Now I have to get some miles in. Less than three months to go. Eighty days till Boston. Once again I’m out of sync with the book, “Marathon Training: The Proven 100-Day Program for Success,” with daily training logs by Joe Henderson. On my own again, winging it.
My personal trainer never would’ve let me stray. But I don’t have one. In fact have never had one. How do you find your way to fitness without a personal trainer in this day and age? In upscale New York City, here are the top three professions: 1) Personal trainer; 2) Dog walker; 3) Evening entertainment consultant. There’s always work if you know where to look.
Like marathon running consultant. Which if I play my cards right . . . I see my potential clients in Prospect Park, groups of primarily women being led in exercise. Why not in marathoning?
I mean no one says you have to race, just run. In fact, just join a marathon. In Henderson’s book, I jump ahead to Day 28: “Thirty percent of Boston’s runners broke three hours in the early 1970s. By (1997), in a field 10 times larger, the count of sub-threes dropped to 10 percent.
The new marathoners represent today’s majority. Their marathon isn’t a race but a survival test. It also can be a graduation exercise from an organized training program, a guided group tour, a social event, a minivacation.
The growth prospects of marathoning clearly lie with the second group. The most successful events of the future will be those catering to the needs and interests of the new marathoners – and to reformed racers who stroll over to the other side.
It’s okay now to run slowly. It’s okay to take walking breaks, or even to walk all the way. It’s not okay to say that U.S. marathoning is poorer today because the front ranks have thinned. Our wealth has simply dropped back an hour or so.”
Not me, I’m afraid. At 55, I’m running as fast as I have in my life. What’s more, I don’t stop. Or I haven’t in my last two marathons: Pittsburgh in May and Steamtown in October. In Steamtown, my forefoot pain was so excruciating that more than once I thought to stop and walk. But I’d trained for this moment, and while it’s fair to say that I’ll never run a sub-three, I’d worked hard so that my body was strong and believed I could tough it out. Because running those final one hundred meters, it’s hard to describe the feeling: imagine scoring a championship goal, your first kiss, seeing your daughter for the first time. When I tell my work pal R that I’m training for the Boston Marathon in April, he doesn’t hesitate: “I always wanted to do that, now I know I never will.” “It will be a beautiful thing, all right,” I say, and R nods in agreement. For years I ran with a faith that I could, with a race in mind, get back to training. Since my body broke down in marathons twice – once in 1985 and again in 1987 – I stopped marathon-training, told myself I’d be happy as a runner but not as a marathoner, but then I’d get myself to a place three months from a big race and tell myself that I could build up my strength so that I would not only run but compete. I don’t easily “stroll over to the other side.” Not since those early days out of the hospital in the aftermath of my pulmonary embolism, when after weeks of treatment I was left in a wheelchair, could barely place any weight at all on my left leg, when I told myself I would compete, not just finish.
Then, in the summer of 2001, there was second aftermath. Blood Clot II. I’d not kept up my blood-thinning regiment (don’t ask), and in Prague, Czech Republic, I was sitting at lunch with friends when a shooting pain struck me, this time in the calf of my left leg, just below the knee. It’s the weekend of the summer Czech holiday, and only the sickest of patients don’t pick up and go home to family. (I write about those days in “My Listek,” or my breakfast menu in a Prague hospital, see the Larry O’Connor Web site detour, at right, the Essays tab, http://www.larryoconnor.net/ ). Then convalescence in the Loire Valley, France. Not far from Illiers-Combray, the spiritual home of Marcel Proust; my leg wrapped thigh to ankle in tensor bandage, can’t walk without a cane, and I make a pledge to M that this won’t happen again, so that to this day I take my blood thinners every night and wear a Medic Alert bracelet, and will do so for the rest of my life.
*
Another day goes by and I don’t run. Today (Jan. 27) M and I awake in Brooklyn to a brilliant blue sky and out the bedroom window we see our tenants’ dog Marley, a Golden, lying in one of the snowbank mounds that fill the backyard, cancel my annual checkup and after an hour of snow-shoveling, I suspect the roads are clear in the park, and later M and I see for ourselves, one, two hard-core runners on the only black top around, everywhere else it’s slip-slop, dangerous footing because last night and this morning the second-biggest snowstorm hit, not Boxing Day, but plenty, a foot and a half of snow that Marley is loving and so are the kids: “Snow Day!”, a video-postcard in the northern corner of Prospect Park, shrieking as they go barreling down their cerulean, red, orange and yellow sleds, and if I had a genie’s wish it would be to take the day off, not run a ten-miler, which part of me is feeling I have to get in, the post is called, “Let the Training Begin,” for God’s sake, but rather not go into Midtown for work, go home and snatch up our lime-green sled and head back here with M because since she’s been back from India we’ve had no special time together, and both of us say as we watch the children that we’d like to drop everything and go out there, sliding down the slick snowy hills, our cares falling off like flakes from our sleeves.
Running for Your Life: A Washington Memorial
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