Last Saturday morning, Justin and I stood in the middle of the large Basco warehouse in NW Portland. We were debating refrigerators. Side-by-side doors? Freezer up top? Freezer below?
I didn’t care. I had been vertical for too long. My feet were starting to feel hot, from standing. Plus it was nearing noon, which meant it was time for another feeding. Of me. There were carbs to consume, a marathon to run the next day.
Basco holds an appliance sale on a different week each year, but it seems to fall somewhere in the spring/summer.
Basco has not only supplied us with all of our kitchen appliances, but it has also served as a kind of “mile-marker” of my running life in Portland.
2007: Our dishwasher dies. I hobble around the warehouse on my cane, due to a stress fracture in my right tibia. We buy a new dishwasher. Eventually, my leg heals.
2008: We contemplate going to the sale, but realize it’s out of our price range this year. Besides, I don’t want to wander around the warehouse; I am once again hobbling, with a mysterious and slowly recovering right quadricep injury.
2009: We buy a new stove. I hobble around the warehouse on stiff legs from running the Eugene half marathon.
Finally we found a fridge that would work well enough in the space, well enough in the cost, and got on the road, with a stop at Laughing Planet for a smoothie and soup for Justin, and a big bowl of rice, beans, spinach, sweet potatoes and plantains for me.
The drive to Eugene takes two hours from Portland. It takes even less when you tailgate like Justin. What? I’m just saying.
Decide that the first thing to do is check into the hotel, then go to the Expo, where I’ll pick up my race packet with my number, chip, t-shirt and all kinds of random promotional items that inevitably sneak into the gear bag, We will then then eat at a Grandma Early hour so I/we can go to bed at a Grandma Early hour.
We arrive at the Best Western on Franklin, which is where we stayed last year for the half. I am delighted that we can check in (it’s 2 p.m. and check in isn’t until 4 p.m.) but a little dismayed to find out that we didn’t get the same room we had last year (third floor, no one above you, view of the creek, little balcony), and instead have a first floor room (no balcony, parking lot level, view of the parking lot, elephants above us).
Since my running superstitions border on OCD, I try to will myself to relax. After all, I tell myself, although last year was a good race, I didn’t meet my “A” goal, so maybe it’s just as well.
The Expo is nothing short of a clusterfuck. Picking up my race number is upstairs, then t-shirt pickup is downstairs, and it’s not in a logical direction. The line for t-shirt pickup is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Justin and I go all East Coast and walk up the side of the crowd until I get my t-shirt. It’s kind of like watching Oregon drivers try to merge.
We move through the booths of vendors and the few free soy milk samples that are offered, and Justin nibbles on Krusteaz muffins and brownies while I look on enviously.
I have a new award that I am bestowing: The Random Marathon Sponsor givewaway. At CIM, it was thumb-size containers of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. At Eugene, it was giant blocks of tissues from State Farm Insurance. Really, State Farm?
We have some time to kill (die time, die!), and so start wandering around Eugene and lo and behold, come upon a big Saturday outdoor market. It’s like Portland’s PSU farmer’s market (for food) and Portland Saturday Market (for random tchotckes). And it’s packed, but it’s in a huge enough area that it doesn’t feel really crowded. Lots of tie dye, blown glass, candles. I try on a silly hat. Really, it’s no different than any kind of hippie market, but it’s a gorgeous day, the sun is out and warm enough on you but not too hot, the breeze is just so, and everyone is smiling. It made me wonder what life would have been like if I had gone to college in a place like this. As opposed to Hopkins, so competitive, so in its own world. It made me a bit wistful.
Justin and I weave in and out of the booths. I text Clover, who is coming down to Eugene having just run Boston, largely to run Eugene with me and keep me company at pace. We make plans to meet up after the course presentation. With all its twists and turns, this makes the Blair Witch Project look like high-quality filmmaking. The course presentation is an overhead projection of the flyover map of the course that was already on the website. I sigh and snark audibly. Justin shushes me. Such is the circle of life.
Clover meets us wearing this year’s Boston Marathon jacket. I want a jacket. I want a Boston Marathon jacket like I wanted a blue and white striped Benetton rugby shirt back in 1986.
Eventually we navigate out of the parking garage and make out way over to Oakwood Center, which has two rice-based options: Mio Sushi and Café Yumm, as well as a Trader Joe’s, where I pick up my latest obsession: Almond Butter with Flaxseed. A bit more oily than the straight-up ground almond almond butter from Fred Meyer, this still isn’t salted enough (really, what is?), but it’s a nice change and the flaxseeds give it additional nut depth. Thus completes my pimping of almond butter.
Conversation is lively, and centers around various birth control methods and basketball. Yeah. I don’t know either. I feel myself holding back, uneasy with lapses in conversation, but then uncaring. I can’t focus on conversation. I am holding in all my energy, my focus. I am going to run a marathon tomorrow. A qualifying marathon. I want to go to Boston. I have been working my butt off to go to Boston. I feel uneasy. I feel like I could so easily fail.
Drive by start area, and Clover & I decide to meet at the architectural statue close to Hayward, which is where we assume the shuttle buses from the Hilton will stop.
Lights out at 8:30. (I’m sorry, Justin; the good news is that you won’t need to deal with this for a year.) Surprisingly, I fall asleep and only wake once (that I remember), having dreamt I already ran the race, a recurring that I’m in a marathon that takes place outside, but inside as well, with running through corridors and stairwells all counting toward overall mileage.
Alarm at 4:50 a.m. Backup wakeup call at 5 a.m. Justin is so nice.
Green tea in a coffee-smelling mug from a coffee-smelling coffee-maker. Millet bread. Almond butter. Bathroom trips. Thumbing through a magazine. Bathroom trips. Shower to warm up.
Packing for a race away from home is akin to Noah loading up the ark. Two of everything, because you never know. Two long sleeve shirts. Two short sleeve shirts. Three pairs of socks. Two pairs of shorts. Two sports bras. One pair of older shoes, one pair of newer ones. Two hats. One pair of mittens. One pair of gloves. Disposable, warm, throwaway clothes I spent $5 on—total—at Goodwill the previous day.
Day of race: Short sleeve shirt, RaceReady shorts. SmartWool socks. Adidas Salvation, the shoes that are in fact my salvation, newer pair vs. old one. I wear the shirt that says “run” all over it, even though the race bib covers up most of the runs.
Time’s getting away from me, so I strap on my Garmin watch, pin on the bib number, wake Justin to help me tie on the timing chip (someone else has to do it, as part of my OCD), pack three Gu chomps packets and one Gu Espresso Love gel into my shorts pockets, pull on the Goodwill clothes, and head outside…
And immediately wish I’d packed a room key.
Because upon getting outside, I don’t need the outer layers. I am hot already.
I briskly walk from the hotel to the statue, holding the XL pants up by one hand.
I get there by 6:25. I see Brian, who has just dropped Julie off. I do some dynamic stretches. I feel anxious. Clover shows up about 6:40, and we both drop the extra layers. It is surprisingly warm outside, feels almost surreal. We jog over to the port-o-potties and the lines are endless. I don’t really have to pee, but I figure I should. The bushes are an option, I suppose.
Eyeing the dorm area, I spy it: Spiller Hall. Except I can’t pee in front of Spiller Hall and there’s a guy not too far away sitting on a bench. That kills it for me. I can’t do it. I am hoping it’s what Julie and I call a “Ghost Pee,” when you have to pee, but then when you try, nothing comes out.” This is the sibling to “Phantom Poop,” – you get the idea.
We get into line. I don’t get all misty, like I did at CIM, where the beginning of the race was almost like me praying, offering up thanks for being able to be here. Today, I am all business. In fact, this whole race experience was to be less…soulful and gracious, and more like “let’s get this shit done.” I was here to grind out a qualifier. The amount of focus this required wasn’t going to last forever. It couldn’t. I feared burnout on many levels if I didn’t make this.
I’d trained more than I’d ever had for a marathon thus far. I upped my mileage to about 55 miles a week. I’d done the same 22-miler route that I did while preparing for CIM 30 seconds a mile faster. I’d ran Hagg lake with my friend Caroline and ran that 30 seconds a mile faster. I was doing things like 10-11 mile runs on weekdays: a long weekly run in addition to my longer weekend run. I did my long runs at the same time this marathon was scheduled to begin: 7 a.m. I had practiced with Gu, with water bottles.
The week before the marathon I’d gotten what is still undetermined—a cold or allergies, I don’t know, but I was wiped out. I consumed more zinc than a mine. I downed juice. I lay around. I took a day to work from home. I feared, because my runs the week before had had no pep; I was running 9:30 miles and felt tired. Echinacea. Astralagus. Oscillo. I took it all. It was not taper-it is, folks. There was something wrong.
Anyway: I had to respect the run. If you respect the distance, if you respect the run and what it takes, it will respect you back. You must approach it, look it in the eye, mutually declare yourselves worthy opponents.
Respect!
Another reason to Respect the Eugene Marathon: the runners pretty much seeded themselves where they needed to be. They had signs posted on either side of the start with your per-mile pace. Most people stuck to it, with the faster runners in the front, and the walkers in the back. I don’t think I had to dodge a single walker, which was so, so welcome—and so, so rare.
And we’re off.
Here’s the deal. Everything up until this point was written on Monday. It is now Friday, and my memories of the race are diffusing as quickly as my muscle soreness (I’m doing great except for one area on the back of my knee that’s still a bit Frankenstinian). I’ve lost a lot of the motivation to write about this, and I kind of fear this is going to get boring. So here’s a brief bit of what I can dredge up from the race. Otherwise you can read what my friend Clover—who was smart enough to do a recap on Sunday afternoon—had to say about the whole event.
Started out slow. The race has some ups and downs in the first few miles. I was glad that the night before, Clover had asked if I was bringing music, too. I said yes (in fact I brought two ipod shuffles, one old and not as trusty, and one new and less experience-tested), and was glad to know that she didn’t expect us to talk the whole time, or even that much. Conversational pace is great for running training runs, but when you’re in a race. You literally should save your breath.
We spot Julie and Susan, who drove down from Portland that morning
So it was all good; we’d talk sometimes, sometimes to verbally roll our eyes at another runner, remark that it was okay to speed up on the downhills; we’re both fans of hills and how to use them to our advantage (even effort up, fly down). Clover talked to me about Boston. You’re solid, she said, you can totally do this. At mile 5, I didn’t want to be too cocky.
I knew all I could know about the course: Last year I ran the Eugene half marathon, and that course is the same as the full marathon for the first 10 miles or so. So I knew that the first 10 miles weren’t completely flat, that there was a gradual up and down from miles 4-6, a steep one about mile 8-9. And I’d heard that the rest of the course was fairly flat. So hopefully it would be doable to keep a steady pace on the flat parts.
Two weeks before this run, I had ran 14 miles, all at 8:30 pace. If I could do that, I figured, I could just about double that. Right? RIGHT?
To run a marathon in 3 hours and 45 minutes requires 8 minute, 35 second miles.
26.2 of them.
I wanted to do a 3:44. I told myself that would give me extra time. I even found a site where I could put in my desired time, and the time the race started and it would give you a time for each split. I gave it to Justin, for spectating purposes.
My plan was to run the race as evenly as possible. I wanted to stick to under 8:33 for at least the first 20. I doubted I’d see the 3:40 pacer, but if I felt good enough in the final miles, I’d go for it. But I didn’t want too fast a pace and die after mile 20, and I didn’t want to run too conservatively at the start and have to haul ass at the point when I most needed to and was least likely able to.
So the splits here are boring:
First 10 miles: 8:35, 8:31, 8:34, 8:32, 8:30, 8:19, 8:23, 8:29, 8:25, 8:28. The course rolls a little, so there’s that as interest. I keep reining in Clover. I don’t want to go too fast. Starting too quickly will give me a side stitch or worse. I feel like a pace nazi, because I want to go go go ! And I can’t. I shouldn’t. There’s a lot out there, still.
Mile 9, I spot Justin, who trades water bottles with me. Me making him wear the neon orange hunting hat from Cabello’s was the best idea ever. He also looked way cute in it.
Around mile 10, the course splits. I looked longingly toward where the half-marathoners were going. Their course is prettier. At this point I was flagging a little. I wasn’t even halfway there, and the course was getting ugly. We ran down Franklin Blvd., a long stretch of commercial area on the way to Springfield. It was wholly uninspiring. It was warm; the sun was out and beating down on us and the road canted a bit and it was fairly unpleasant. But I kept going. I figured this was just a big patch of meh.
8:29, 8:33,
Going through Springfield was also pretty uninspiring. The crowds were thin. Perhaps it looks different when the streets are open and people actually use the town. But I was kind of unimpressed. It did, however, get a bit cloudier, which I welcomed.
8:31,
I spot a cute dog that looks like Julie & Brian’s dog, Chloe. Then I look up and realize it’s Brian, along with Justin. “Do you want water?” Justin shouts. I debate for a millisecond. I do. I jog in place for a few seconds to get it. A bystander chuckles. Oh, you runners!
8:31, 8:35,
Mile 14 - Clover excuses herself to find a port-o-potty, and runs ahead. I’m pretty into a grove now, which surprises me, because at CIM miles 15-17 were the suckiest. But I’m doing really well and feeling just dialed into what I need to be doing. The patch on Franklin is history. My music is good, kind of techno undulating, which is fine with me, and I glance back several times for Clover, start to get a little concerned, but I need to keep on going. I think of what Albert, one of the fast guys in our running club, once told me:
“If you want to run a marathon and hit a specific goal, you have to understand that running a marathon is selfish endeavor…It is not a "fun run with friends" or any of that other crap - save that for another race, seriously. You may spend half a year running/training with someone for the marathon, but on the day of race, if that person is lagging behind, you better be ready to drop that person without a second thought. Think about it, if you train for months and months for one race, there's too much on the line. You can't say ‘Oh, so and so isn't feeling well. I'll slow down for a couple miles.’ No freaking way.”
So I kept going. And I was feeling great. I hit the half-marathon split only six seconds slower than I raced the half-marathon last year.
8:33, 8:31, 8:28, 8:30, 8:33, 8:31,
I see a red lizard shirt and yell “Hey! Lizard! Who are you? Turn around!” and it’s Dave, from my running club, who is faster than me.
How are you doing? I ask.
Terrible, he says.
You look good, I say—probably the last thing he wants to hear, but my brain’s not working quite right at this point. And I didn’t want to say “Hey, yeah, you do look horrible!” Truth is, he didn’t. But we all have our own personal barometers. I just keep going. I have to get going. I’m NOT going to not qualify for Boston today, I tell myself. I’m not going to disappoint myself. I am here to get this done!
Up until 20, I’m on cruise control. The crowd thins out a lot. I’m not really thinking. I look at my watch maybe once per mile, usually about halfway through each mile.
And here’s where I start to fade a little. My knee/calf on my right leg feels a bit…unhinged. I feel like my stride is altered. I consciously check my form and keep running. Just keep running. I don’t feel like I’m really looking at anything. I’m just running.
I think of opening it up on mile 20, and I just feel tired. It feels endless. I told Clover, earlier on in the race, that she was a machine. Now I feel like one. I’m starting to feel more like old jalopy than lean, mean, irongirl machine. I’m running pretty much alone, the paths curve around a lot, I could kind of be running on Mars. I’m just grinding out the miles.
I see my friend Julie, who I was running with. She mentions something about needing to make two bathroom stops. “Race face!” she reminds me. “Race face!”
I run with her for a few paces and move along. I can’t wait for anything. She’s going to Boston in April. I need to go to Boston in April.
I can’t think about the bathroom. I’m pretty nauseated. I’ve been trying to straddle the border between fueled enough and bonking by chomping a few Gu chomps every 4-5 miles or so, for sustained energy. But the Gu and the running are upsetting my stomach. I’m not a puker, but I reach into my pocket for one of the antacids I brought.
I’m pretty queasy. I need a new Gu, though, otherwise I won’t have the energy to make it to the finish line. It takes me about 10 minutes to hork down the last one I brought, the Gu Espresso love flavor. At this point, I have more caffeine in me than Colombia.
8:36, 8:37,
Shit, I tell myself, it’s okay, you have bought enough time, you can still do this, just keep running, just keep running. The crowds are very thin, and the number of runners out seems fewer than running Springwater on a shitty day in the early morning: That is to say, sparse.
Mile 24, I look up, and there’s Clover. What the hell, I wonder? Did she finish? She starts running with me and explains that she lost time in line for the port-o-potty and then trying to catch me, so she ran to the end, handed in her number and then ran back from the finish to find me.
Actually, I kind of learned this later, because at the time it just seemed like some weird break in the space-time continuum that she was there, like some sort of runner hallucination. I didn’t really want to talk. I was trying to avoid thoughts of my stomach.
So I just told her, “Tell me something good.”
And this is what I remember the conversation being like:
Clover: “Boston will be so fun. We’ll hang out at [her boyfriend] Len’s parents’ house in Newton the night before, we’ll make something gluten-free for you.”
Me: “mmmporf.”
Clover: “You’re going to do this, you’re going to go to Boston, you can tell all those fast guys like Albert to shove it, that you’re a real runner now.”
Me: “kkkggiqst.”
8:44,
I remember picking it up here and a vague recollection of Clover saying to a stranger, “This is my friend Carin; she’s going to Boston!”
Me: “pshooorrrfff.”
8:38,
I was pretty sure I might have been foaming at the mouth. But fuck this shit, I was going to run Boston! Keep running, goddamn it, keep running! You didn’t get this far to fuck it up!
8:31
Clover bailed at the 26 mile mark, saying she’d see me at the other side. I saw some people in Red Lizard shirts, Steve and Joanna, and I saw Justin, who had the camera out, but I put my head down, I wasn’t into smiling for the camera, this was not, so not, over until I crossed that finish line, I had to just get to the finish, just complete this, just make sure you’re going to Boston, Carin.
At CIM, for the last three miles, I was racing like it was a 5K. I was zooming past folks. It was primarily because I was bored, and wanted to finish this thing already, but I also had a fair amount of pep left in me.
At Eugene, I think it’s pretty fair to say that I left it all on the course. I did it right. I think.
The last .2 seemed endless, and at a 7:48 pace, I can’t imagine why. I know we finished on legendary Hayward field, but I don’t remember much about it. I remember the brick-colored track area hearing “Carin Moonin, from Portland!” from the announcer, and I remember thinking “Thank GOD he pronounced my name correctly,” and I saw the clock and it was 3:44 and knowing it took about a minute to get to the start line meant I was a 3:43 marathon, actually, so I'd DONE IT! with time to SPARE! and I…well, I finally understand the phrase “broke into a smile.”
I smiled so far I thought I would break my face.
Because I got what I came for. I had done it. I had done it with three minutes to spare. And when you’re running marathons—or anything, for that matter—three minutes is a big difference.
So was 10 minutes. I had taken off 10 minutes from the 3:53 I got at CIM.
I am going to Boston.
See you in April 2011.
