london marathon, or, living through a racing nightmare

marathon related nightmares are not a new concept to me. as you can see from the entry from october 4th, before new york city marathon i assembled a small collection of fairly vivid nightmares that kept me from sleeping properly many nights before my first big race. strangely, i can't recall having any such nightmares before my second marathon in london. instead, it seems as though nightmares were reserved for the race day itself..

when i woke up on marathon morning, my dad peaked into the room i was staying in and announced that him, my mom and my brother - who were all in london to cheer me on - are coming with me to the start. i immediately found the idea of having an entire entourage with me quite hilarious. but, i was in a foreign country with no one to chat with at the start. why not let them come?

there were 3 ways to get to the marathon start in greenwich - 2 different trains options and 1 bus - all 3 endorsed by the race organizers. team AK decided to take the faster, more direct train, leaving extra early to allow time for bathroom, bag check, prayers, etc. to take that train, we first needed to take the tube to canary warf and change. on our way to canary warf, i was thinking to myself that everything is a bit off. i am in london with my family. they are travelling with me to the marathon start line. it is 75 degrees outside. i spent all of yesterday sightseeing in london and my legs are killing me. my brother keeps taking photos of me, as if he was making a documentary about this. i haven't been to the bathroom in two days. did i mention it's 75 degrees outside?

after we got to canary warf, we followed a big group of runners that seemed to be heading in the direction of the train to greenwich. i thought to myself: if all else fails, just follow the crowd. ironically, it was only a few minutes later that it became clear that the crowd, which me and my entourage submerged into, was terribly wrong: the train from canary warf to greenwich was not running.

one hour before the start, we needed to reassess. do we go back to central london and take train #2, or take the tube to north greenwich, where we catch a local bus to greenwich? the crowd was split on the issue and the race officials we ran into had no idea (!?!). oh what the hell.. i guess north greenwich was closer to greenwich, so that's where we went.

after getting off the tube at north greenwich, a soothing female voice announced that due to road closures the bus to greenwich is not running. nor are cabs. for all practical purposes she may have as well said "you're fucked." and now what? once again it was time to defer to the crowd and see what everyone else thinks - and everyone else started walking to greenwich - a lovely three mile walk on a warm sunday morning!

what followed was almost like a scene from little miss sunshine: the four of us race-walking three miles, me taking off my clothes while walking, my mom holding the vaseline, my brother in charge of GU, my dad carrying my coke and my bag. i couldn't help but laugh the entire time. eventually, after consuming and applying all the necessary products and materials, i couldn't hold myself anymore and started jogging to the start, leaving my prep team behind, an effort which quickly came to a halt once i got to a hill, on top of which the marathon village was situated - 160 feet high, to be precise. between the walking and hill climbing, i kept thinking to myself: this would be a great warm up before a 5K, perhaps.

needless to say, i essentially missed the start of the race. after dropping off my bag i ran towards to crowd, by which point the starting zones had been dissolved (i had number 2 out of 9, by the way), people were cheering and after i squeezed into the crowd of costume-wearing walkers (numbers 8 and 9, mostly), we started moving at a pace that remotely resembled a jog. after crossing the start line i knocked a few people over ("new york asshole!") and found my way to the side walk in an attempt to move faster.. i ran close to 10 miles like this: hopping on and off side walks (sometimes running behind the spectators), dodging people, using the thin space between the runners and spectators on the left (often screaming out to warn kids with eagerly and fully extended hands to create space for me), endlessly repeating "excuse me, excuse me, on your left".. however, by mile 4 the writing was very clearly on the wall: i was a full minute behind my pace and the crowding was not getting any better.

eventually i started facing a whole new problem. perhaps it was mental exhaustion from trying to get by people or my legs got tired from going back and forth between mini-sprints when possible and slow running when i got trapped between people, or maybe it was the miserable heat after a full training season of freezing temperatures. or, alas, the fact that i couldn't train properly in the last few weeks before the race due to my achilles tendon finally caught up with me.

whatever it was - by mile 13 i was ready to stop, same way i felt in new york at mile 20. how could i have hit the wall so soon? knowing that 3:10 isn't happening by any stretch of imagination didn't help and the only thing that i was focusing on at this point was my family who was supposed to be waiting for me at miles 15 and 18 (there was an out and back element at one point in the course). after not seeing them i looked for new reasons to keep running. 8 more fucking miles and i want to stop. why am i doing this? i will never run again, ever. at mile 20 i finally walked a bit. and then at mile 21. and 22, 24 and 25. i drank and poured so much water over myself i felt like i was swimming but at this point i knew that even if i crawled, i was gonna cross that damn finish line.

after the finish i was overcome with so much happiness i started laughing. i hugged my parents and my brother with so much enthusiasm they thought i went mad. i'm done with this disaster of a race, i didn't get injured, and i'm with my family - what could be better?

i briefly considered how great it would have been to come in at 3:10, qualify for boston and start thinking about running sub-3 in new york, how to improve my training, etc, etc. but seriously - whatever. maybe one day i will, and maybe not. and maybe it shouldn't (doesn't?) matter so much. for now, i am ready to just chill the hell out. and keep running.

update re: decision #2

so!

finally i got around to setting up my fundraising website for the london marathon. as the counter on the left hand side shows right now, there are only 60 days left until the big day. check out the site here and gimme gimme gimme some cash!

as you will notice, i kicked the campaign off by donating 200 pounds sterling, as promised in the previous entry. let the fundraising begin!!

oh, and update re: decisions #1 coming soon...

decisions and declarations

this may look and sound a bit silly but in the last 12 hours i made a few decisions which i would like to declare to the whole wide world in the hope that if i put them in writing i will have a higher chance of sticking to them. so - here they are:

decision # 1: i will be vegan for a week.

this one has been brewing in me since last weekend and i was finally tipped off this morning at 10:08. here's the story: last sunday i organized a small brunch at my place for a few friends and as it happens, one of them is vegan. despite being a fairly confident cook and baker, i was rather clueless about what constitutes a vegan breakfast. eggs and... wait, no eggs. no milk. no cheese. no meat, needless to say. ugh. so i started researching online. after desparate and unsuccessful attempts to find good recipes in my online recipe destination of choice (www.allrecipes.com), i finally googled "vegan baking" and what did i find? the first link unlocked the secrets of it all. with some clever substitutions i managed to bake some pretty delishious rosemary biscuits and orange blueberry scones, if i may say so myself.

i was mildly amused and surprised when this morning i received an email from a friend of mine with a link to an article in the times profiling the author of the aforementioned website that saved me from serving vegetables only during last weekend's brunch.

here is the email exchange that ensued:

me: "i stumbled upon her site (theppk.com) when doing research for last weekend's brunch and liked it a lot... wanna get the cupcake book... i have to admit that all this research into vegan baking and reading about it has made me want to experiment with veganism... would you like to try a one week experiment with me?"

friend: "I would, but honestly I’m not ready to be vegan again :) And the thing is, meals I can handle. Soy milk in my cappuccino, I cannot."

me: "Good point. I sorta love the self-torturous challenge of it. And love vegetables. And kinda love how you have to get real creative. Hmm."

few clicks later, the little helpers in amazon warehouses were alerted about my purchase of her 2 books ("vegan cupcakes take over the world" and "vegan with a vengeance"). i am going to do it for a week and see what happens.

decision # 2: i will donate the $450 i won in poker yesterday to a charity.

ok - the fact that my job is a bit weird is obvious from several things. i get here at 7am. i rarely leave before 7pm. when we have a "bad day" that means we lost the equivalent of the GDP of a small african nation. perhaps that's an exaggeration, but you get the point. however, the fact that yesterday, during work hours, me and 6 of my coworkers, including my direct boss and the CEO, decided to play a game of poker is outright abnormal. i could have backed out and looked like a total scary-cat loser with no balls. instead, i hesitantly swallowed, ran to the ATM and paid $100 to play like a real man (who begged the big boss to lower the buy-in from an absurd amount of $300 and succeeded).

the game itself was incredible. i have played many times before but not with this much money. when i won my first big hand i was shaking so much that the other players had to help me collect my chips. not exactly how a professional gambler behaves but perhaps it helped me fool them into thinking that i have no idea what i am doing. and for the most part i actually did not. i lost all my money. all of it, except for one chip. one single chip which turned into 5, which turned into 10, and so on and so forth until, eventually, i went all in - and won. wow. it was the most nerve wrecking way to make $450 but i did it. i took the money and rushed out to a dinner meeting where the whole time i could feel the warmth of my hard earned cash in the pocket of my pants. the excitement was so powerful that at 9pm after the dinner meeting i had the energy to get on the treadmill and run 9 miles, 5K of which i did in 20 minutes! seriously, what a day!

ok, i know $450 is not a million dollars, but it is a nice sum to come to so suddenly. and as i was dashing away on the treadmill i got to thinking about what would be the best use of the money. then i realized the money would actually pay for a decent chunk of the donation i need to get for my london marathon charity entry. can i actually bring myself to just give away so much money? i decided that since several hours ago i was essentially ready to lose $100 and now i had $450 extra in my pocket as long as i treat it as money i never had, i will survive. and after all, it will help me run the marathon, so it is still quite selfish. oh well, easy come, easy go. my real hope is that my donation will prompt other people to donate like crazy once i start the fund raising. and the charity will remember me forever as the guy who raised an absurd amount of money and will make a little statue of me when i die. so really, it's completely selfish.

:)

annals of an obsession

it all started on november 5th. after crossing the finish line of the nyc marathon, which has yet to see its own detailed entry, on my way to the family reunion area, i noticed a runner walking next to me. he was tall and thin - perfect runner physique - and had a charming face. he looked sort of familiar, but at the time i ascribed this familiarity to his prototypical runner body. i could tell the race took a toll on him as he was not in very high spirits. i empathized: the joy from the accomplishment was still overshadowed by sheer physical pain. a quick look at his official transparent bag revealed a 3 digit number - which in a 37,000-people race is a clue to a very fast runner. sweet. we even exchanged a few words: he told me a brazilian male runner won the race but didn't know who the female winner was. he asked how my race went. it was a promising start. sadly, then we hit the reunion area, he reunited with his family while i reunited with mine - that is, my best friend who came to pick up whatever was left of me after pulling me with an invisible string for 2 miles after 24th mile. the day went on, i celebrated in several different locations, stories were told, food was eaten, alcohol was drunk (ouch)... the encounter with the beautiful runner was almost entirely forgotten. almost.

several days later, as i was dealing with millions of things that descended upon me at work while struggling with soreness and somewhat of a marathon-enduced post-partem depression, i remembered him - the 3-digit beauty. i remembered that despite my soreness at the finish line i managed to memorize his number and 3 clicks later i found out that he finished the race in 2:38 - and his name. and then i moved on, once again.

it took several more days of post-marathon malaise before it hit me: google him. can't hurt, right?

wow.

some people have generic names, which, when googled, lead to 65.3 million hits, among which, probably somewhere at the very end, is a page or two that are actually relevant to the subject being studied. other people have very specific names which yield 5 sites, all of which are highly relevant to the stalkee. three digits, as i came to call him, was an interesting combination of these two types of people: his name was highly unique and yet yielded quite literally hundreds of fascinating websites. for the next couple of hours i became fully immersed in his life.

that he is my age was no news to me - i saw that on the marathon results page. however, i was stunned to find out that that the true reason why he seemed so familiar was that he was my classmate in college. but he wasn't just any classmate. he was on the track team and he was an honors scholar with a major in cognitive neuroscience. while those 2 things are essentially the definition of socially deficient dorkdom, to me they served as immense turn-ons: a runner with a brain! in addition to being smart and fast, he was also the son of a prominent new york times science writer, who apparently from time to time dipped into his knowledge of running as documented by the fact that he co-authored some marathon-related articles with her.

i don't know if it was physical attraction, his speed, the fact that we have more in common than i ever expected, or pure boredom that made me look for more. with every new page an incremental fact emerged, a new interesting piece of information. he is a phd student in psychology at a university in new jersey; apparently he runs every race in the state, always finishing in the top 5; he doesn't have an NYRR record (strange); his grandmother died in 2001... at this point, the diagnosis was clear - i was obsessed.

the obsession ritual culminated earlier today. an email arrived in my mailbox from my university asking me to update my alumni contact information. as i was updating it, i briefly thought about looking up some of my college friends - and then BAM! before i knew i was typing in the runner's name and hitting enter, feeling my heart skip a couple of beats as i was waiting a few seconds for the results to load. his name showed up and one click later i was staring at his gmail address. oh god, just how creepy would it be to send him an email? should i?

after giving it some thought i decided that having this semi-fictitious person to fantasize about is much more satisfying than facing the cruel reality of the situation. after all, what do i have to offer to a 2:38 marathoner anyway? oatmeal cookies?

oh well, moving on.

scared

last weekend was my last long training run for the marathon. i think about the fact that in less than 3 weeks i will run the marathon and i'm scared. well - more like... concerned. and i'm not talking about being nervous about the race itself - the fact that it's my first one, that i will not be able to experience it with my running partner, or the general anxiety i always get before a race about being able to achieve my goal - that goes without saying.

i'm talking about something else here: in the last 6 months, my whole life has revolved around running... shopping for running shoes and clothes... reading about running... talking about running... hanging out with other runners... i've run during vacations in provincetown, fire island and san francisco... i've woken up extra early while on business trips in dallas and LA to go running... i quit smoking (not really because of running, but it helped) and generally stopped going out drinking and dancing... i've been up at 6am or earlier on many saturdays and sundays to go to races or long runs... i've been going to bed at 10:30pm both during the week and on weekends. indeed, training for the marathon has not only taken up all my free time - it has truly transformed my life. a mini metamorphosis, if you will.

so my concern is the following: what happens after mile 26.2?

will i stop running? will i pick up smoking again? will i go out till 4am every friday and saturday night, drink excessively and hook up with random faceless strangers? (not that i did that before... not every friday and saturday anyway.) will i be fat again? most importantly, what will i do with all the free time that suddenly opens up once i am not running every night after work, not going to bed early on saturday, not spending 3 hours every other sunday doing a long run and taking the rest of the day to recover? isn't life suddenly going to feel somewhat empty with all this free time on my hands?

then i remind myself - you are smarter than that.

for starters, new york is not the last marathon and certainly not my last marathon, especially if things go as planned. thou shalt keep in shape, dear alex, one way or another.

secondly, i will start organizing. dinner parties. brunches. thanksgiving. christmas - oh god CHRISTMAS! that means buying gifts for many people but especially for my niece natalia.

however, besides obsessing about the next marathon or planning things i can do in place of running, i will finally have the time to chill out, at least for a bit. a friend of mine put it very pointedly:

"binge laziness. spend a saturday staring at the ceiling. read magazines front to back. spend two hours in the video store with a friend, debating which dvd to get, and then fall asleep during the first thirty minutes. make another coffee. that kinda thing..."

and that does sound kind of nice.

nightmares

marathon prep guides mention all sorts of things one should expect when training for a marathon, especially their first one: weight loss; knee pain; soreness; injuries; no time for ever doing anything else; fanthom pains...

however the one that none of them mentions is a stream of nightmare leading up to race day.

nightmare 1: i wake up, look around and see a looooong bridge. and by long i don't mean brooklyn-bridge-long. i mean looooooong. i think. i think some more. i've never seen this bridge before. wait. no. no, please don't tell it's verazanno narrows! eventually i realize that its three hours before the big race starts. somehow i fast forwarded 6 weeks and here i am, at the feet of the bridge, waiting for the horn to go off. i panic. i freak out. i am ready? of course not?!?! i thought i had 6 more weeks to prepare!! i keep telling myself 'this has got to be a bad dream, you have to wake up, you have to wake up!'... i see people taking off their clothers and peeing all over the place and all over each other. yes, in my dream, i invoke the 2 things that everyone who has run new york talks about - the peeing and the clothes.

nightmare 2: i'm running the marathon (or rather "a" marathon, since the course doesn't seem to be anything like new york... actually it sort of looks like prague, mmmm, weird), and at first it goes ok, but then i realize i cannot run... i can only move in slow motion. similar to the dreams from childhood in which you're trying to get away from something and the strong head wind keeps slowing you down. i'm trying to stay with it and not give up. the clock is ticking and it feel like hours and hours are passing by and i am moving in slow motion.

night running

running, as one of my best friends would say, is a bliss.

recently, i added running at night to my list of favorites. no, this is not something i do regularly, and it isn't something i ever thought i wanted to do; hell, it isn't even something that i would recommend to most people.

but it surely is pretty freakin' amazing.

affixed on your forehead is a lamp. on your running shorts, in the front and in the back, is a blinking light. and on your upper body, believe or not, is a reflective vest.

and no, these are not worst-case-scenario measures. these are absolute necessities.

as i was running my 6.4 mile leg at reach the beach, the lamp on my forehead create a strange halo and several times i had to make sure i wasn't just imagining it. the run started with a steep prolonged uphill. however, what followed was a long long downhill which, combined with the halo, gave me a very uplifting feeling. the best runners' high i've ever had. at some point i had to remind myself where i was and what i was doing and that the pounding noise is the sound of my feet hitting the ground.

when i came back to work the following monday i felt like i've been gone for months. no, i didn't go through a spiritual experience. but doing something so out of ordinary definitely felt like a getaway, moreso than a week spent at the beach in fire island. i guess not just the night running itself, but the whole experience - 25 hours or running, driving, eating, talking, cheering.

what a bliss indeed.