Mair was right. I found a silver lining to Sunday’s race… even though I didn’t run.
It’s hard to reverse a decision. I had decided to run, I was all in, I had accepted that it wouldn’t be a PR, I was ok with just running the 13.1 miles at whatever pace I could manage to prep my legs for the Chilly Half Marathon in November.
So I was pretty upset when it became clear in the middle of the night that my cold had taken a turn for the worse, and it was going to be all I could do to get out of bed and spectate, let alone run. Coughing, sinus pressure, congestion… I was downstairs several times between 2 and 3:30 a.m. raiding the Caiazzo medicine cabinets looking for sudafed and trying to get rid of enough congestion so I could go back to sleep.
Needless to say, when Greg’s alarm went off at 5:30 a.m. I told him I didn’t think I should run. He emphatically agreed, which is when I knew I really shouldn’t run.
How it felt: I should have felt relieved. After all, I no longer had to go battle 10-15 mile per hour head winds and 45 degree weather I wasn’t used to. I no longer had to tackle the challenging (and slightly long) course all while feeling under the weather and battling a cold for the second year in a row, knowing it’d be a mediocre race time. I should have felt relief, right?
I wasn’t even going to run this race originally! I signed up for it long after Greg did, because I was going to watch him run, and save up my training for Chilly. All I was doing was reverting back to the original plan. It shouldn’t have been such a big deal – up until about 6 weeks ago I wasn’t going to run anyway.
But I didn’t feel relief. I felt profound sadness.
I was supposed to be out there, struggling. I was supposed to be pushing through that headwind, digging deep to make it up those hills, laughing when my eyes watered going over the bridge with the cross-winds, wondering what the heck I was doing, feeling crazy and strong and epic and like I was part of something.
I felt anger. Why didn’t I make the decision to quit when I first felt sick, not at 3:45 a.m., 4 hours before the race, after I’d set out all of my running gear and posted my bib number on Facebook. Now I felt like a quitter, looked like a quitter, and suffered remorse because I felt no satisfaction or relief in exchange for quitting.
I almost cried: I was telling Katie (she’s family and a triathlete, so she gets it) why I wasn’t running, and I started to choke up. I was so upset not to be running.
My sadness is the silver lining: I didn’t realize it yesterday, but my sadness is actually the silver lining to dropping out of the race. Not only did I prevent myself from deteriorating into another drawn out case of bronchitis, I also learned something important.
I want to run half marathons.
I don’t feel relief when I’m unexpectedly spectating, I feel loss.
I saw someone walking at mile 10 when we went to pick Greg’s gloves up on the side of the road, and I even felt jealous of them because they were completing the distance. Their legs hurt. They FELT something. They’d endured. They were having the 13.1 experience, and afterwards, they’d have a story to tell. They were also wearing a green tutu. Clearly they had a story.
I realized then that I didn’t really care as much as I thought about accomplishing a pace goal. I do care, I will be sad if I don’t do well at Chilly, but I care just as much about being out there and engaging in the challenge. I would have given a lot just to be out there finishing even slower than last year, just to have the chance to run the course and feel alive in the peculiar way pushing your limits makes you feel.
It WAS great seeing Greg finish: Greg ran a great race, has a new PR in the half marathon, and his time is even more respectable because it’s a slightly long and rather challenging course. He came in 34th out of 1,765 people. It’s quite trippy to watch your husband finish in the top 2% of a half marathon. These are all people who run enough to make it 13.1 miles, and he’s coming in 34th out of seventeen hundred. THAT’S INSANE. A new goal on my bucket list is to get to the point where I can run just one mile at his half marathon pace. I’d better do it soon before he drops the pace target again.
So here I am – I have a renewed faith in my identity as a runner. To feel so upset made me realize that I do want this. I am doing this for myself, not just because Greg’s a runner too. This is who I am, this is what I do.
I am running this… and I would rather run slowly than not run at all, because I crave the struggle and the journey even when faced with uncertain results.
If you ever wake up the day after a race you didn’t run and feel like crying because your legs don’t hurt and you have no memory of suffering and surviving miles 9-12… you too will know that this is who you are. This is what you do.
You’re a runner.
And there will be another race.