of audacity, many months, even years earlier when you decide “this is a thing I can and will do.”
All of this, the mental and the physical, must travel together and arrive at the destination race hand in had and ready to fight.
That is the mental state we refer to. It is not that this mental container that wraps around your training and racing is the only thing you need. It is that it is vital in its purpose. Without it, your training and racing lie like a lifeless, soulless, twitching thing.
That’s where my mind was, coming out of a long spring and summer of listless and episodic training and racing.
The Nantucket half marathon was not the vacation lark I had hoped for. I executed a sloppy race and did a poor job pacing for the 1:50 group. I felt heavy and slow on those rolling sand hills in the island sun.
That pain in my right butt was twinging again like it had been since Boston. I had recovered poorly from the BeanTown marathon a month prior. Physically, my heart and lungs were strong from all the miles but my confidence was shot.
The beat down at Boston in April after pouring everything I could into the training. The power loss at Vermont in May. And another discouraging beating at BeanTown in August. The pattern was stuck in place like some ugly parasite.
As I rode the ferry back to Hyannis from Nantucket I realized that it’s all mental and I didn’t have the mental fitness to race another marathon at Baystate a scant 7 days hence.
It was all mental. And I didn’t have it.
As much as I pride myself on being indestructible. As much as I believe in the ability of fate to pull a good race from the ashes of any poor training campaign as it has in the past. As much as I know anything can happen when you show up time and time again. I was defeated.
An army defeated should not array for battle.
There on that boat ride I decided that I didn’t have the mental capacity to suffer through another beating at the BayState Marathon. I would do ‘the smart thing’ and drop to the half.
The little quit.
Of course, I could run 26 miles.
But I didn’t want to.
The next day I called my local physio, who I trust, to see if I could make an appointment to find out what was really going on in my butt. To my surprise they had an immediate opening. This doctor knows me and knows what I do so I don’t have to tell him my whole life story I can just get to the pointy point.
I needed to know what this chronic pain was so that I could treat it the right way. I had self-diagnosed, (always a mistake), tendonitis in the high hamstring. But I didn’t know. I wanted him to dig in there and tell me which of the many moving pieces was slightly ajar.
And. as is usually the case when we self-diagnose, I was overcomplicating things. It wasn’t some arcane or esoteric injury that only I, because I’m so special ya know, could get. It was simple piriformis muscle pain. Call it what you want; ‘tightness’, ‘strain’, ‘micro-tearing’, it’s a common, top-ten running injury. Right up there with runner’s knee and Achilles tendonitis.
Not impacted an bot-fly larva, not nerve-ending-necropathy, not even the Spanish flu. Just plain-old over-use piriformis. And you know how you fix that? You stretch it. This tight little butt muscle was constricting my whole chain of muscles up and down the back of my right leg. When it tightened up late in those races that’s what it was.
This is where I felt the dark clouds in my running mentality start to part and the glimmer of the hunter’s moon peek through.
What about BayState? I struggled with reversing that decision to drop to the half. But, I was still under trained, still had that niggling, if commonplace, injury, and still mentally beaten down from too much of life.
As the race approached during the week I saw that other runners from my club would be there. My training buddy Brian would race for his 2021 qualifier. My friend Tom would make his first comeback ½ marathon after many long months beating back the scourge of prostate cancer. Others would race too.
It makes you fell a bit of a self-centered heel when your friends are celebrating life and you’re obsessed with failure.
It was not a lock. I stood around the expo on Saturday for a long handful of minutes describing the course nuances to those who hadn’t run it before. I gave advice to a young man who was running his first marathon.
And I switched my bib to a ½ marathon bib. Because I was not physically fit enough to justify a marathon try, but really, I wasn’t mentally fit enough, I had to come to grips with that.
I only ran twice during the week. A couple of easy hour-long runs in the woods with ollie. I felt pretty good when I woke up on race morning. I had no goal, no plan. Just show up and run an easy half. There’s nothing riding on it.
Race morning was cold and pure and dry. A perfect day for racing. Perfect. I smiled inwardly and joked with the other runners about kicking myself to have dropped to the 1/2 on the first perfect day we’d gotten all year.
And we were off. I hung in the pack and chatted with people. It was a slow first mile with the crowd but we were moving well. I figured I’d aim to do this half at the same pace I would have needed for a 3:35 marathon, lacking any other specific goals. Maybe hang around an 8 minute mile and see how I felt.
As we approached the split where the marathon breaks off from the half I found myself in the 3:40 marathon pace group. Looking at my watch I noted that their pacer was a 10-20 seconds a mile fast. I commiserated with them but let them go as we reached the split.
By this time I was pacing a couple of ladies and comparing notes. I don’t run a lot of half marathons so my pace math isn’t as ready, but I did what I could to coach them along. We were knocking off sub-8’s and it seemed like a reasonable pace, but a bit faster than they were aiming for. I cautioned them to throw in a couple slow miles as we turned the corner at 10K.
Then a funny thing happened. I felt good. We turned the corner for that second loop and my marathon brain said, “Your going too fast, you’re going to crash!” but my runner’s brain said, “Yeah, I’m only running a half so who cares if I’m on a pace to crash at mile 16?”
I began to race. I accelerated a bit and felt good so I held it at nice tempo pace. My HR and lungs were fine, it felt like a mid-to-high zone 3 effort. My legs felt fresh from the week off. I dropped my pace on these well-worn roads of Lowell down into the 7:20-7:30 range to see how that felt. And it felt good.
And that was that. I was racing. My form was good and clean. My effort was steady. The second 10k slid by like an old friend I hadn’t seen in a while. I lost my lady friends in those first accelerations and was casually picking off runners as I went.
It got a little hard in the last couple miles but nothing to write home about and I held that pace. I pushed through the finish exhilarant and happy. Here was a runner. Here was a good and capable man.
Here was redemption.
Two of the ladies were in the chute behind me. I was amazed. They had latched on to my energy as I dropped the pace and hung on the set large personal records. I was their beacon as well.
It wouldn’t qualify me for Boston. It wouldn’t qualify me for anything. But it was a mental victory. I had swept the mumbling demons from my mind. A small victory. But on small victories empires are built.
I can run. I can race. I’m not spent.
I can do anything.
I can be anything.
I am not afraid.
It’s all mental.