The marathon itself does not give me license to strut. The training, people! The training! There are no cheering crowds or finish lines on my twenty-mile pre-taper runs. No friends holding posters, no water stations, no Gatorade but that which I bring myself. Think you’re tough shit? Think you could survive a hurricane while balancing on a popsicle stick? Well most people could not survive three and a half hours of lonely, solitary, monotonous running, up and down the highway, around and around the track, across bridges, across towns, across Interstates. But thousands can. And it’s a wacky, weird community of loons and cancer survivors and Nam vets, sorority girls and ex-cons and vice president of global corporations, who screw up the gumption, somehow, some way, and lace their sneaks extra-tight and brave the elements with nothing but an iPod (maybe) and their thoughts for company for hours on end just so they can say, like me, over a tall glass of Jack Daniels, “Yeah, I ran a marathon. So what?” OWN IT.
My first marathon is in 9 days.
And the twenty-one-mile pre-taper long run suuuuuuuucked. But I did it.
