THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 1315 miles or so I c ould f eel m yself tiring, but it didn’t seem d ifferent in
kind from other t imes I ’d b een tired — worse, but n ot u nimaginably
so. I trudged on.
Then, somewhere around Mile 20, with no special warning, my
soul died and went to hell and left my body sailing inertially on. The
people and houses I passed grew flat and unreal, resembling
cardboard cutouts badly pasted to a stark backdrop, an effect
reminiscent of cheaply slapped-together cartoons that in my
childhood had made me sad in ways I couldn’t express when I
watched them on UHF stations on winter weekday afternoons that
darkened to evening by 4 o’clock. I became confused about time
and distance and could not for the life of me figure out how much
farther I had to run and how much longer it would take. I settled on
a rough estimate of forever and forever, respectively. I didn’t know
about the effects of glycogen depletion, so I vaguely assumed that I
just happened to b e suffering a sudden delusional break w ith reality
while I happened to be running a marathon, but I was too addled to
be more than a little curious about the coincidence.
No matter how awful I felt — and indeed I felt more awful than I
ever had in my entire life — I retained just enough sense to realize
that continuing to feel this way was preferable to hating myself
forever if I quit. I was also dully aware of hating Charles a g reat deal,
and of hating myself for letting him trick me into this death march
that I now had to see through to the finish. Furious, perplexed,
betrayed, self-pitying, I sulked onward.
Mostly, I was looking forward to not having to run anymore, in a
way that I h ad never looked forward to anything else, ever. B ut I was
still going as fast as I could, albeit in a self-parodic undersea
fashion. Having started out at something like a six-minute-mile
pace with Charles, I probably clocked more like 10 minutes apiece
for the last couple of miles. Eventually the finish line came into
view, and I plodded in a haze across it. There were nightmarishly
chipper people there who put around my shoulders a foil-like
anti-shock wrap of the s ort they put o n weeping survivors of natural
disasters. Faces swam into my balky vision, and tinny, flat buzzing
voices kept asking if I was okay, which annoyed me because it
confused me even more. Now that I no longer had to keep running,
everything was fine, obviously. In fact, seeing the finish line and
knowing that I could stop running when I crossed it and then
actually ceasing to run when I crossed it ranked among the most
intense pleasures I had ever experienced.
There were things to eat and drink in the finish area, all of which
caused every individual cell in my body to want to vomit when I
considered ingesting them. I’m not a big orange juice m an, but all o f
me wanted orange juice and o nly orange juice. When I finally found
a convenience store and drank some down, my cells were like,
“Jesus H. Christ, that’s what we’re talking about,” and my head
cleared and I returned to an approximation of my normal self, only
constructed out of jerky and sawdust. We were staying in a not
entirely convincing north-country-sporty-resorty hotel, which had
whirlpools in the bathtubs. I had to use my hands to lift my dead
legs over the side to get into the tub. I spent a very long time in it,
immersed up to the eyes like a gator, thinking about how to do
better next time.O
ver the next few years, I learned how to run a marathon. In
training, I did speed work at the track every once in a while
— not often enough and not fast enough, but more than
before — and built up to longer and longer Sunday runs. I got used
to carrying and eating packets of goo in the first half of a race to
stave off glycogen depletion, a condition of crisis known among
endurance athletes as “bonking,” and I learned to shake down andthe time as a s trategic a pproach to my first marathon, especially o ne
I hadn’t trained for, it had the virtue of being easy to remember. I
snatched paper cups from the volunteers at some of the water
stations, but I couldn’t get the hang of drinking while running and
didn’t want to stop, so I spilled most of the contents. I didn’t have
any of the nutrient goo that marathoners eat to re-up on calories,
and I resented that everyone else seemed to be drawing reptilian
strength from theirs.
The course doubled back on itself, and the same hill rose up
ahead. This thing again? Fine, whatever; up we go, and down. After
The author running his first marathon, in
Burlington, Vt., in 2008.PHOTO: ACTION SPORTS INTERNATIONAL/COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR