I was scared.
Since my first 50-miler in 2007, I've never been scared to start an ultramarathon. But on MMT 100 eve, as I writhed uncomfortably in the slightly-too-warm back seat of my Honda Civic (now seeming much worse as "Plan B" in action than it did in my mind, when I thought that I wouldn't have to use it), I wasn't having trouble sleeping from the typical pre-race nerves, or excitement, or even bug bites. I was just plain scared.
Since Badwater last July, my races have turned out mediocre for the most part, and the one ultra that I did attempt (Speedgoat 50K aside), ended in a disaster, the way only a race like Hellgate can. So, just hours away from lining up for a 100+ mile quad-thrashing rock-stomp, I felt nothing but fear.
I was certainly in much better health than last year. Debatably, I was in similar or better shape. But not having successfully attempted this sort of distance in far too long, I had no idea how my body was going to respond. I tried to suppress visions of collapse in the woods, feeling totally broken, but I knew they were there. I didn't even want to think about what this might mean for Badwater in July.
But in other news, most other things were under control. New headlamps and new handbottles (to replace the lost and stolen ones), drop bags set, warm clothes pre-positioned at the finish line, the dozens and dozens of actual important things to do outside of this silly race at least temporarily taken care of . . . on a very practical level, there wasn't really anything to worry about. At 3 am, I made deliberate, yet efficient work of my pre-race preparations, and then it was off to the starting line with 10 minutes to spare, to mingle with 200-ish other runners and try to feel like I belonged there.
The semi-circle at the starting line, the same as in 2010, was there with about 2 minutes to go until race start. Although there were quite a few legitimate contenders (probably even more than last year), nobody wanted to take the lead. This time, I didn't either.
At exactly 0400, off we went, and I settled in with what ended up being the lead pack as we held a comfortable pace over the first few road miles. We turned off onto our first trail, I switched my headlamp to high, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I wasn't losing ground. I was also an indeterminate kind of surprised that while I was running near Jason Lantz, he brought up my New Jersey Marathon blog entry, and asked me if I was going to try to qualify for Boston 2014 again (most likely, yes). Sometimes I forget that some people read this thing.
Before I could really think too hard about anything that was happening, it was daylight, and I was motoring along a technical downhill trail section to Edinburg Gap with the rest of the lead pack. As we came through the aid station, I looked at my watch - right at 2 hours. Having studied splits from previous years, this was about on pace to go sub-20 hours, which, in my fear-filled mind, was too fast.
I backed off a bit in the next section, not as much because I had to, but because I wanted to, and a few more people passed me. I was still making decent progress, picking through rocks and enjoying the scenery that I could within the motion blur, but I was also gradually starting to feel worse. By the time I hit Elizabeth Furnace, the 33-ish mile mark, at just over 6 hours, I felt as though the wheels might already be coming off. My stomach wasn't feeling right, my legs were feeling weak, and if somebody had told me that I could stop at that moment, I would have done it without hesitation, curled up in a ball, and fallen asleep right there, on top of rocks, dirt, bugs, whatever.
People at the Elizabeth Furnace aid station were saying that I looked okay. I felt awful. As I forced myself into a very uncomfortable jog out of the aid station, distinct thoughts of "this is a cruel, sick endeavor" and "why on earth would anybody subject themselves to this?" were first and foremost in my mind. I tried to convince myself intellectually, rationally, that I could do this, but my body was protesting loudly about going beyond the marathon distance. I tried to figure out why on earth I felt this way. Had I accidentally ingested some sunscreen? Maybe something bad in last night's dinner? Lack of sleep? I had no answers, other than to keep moving forward.
I reached Veach Gap, not-so-fresh off of a gravel road slog that I desparately wanted to walk, but compelled myself to mostly run, to find Jon Loewus-Deitch working the aid station. He came towards me to give me a hug, and then, barely touching me, recoiled with an unabashed "ew, you're gross" . . . which, that far into the race, was probably pretty true. Still, the whole incident amused me enough that I was at least a little bit distracted on the ensuing climb out of the aid station. That didn't last for the entire climb, though, so the best I could do was hope that the drop down the back side of the mountain to the Indian Grave aid station would be a welcome break. And it was, if you count stubbing your toes on multiple rocks and struggling not to fall on your face a "break" from a never-ending uphill grind.
And there I was, just past Indian Grave, on an almost 4-mile road section, feeling more and more broken by the minute. The race director passed me in a truck, heading towards me. I tried to smile and wave, but my walking a flat road section betrayed the very strong instinct to beg for a ride back to camp in the truck. Matt Bugin passed me on the road section, and, in reference to the Hammer Nutrition shirt that I was wearing, quipped "C'mon! It's Hammer Time!" It was at that point in the race that I couldn't understand how anybody could do this sort of thing, let alone be so cheerful doing it. I let Matt pass, and when he said "I'll see you again later," I responded with a very definitive "maybe."
Sometimes, knowing the course is a bad thing. When the road finally ended, at Habron Gap, I knew what was next - a 10-mile stretch between there and Camp Roosevelt, the easiest drop-out point, containing dozens of nasty rock-ridden surprises. On the one hand, I wanted to drop at Habron Gap. I wanted to drop at the previous three aid stations. On the other hand, dropping at Habron Gap meant a much longer drive-of-shame back than dropping at Camp Roosevelt. The 10 miles ahead were somehow the lesser of the evils.
As I trudged up the mountain, it took every bit of willpower to make forward progress. Near the top, the only thing that worked was to focus on a patch of ground two feet in front of me, and tell myself to put my foot there, again, and again, and again. When I reached the top, exhausted, I sat down on a rock for about two minutes to collect myself. Nobody else was around. I closed my eyes and I felt my entire body tingle and buzz. I was close to blackout. I was close to failure.
But, sticking to my easy drop-out plan, I couldn't stop there, so I stood up, and somehow felt a little better, so I kept moving towards Camp Roosevelt. Somewhere on the interminable yellow trail to the Camp Roosevelt aid station, Keith Knipling, who has finished this race something like 13 times, passed me and asked how I was. I told him bad, and that I was feeling slow. He said "well, just keep moving forward," and he kept moving forward. It was at this point that somehow, the apparent pointlessness of this endeavor had lifted. Keith had done this many times before. He had most likely had bad days here. I had a bad day here in 2010. Somehow, I was going to find a way to do better, if for no other reason than for the sake of doing better. That was the logic, and that was the plan. I started to run again. Before long, I had caught Keith, passed him, and reached the aid station.
When I arrived at Camp Roosevelt, at around quarter after 5, I found myself, time-wise, in nearly the same situation as I had been in last year. And last year, I had run under 24 hours. Last year, I had come through feeling much more under control, but I wasn't totally out of this year's race yet. Mark Rodriguez said that he thought I normally came through there around 2 pm. Z said that I looked a lot better at this point in the race than I did back in 2010. It's all relative, I suppose. Being on the edge of a total breakdown, the best commentary I could manage on my condition was "hangin' in there," which became my go-to line for the rest of the race whenever anybody asked me how I was doing. And before too much navel-gazing could take place (or before Keith could beat me out of the aid station, for that matter), I was off and running again.
At this point, the race blurs quite a bit. My focus shifted from the impossible to the plausible. I had somehow come in under 24 hours last year, with a similar start time-wise, so it had to be plausible to do it again. I distinctly recalled sections of the race where I had walked when I could have run instead, and about how much time I estimated I would have saved by running. I reasoned that there was margin under the 24-hour line if I just stuck with it. And I really wanted to be under that line, because I didn't want to be out there any longer than I had to.
I kept moving forward, and I kept focused. I was going to have to keep trying things with pace and nutrition until something stuck and I didn't feel so terrible. I tried to enjoy the pleasant things - the breeze on Kerns Mountain was refreshing, and I kept both of my contact lenses this time around. At the Visitor Center aid station, Jackie Palmer and her friend found me some Listerine strips, so that I didn't have to taste stale Gatorade (at least for ten or fifteen minutes). The momentum kept building. And I kept passing people. By the time I reached the Picnic Area, Mile 90-ish, I was in the aid station with two people who were ahead of me still there. The thought of getting out before they did, and gaining ground, was too exciting to prevent me from rapidly downing two cups of water, a banana chunk, and a cup of Coke, then nearly throwing it up a quarter-mile later. (I dry-heaved three times, then rode the adrenaline surge all the way down the trail to the road crossing.)
After one more mountain crossing, as I hauled down the road to Gap Creek, just over six miles to go, somehow running comfortably, it occurred to me that this was pretty much the definition of "hanging in there," which is a thing that my Dad says a lot when somebody asks him how he's doing. I used to look at it as a way of deferring a "real" answer to the question. At that point, I had a profound realization that a lot of the time, it probably was the "real" answer to the question. "Hanging in there" is definitely a state of being, where clear "good" and "bad" don't exist, but you keep going anyway. In this case, all the way to Gap Creek, where I did actually see Matt Bugin again . . . sitting by the fire. Maybe he had gotten there ahead of me and was resting briefly, maybe he had dropped hours ago. I didn't know which. I didn't want to find out right now. I wanted to finish the race.
And, with a huge surge of energy, I attacked the last section. Up Jawbone Gap one more time, much more briskly than the first go-around, even though it wasn't very much cooler at almost 2 am, down the rocky backside, and on to the gravel road to the finish.
I hit the gravel road running strong. The night was dead-silent, save for the crunch of gravel under my feet. The only light was my headlamp. Nobody was nearby. As I scanned the horizon, looking for the next reflective confidence marker, my footsteps quickened. Impossibly, after hours of pointless suffering, I had found a way. It took only 99+ miles of forward progress on foot to re-discover the pure physical pleasure that running can be when it's done just right. And, for the first time ever in the last few miles of an ultra, I didn't really want the race to end. I felt as though I could have kept on running down that dark road for hours.
So I had to make do with finishing strong, in 22 hours, 54 minutes, and 48 seconds, nearly 40 minutes faster than last year's time, 7th place overall, with Mark Rodriguez and Chris Avedissian, who's been a fantastic crew person since Old Dominion 2008, waiting for me at the finish line. Since I was in the "solo" divison, they couldn't help me during the race, but they were immense help afterwards, even though I didn't collapse into a ball on the ground or throw up in a trash can, as is customarily the case. I tried to sleep, but all of the energy that I had suddenly found at the end of the race refused to be pent-up, so I hung out with Mark and Chris until they had to sleep, then hung around the finish line and watched more people come in - in particular, Sniper, for his 10th finish, and Shannon MacGregor, sticking out a tough race to come in under the 36-hour cutoff.
And that, I'd say, is the day that I learned the true meaning of "hanging in there." Thanks, Dad, for that one. Considering how poorly the Club Challenge 10-Miler went at the end of February, it's hard to believe that in the relatively short interim, I've been able to turn things around so much. I'm starting to feel excited about Badwater (cautiously excited, of course). The plan, as it were, seems to be working. That's the power of "hanging in there."
And finally, related to Badwater, just a reminder that you can make donations to G-PACT, my Badwater charity, here: http://www.firstgiving.com/G-PACT/david-ploskonka-badwater . . . it'd make my pointless suffering just a little bit more meaningful, and I'm sure that my little sister, who suffers from gastroparesis, would appreciate it, too!
Monday, May 20, 2013
Sunday, May 5, 2013
New Jersey Marathon Fail Report
This is not at all what I wanted to be writing right now, so I'm going to do my best to get this out of the way quickly, without terribly compromising the quality of my writing. (It probably won't turn out to be either, though.) Here goes:
First, if a picture is still worth a thousand words, then this one more or less spares you from having to read the rest of this:
(Yes, it cost $5.00 to get out of the giant parking lot at Monmouth Park after the race.)
The longer version, starting with the acknowledgments and disclaimers: Yes, it is, by many accounts, "stupid" to try to run two marathons in two weeks, even if the first marathon felt like only a moderately difficult training run. Yes, people have the right to charge whatever they want for a marathon, and since people are willing to pay a lot, registration fees keep going up. Yes, there are no guarantees that even on what you think will be your best day, you will actually perform.
All that said, leading up to the Kentucky Derby Marathon last week, and especially after the race, if you had asked me what sort of shape I thought I was in, I would have answered, in all honesty, 2:50 shape. My legs felt exactly the way they did before Boston in 2011, where I went just under 2:50 (which, at the time, I didn't think was even remotely possible). So even though I had run a marathon a week before this one, I felt that, as a "flat, fast course," this was a good opportunity to qualify for Boston. And, with my upcoming ultras, starting with the MMT 100 in two weeks, leading up to Badwater in July, this was just about the only opportunity to qualify for Boston before my legs will be too trashed from running ultras to run a fast marathon. (Remember, that qualifier has to be in by an unspecified time in early September, and it better be good.)
So even though over the past week, my legs felt just a little flat (but by no means wrecked), and I was sick on Friday with some sort of stomach bug, and I spent most of Friday and Saturday getting yelled at by somebody who will remain unspecified, which (to cut short a much longer story) culminated in $84 of tickets, and a $125 tow job (which, as an aside, makes me angrier than just about anything else on this earth, as people in the towing business are the lowest scum on earth), I still drove 4+ hours to Nowhere, New Jersey on Saturday afternoon, so I could pay $155 to register for this bad marathon. At this point, I was feeling like the whole thing was baloney. (The expo was, quite literally, as the only edible samples there were . . . bologna. Seriously.)
Outside of all of that was a lodging mess. People were in, then people were out, and I did finally find a place to stay, but they didn't need to make me the subject of derision (albeit somewhat rightly so) when they found out that I paid $155 to run this marathon to try to qualify for Boston. (As pacers, they were running for free, which is probably about what this race is really worth.)
In spite of all of that, I managed to make it to the 5 a.m. wake-up call, so that we could spend an hour and a half driving what should have been 45 minutes to the start of the race, complicated by the single-point-of-entry parking system. (In truth, we pulled some questionably legal maneuvers that shaved about an hour off of our parking time - otherwise, we would have been scrambling to get to the starting line.)
And in spite of all of that, I managed to be smiling and enthusiastic about a situation that, objectively, was pretty much bullshit. I was the only one in the sparsely populated "A" corral smiling and singing along to "Sweet Caroline," in my discarded women's sweater-shawl (courtesy of anonymous half-marathoners flush with disposable clothing). Everbody else looked nervous, scared, and cold. For me, in spite of a lot of garbage in every other aspect of my life, there was still joy in racing.
And for the first 20 miles of the race, I felt in control. I felt strong. I felt like I was really going to do this. While I wasn't out super-fast (just over 1:30 at the half, and 2:18 at 20 miles), I felt as though it was a controlled effort. The course really was pancake flat, although being near the shore, it was not without the wind-to-the-face, particularly when the course snaked in the direction of the shore, which it did quite often after the half-marathon mark, to add mileage without having to close down any more of New Jersey.
But somewhere between mile 20 and mile 22, the wheels started falling off. Things started hurting, my form faltered, my stride rate slowed, the wind-to-the-face intensified, and by the time I hit the 22 mile mark, the clock said 2:37, and I was broken. I contemplated my options, which included muscling through, maybe salvaging an 8-minute mile pace, and finishing in around . . . 3:10. As if I haven't already failed three times to qualify since October running approximately 3:10 (Baltimore: 3:09:27, NCR: 3:11:something, Rock N Roll USA: 3:07:12). This was painful. I had no gas left in the tank. This was no longer fun.
So I chose instead to reduce the pain level and try to death-march my way to hopefully less than a 3:40, but this random woman would not let me quit. She claimed to be hurting a lot, and was reduced to run-walking (how she got so far ahead of me is beyond me, although there many opportunities to cut the course, not that I'm accusing anybody of anything), but she wasn't hurting so much that she couldn't periodically come up from behind me when she was walking, push me in the back, and tell me to keep moving. She wanted to finish the race with me. I wanted to be anywhere but there. I would run ahead, get tired, start walking, and just hope that she wouldn't come up behind me again. But she always would. And it would start all over again.
As I got closer to the finish, more than enough other people came up behind me as I walked, patted me on the back, and told me to "c'mon, run." What part of "3:05 was ten minutes ago" don't you understand? I thought to myself. At one point, I said some unkind words to one of them out loud, which a couple of clearly non-runner passerbys actually smiled at. It was the first smile that I had seen from anybody all race, which made me feel a little better, until I looked down at my shirt and noticed that my right nipple had bled all over my shirt, probably the worst nipple bleed I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of them. No wonder people were giving me horrified looks all day.
Eventually, like everything else in this life, the race ended, just after the random push-in-the-back woman sprinted past me (she wanted it more). I ran a 3:25:something, but who really cares, the point was that it was over.
For my trouble, I got a huge heavy albatross . . . er, medal, hung over my neck, a bottle of water, a banana, a tiny chocolate chip granola bar, and three pieces of saltwater taffy, each of which were half-stuck to the wax paper wrapper. Pretty lame, New Jersey. As soon as practicable, I sat down on the sidewalk by the ocean, waiting for my ride, and the inevitable post-race shivers (it was windy and 50) to come. I didn't have to wait long for either, as the slowest was pacing 3:30. In the meantime, I put my head on my knees, blocking out the sunlight, and contemplated my lot in life. I drove many hours and spent way too much money on this. There was nipple blood on my shirt and salt on my face and I reeked of A&D ointment. I was a smelly, sloppy failure.
I got out as fast as I could, considering that it was a mile walk to a shuttle bus to the parking area, and now I'm here in Baltimore writing this, after a distinctly unsatisfying round of Taco Bell, the only thing that seemed appetizing when I finally regained my appetite. (I again no longer have an appetite after that.)
So I'm sure that this all comes off as a disorganized pity party. I entirely acknowledge that. But I guess that's the thing about racing. You set goals and make plans and you hope that they work out. And when they do work out, you look really awesome and you feel really great and life is beautiful. And when they don't work out, at best, you're left scratching your head wondering why they went awry, or, worse yet, you're ashamed and humiliated.
Five attempts to qualify for Boston since October 2012. Baltimore, NCR, George Washington Birthday, Rock N Roll USA, New Jersey. Hundreds of dollars in race fees, hundreds of miles of driving, over 16 hours of wasted running. So why keep trying?
Well, I'd like to go back to a sentence that you either skipped or probably already forgot by now. The one where I talked about singing and smiling in the starting corral, not because I'm always a singing, smiling kind of guy, but because of the gratitude that I had for being on the starting line, in spite of a lot of bad stuff, and the opportunity to do something really awesome. Standing there today, I secretly hoped that Boston 2011 wasn't just some sort of wind-aided fluke, and that I had the potential to run 2:50, or even faster.
Today, it didn't work out that way. And at the risk of the terrifying potential that it may never work out that way again, I stubbornly, and perhaps foolishly, choose to believe that with continued hard work, and a little luck, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . . it just might. (So go ahead and throw stones.)
First, if a picture is still worth a thousand words, then this one more or less spares you from having to read the rest of this:
(Yes, it cost $5.00 to get out of the giant parking lot at Monmouth Park after the race.)
The longer version, starting with the acknowledgments and disclaimers: Yes, it is, by many accounts, "stupid" to try to run two marathons in two weeks, even if the first marathon felt like only a moderately difficult training run. Yes, people have the right to charge whatever they want for a marathon, and since people are willing to pay a lot, registration fees keep going up. Yes, there are no guarantees that even on what you think will be your best day, you will actually perform.
All that said, leading up to the Kentucky Derby Marathon last week, and especially after the race, if you had asked me what sort of shape I thought I was in, I would have answered, in all honesty, 2:50 shape. My legs felt exactly the way they did before Boston in 2011, where I went just under 2:50 (which, at the time, I didn't think was even remotely possible). So even though I had run a marathon a week before this one, I felt that, as a "flat, fast course," this was a good opportunity to qualify for Boston. And, with my upcoming ultras, starting with the MMT 100 in two weeks, leading up to Badwater in July, this was just about the only opportunity to qualify for Boston before my legs will be too trashed from running ultras to run a fast marathon. (Remember, that qualifier has to be in by an unspecified time in early September, and it better be good.)
So even though over the past week, my legs felt just a little flat (but by no means wrecked), and I was sick on Friday with some sort of stomach bug, and I spent most of Friday and Saturday getting yelled at by somebody who will remain unspecified, which (to cut short a much longer story) culminated in $84 of tickets, and a $125 tow job (which, as an aside, makes me angrier than just about anything else on this earth, as people in the towing business are the lowest scum on earth), I still drove 4+ hours to Nowhere, New Jersey on Saturday afternoon, so I could pay $155 to register for this bad marathon. At this point, I was feeling like the whole thing was baloney. (The expo was, quite literally, as the only edible samples there were . . . bologna. Seriously.)
Outside of all of that was a lodging mess. People were in, then people were out, and I did finally find a place to stay, but they didn't need to make me the subject of derision (albeit somewhat rightly so) when they found out that I paid $155 to run this marathon to try to qualify for Boston. (As pacers, they were running for free, which is probably about what this race is really worth.)
In spite of all of that, I managed to make it to the 5 a.m. wake-up call, so that we could spend an hour and a half driving what should have been 45 minutes to the start of the race, complicated by the single-point-of-entry parking system. (In truth, we pulled some questionably legal maneuvers that shaved about an hour off of our parking time - otherwise, we would have been scrambling to get to the starting line.)
And in spite of all of that, I managed to be smiling and enthusiastic about a situation that, objectively, was pretty much bullshit. I was the only one in the sparsely populated "A" corral smiling and singing along to "Sweet Caroline," in my discarded women's sweater-shawl (courtesy of anonymous half-marathoners flush with disposable clothing). Everbody else looked nervous, scared, and cold. For me, in spite of a lot of garbage in every other aspect of my life, there was still joy in racing.
And for the first 20 miles of the race, I felt in control. I felt strong. I felt like I was really going to do this. While I wasn't out super-fast (just over 1:30 at the half, and 2:18 at 20 miles), I felt as though it was a controlled effort. The course really was pancake flat, although being near the shore, it was not without the wind-to-the-face, particularly when the course snaked in the direction of the shore, which it did quite often after the half-marathon mark, to add mileage without having to close down any more of New Jersey.
But somewhere between mile 20 and mile 22, the wheels started falling off. Things started hurting, my form faltered, my stride rate slowed, the wind-to-the-face intensified, and by the time I hit the 22 mile mark, the clock said 2:37, and I was broken. I contemplated my options, which included muscling through, maybe salvaging an 8-minute mile pace, and finishing in around . . . 3:10. As if I haven't already failed three times to qualify since October running approximately 3:10 (Baltimore: 3:09:27, NCR: 3:11:something, Rock N Roll USA: 3:07:12). This was painful. I had no gas left in the tank. This was no longer fun.
So I chose instead to reduce the pain level and try to death-march my way to hopefully less than a 3:40, but this random woman would not let me quit. She claimed to be hurting a lot, and was reduced to run-walking (how she got so far ahead of me is beyond me, although there many opportunities to cut the course, not that I'm accusing anybody of anything), but she wasn't hurting so much that she couldn't periodically come up from behind me when she was walking, push me in the back, and tell me to keep moving. She wanted to finish the race with me. I wanted to be anywhere but there. I would run ahead, get tired, start walking, and just hope that she wouldn't come up behind me again. But she always would. And it would start all over again.
As I got closer to the finish, more than enough other people came up behind me as I walked, patted me on the back, and told me to "c'mon, run." What part of "3:05 was ten minutes ago" don't you understand? I thought to myself. At one point, I said some unkind words to one of them out loud, which a couple of clearly non-runner passerbys actually smiled at. It was the first smile that I had seen from anybody all race, which made me feel a little better, until I looked down at my shirt and noticed that my right nipple had bled all over my shirt, probably the worst nipple bleed I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of them. No wonder people were giving me horrified looks all day.
Eventually, like everything else in this life, the race ended, just after the random push-in-the-back woman sprinted past me (she wanted it more). I ran a 3:25:something, but who really cares, the point was that it was over.
For my trouble, I got a huge heavy albatross . . . er, medal, hung over my neck, a bottle of water, a banana, a tiny chocolate chip granola bar, and three pieces of saltwater taffy, each of which were half-stuck to the wax paper wrapper. Pretty lame, New Jersey. As soon as practicable, I sat down on the sidewalk by the ocean, waiting for my ride, and the inevitable post-race shivers (it was windy and 50) to come. I didn't have to wait long for either, as the slowest was pacing 3:30. In the meantime, I put my head on my knees, blocking out the sunlight, and contemplated my lot in life. I drove many hours and spent way too much money on this. There was nipple blood on my shirt and salt on my face and I reeked of A&D ointment. I was a smelly, sloppy failure.
I got out as fast as I could, considering that it was a mile walk to a shuttle bus to the parking area, and now I'm here in Baltimore writing this, after a distinctly unsatisfying round of Taco Bell, the only thing that seemed appetizing when I finally regained my appetite. (I again no longer have an appetite after that.)
So I'm sure that this all comes off as a disorganized pity party. I entirely acknowledge that. But I guess that's the thing about racing. You set goals and make plans and you hope that they work out. And when they do work out, you look really awesome and you feel really great and life is beautiful. And when they don't work out, at best, you're left scratching your head wondering why they went awry, or, worse yet, you're ashamed and humiliated.
Five attempts to qualify for Boston since October 2012. Baltimore, NCR, George Washington Birthday, Rock N Roll USA, New Jersey. Hundreds of dollars in race fees, hundreds of miles of driving, over 16 hours of wasted running. So why keep trying?
Well, I'd like to go back to a sentence that you either skipped or probably already forgot by now. The one where I talked about singing and smiling in the starting corral, not because I'm always a singing, smiling kind of guy, but because of the gratitude that I had for being on the starting line, in spite of a lot of bad stuff, and the opportunity to do something really awesome. Standing there today, I secretly hoped that Boston 2011 wasn't just some sort of wind-aided fluke, and that I had the potential to run 2:50, or even faster.
Today, it didn't work out that way. And at the risk of the terrifying potential that it may never work out that way again, I stubbornly, and perhaps foolishly, choose to believe that with continued hard work, and a little luck, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . . it just might. (So go ahead and throw stones.)
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