I got stuck on a phrase at MOMA’s “Exquisite Corpses: Drawings and Disfiguration.” It was used in a wall reference describing the rotund, planetary-like images of Hans Bellmer: “Accommodating and limitless docility.” Immediately I thought of the manatees milling around a warm water runoff spout at a Florida Power and Light Co. facilty that M, K and I liked to visit when we’d go south to stay with R & S, M’s parents. How drawn I was to the manatees. “Accommodating and limitless docility,” a state of mind where stress is as foreign as an iceberg in the Sahara. Rolling drifting looking but not seeing. Simply being sentient.
On Monday morning I’ll be looking to tap my inner manatee. I’ve trained in such a way that running – even for as long as three and a half hours – is the equivalent of rolling drifting looking but not seeing. Simply being sentient. Where there is no injury and no stress, there can be no pain. I have come to believe that I have done what I have set out to do and that is to be ready to run for hours. Not to race. But to be inside myself.
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Looking back it’s been quite a ride. Thirty-six years ago I couldn’t as much as take a step much less run a marathon. Seriously ill from deep-vein thrombosis, I very nearly died in January 1976. I pulled through, though, and began running. Mostly recreationally, but I did train for and enter three marathons in the 1980s, finishing only one of them. Then in 2001, twenty-five years after my first DVT episode, it happened again. I contracted more clots in my leg while in Prague for a writers conference. (At that rate, a life-threatening clot every twenty-five years, I’ve got some time ahead to plan. In 2026, I’ll be seventy-one years old!)
So years went by before I trained for and ran another marathon. This time in May 2010 at Pittsburgh, where I surprised myself by not only finishing but with a personal best time of 3:48, only thirteen minutes off my age category qualifying time for the elite Boston Marathon. I’d never for the life of me thought that Boston would ever be in the cards. Of course I gave it another shot . . . And on 10-10-10 at the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton, Pa., I carved some fifteen minutes from that Pittsburgh total, good enough for Boston!
Again I trained, but this time for naught. Last March, a month before Boston 2011, I suffered my first serious running injury: a badly torn hamstring. But thankfully my Steamtown race time was good for two years as a Boston QT, so after months of slow-going, painstaking physical therapy, and a careful ramp up of stretching, machine weights and balanced distance and speed running work, I’m now injury-free and ready as I’ll ever be for Boston. It’s a tough course I’ll be running on Monday, so I think it’s beyond wishful thinking that I’ll carve another quarter-hour off that 3:33 for a 3:18 marathon.
But after thirty-six years of running I can safely say I have never been as prepared as I am today (April 11) to perform as an athlete. Whatever happens on Monday, I know this to be true. It is something that I’m proud of, an achievement that has been a lifetime in the making.
Next: Running for Your Life: Boston Results!
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