Words from the Wise

By Emilie David October 5, 2011
No one I know has ever gone into a marathon saying "I have trained as much/well/hard as I possibly could for this one.  I am going to knock it out of the park!"  I keep trying to remember that but I still would have preferred to go into this monster run healthier than I am.  Two weeks ago I was pretty sure I was going to run the first 3 miles with my friends, and then try and gracefully DNF myself to a bench and wait for someone to show up with crutches.  Lots of rest and massage and electrical stimulation later, I am feeling much more positive about it, and I would even say excited to have at it and see how far I can get.  I'll be running with a hamstring strain in my left thigh, and a quadriceps strain in my right that likes to mess up my knee alignment and poof everything up into a nice round pillow.  It's possible that I will still only make it those three miles, but it's possible I will make it further.  Or even much further.  There is no way of knowing unless I go find out.

There is not much I can do now about my body.  The prescription is rest, massage, ice, more rest.  It's all mental training from here on out, which, in many ways, is harder than the physical part.  I am buoyed by and grateful for the wealth of support I have been getting, from the people I work with, the people I train with, and the people I love.  They have offered words of encouragement, of inspiration, and words that helped me laugh my way out of my worry.  I'm keeping all of them, and I'll call on them every mile of the way. These nuggets from other people (and the occasional Disney song that will probably get stuck in my head) will save me, I'm sure of it.  I'm not done collecting them yet either, so feel free to write below or to get in touch with me the way you usually do.  If you know me, and you don't see your nugget here, trust that it is no less important than the ones I am mentioning.  I'm a selfish person, and some things I just want to keep for myself.

The Nuggets
I think of Megan, the chief cheerleader of my training group, as a bit of sunshine on a stick.  My first marathon will be her third, which gives me hope because it means life was still worth living to her after her first marathon.  But I will just say, as a demonstration of her character, that her first marathon was unbearably hot, and her second was miserably rainy (all 26.2 miles) and cold, and she still signed up for a third!  This is her Charm marathon then, and she is going into it totally charming.  When I was getting ready for my first half marathon, her advice to the group was to repeat a mantra.  Hers was "I feel fine!"  Just those 3 words over and over again.  I know it works because I've used it.  This time around, she wrote this to all of us newbies:
"This race is for you and your own personal glory.  And, it WILL be glorious!  (Think of me saying "glorious" in a Mrs. Doubtfire voice, because that's how I just said it in my office)."  I am going to have a glorious time imagining a Mrs. Doubfire voice coming out of tall, slender, sleek haired Megan.

The next nugget comes from my brother.  My brother and I have been trying to out-droll each other our whole relationship long.  We are both also of the mind that when someone is feeling bad, the only cure is to make them feel worse, because then they will feel better about how they felt before you said something rude and obnoxious to them.  So when I sent him a picture of my puffed up knee-ball accompanied by a description belaying my sadness and anxiety, he texted back with this advice:  "Cut the good one off and the other will adapt!"

This is similar to the advice my work buddies Randy and Will have given me, which is that I should just amputate and get interchangeable prostheses, including a wheel, a chainsaw (because that would be awesome), and a shotgun (defense against zombies).

Tianna works in my office and for the first month or more she didn't say a thing to me.  I thought she was maybe a little stuck up.  Then we went out for frozen yogurt and she did not shut up but still managed to inhale her yogurt before I finished mine.  I knew two things immediately: 1.  She was A-OK; 2.  She was a racer.  I've run two 5k's with her and she just keeps getting faster.  I tried peer pressuring her into doing a Half Marathon with me in February.  When the timing wasn't right, she signed herself up to do one on her own.  I saw her just before the 9 mile marker last weekend.  That was my half marathon wall - it didn't beat me, but I remember it slowed me down.  When Tianna saw me on the sidelines, she yelled my name and I started jogging beside her so I had time to say a few inspirational things.  But all she saw was someone running next to her, which prompted her to say, in a DeNiro sort of way,  "Are you racing me??!!"  and then she picked up the pace and made me chase her!  I hope I can channel some of that good stuff!

The nugget that has been helping me the most these past few days, however, aptly comes from my coach, Taneen Carvell.  She trains at least 3 training programs' worth of runners and numerous individuals.  That's a lot of moods and frustrations and needs to meet on a daily basis, and somehow she knows how to handle them.  She knows when to get the rally going, and when to hop and cheer you into a better run.  She also knows that the closer you get to race day, the more pressure you put on yourself.  That it can make you good and miserable and blow out all the positive energy you try to kindle in yourself so that you forget that you run because it's fun.  And that at these times, the only thing that's going to work is some bluntly but lovingly given perspective: "I hate to tell you, but you are not going to beat the Kenyans."