In 490 BC, the bastard [FN1] Athenian Pfeidippides allegedly ran about 40 km non-stop from the battlefield of Marathon all the way to Athens to give word that the Greeks had defeated Persia in the first Persian invasion of Greece, the Battle of Marathon. After making the infamous announcement of victory, Pfeidippides then promptly dropped dead, presumably due to exhaustion. Now, this fable [FN2] is cited as the origin story, if you will [FN3], of the modern marathon: a 42.2 km running race that has become so popular in the last twenty years or so that in 2013, nearly 600,000 people finished one. All of which is a little bit crazy because it seems to me that the key point of the whole story is that Pfeidippides -- who was a professional running courier, by the way -- drops dead from running such a long, and let's face it, kind of insane, distance. So, somebody somewhere was like "hey, apparently there was this guy who was a professional runner and when he ran 40km to deliver a message it was so exhausting that when he got there and delivered the message he immediately fell down and died! let's add a couple of kilometers and turn that into a race that people do for fun!". Then, for some even stranger reason, this masochistic pursuit became so popular that essentially every major city in the Western world (plus China) [FN4] hosts a marathon, the vast majority of which sell out, and selling out consists of having something on the order of 10,000+ people (or even up to 50,000+ people in the NYC and Chicago marathons). Insanity.
Pfeidippides is a bastard because if it weren't for him, I wouldn't have found myself lined up with approximately 12,000 others on the Lungarno G. Pecori Giraldi in Florence at 8:30 AM last Sunday, waiting for a 9:00 or 9:15 (they weren't able to make up their minds in the race literature or website and both times were cited in numerous different places) start, which ultimately ended up being an interesting (but I suppose not so out there by Italian standards) 9:23 AM start-time for the 31st Florence Marathon [FN5]. Ultimately, 8,686 people, including the regular protagonists of this Blog, Sandi and myself, would complete the race at times ranging between 2h09m55s for the winner, and 6h18m02s for the last guy to officially cross the finish line [FN6].
For me, running a marathon is not a pleasurable experience. Nor has it ever been, despite the fact that this was my sixth rodeo [FN7,8]. So, why do I keep doing them? you might be wondering. And that would be an excellent question/wonder. In fact, it's one that I don't exactly have an answer for. In Revolutionary Spain in the summer of 1936, anarchists took over Barcelona. They were finally free from government and rules and they had temporarily achieved exactly what they had allegedly dreamed of and worked for for so long. But within days of the rising, compromise and centralization began. The cinema workers -- the cinemas!! -- elected 18 heads from amongst themselves to lead an organization committee to help keep films playing. Maybe as soon as I finish the marathon and I vow to myself that I will never do that again I realize that if I don't have anything to fight against (the pain, the insanity of voluntarily subjecting myself to the pain, etc.) then I will no longer really be living. Well I doubt that's it, but as I said I have no idea why I keep doing these things: I'm just throwing some ideas out there [FN9].
In addition to not exactly loving the whole marathon running thing, I'm not terribly good at them either. It might be a necessary condition for a professional marathon runner to really enjoy running to even be able to keep doing it as his or her job, but perhaps not; if you're really good at it, then that in and of itself might just be enough to keep you at it. I have no allusions of ever winning, or of ever even coming anywhere close to finishing within a half-hour of the winner. By the time I cross the finish line, the top probably 100 guys have showered, had a hot meal, and might even have boarded a plane home to their respective countries [FN10].
But the realistic hope of winning isn't what keeps 600,000 people running marathons every year. If it were, we'd be living amongst a frighteningly large shit-load of clinically delusional certifiably crazy amateur athletes [FN11]. It's often said that the vast majority of runners are competing "against themselves". First-timers have probably grabbed some random time that seems, for one reason or another, to be attainable for them. Multiple-timers want to beat their previously best time. If you finished in 4 hours and 5 minutes last time, a nice goal might be to beat 4 hours. You get the picture.
My goal was to beat 3 hours and 30 minutes. For the uninitiated, that is not fast. That comes out to a pace of 4m59s per km, or a speed of exactly 12.06 km/h. The winners run nearly twice as fast, at around 3 minutes per km, and to be considered a respectable runner, you should probably be finishing the marathon somewhere under 3h10m, for a pace of 4m30s per. So, my goal -- which, to spare you the suspense, was not achieved -- was already not all that ambitious or impressive. My previous marathon time, from the spring of 2013, was 3h36m which, for me, was not really all that bad: 918th out of 2456 runners. Fair enough. The issue, though, was that, as is normally the case, I couldn't sleep the night before. Really. I wasn't unconscious for any epsilons of time during the entire night before the race. I was friggin' exhausted. And so I had a great excuse, really: I did OK, but I would clearly have done WAY better if only I had been able to sleep the night before. But since I can never sleep the night before, it didn't matter, because if it's an unchangeable factor, then it's like saying that I would have ran faster if only my legs were a little longer. That may be true, but it's not going to be changing any time soon. Same thing for sleeping the night before, or so all the previous data had told me. Until Florence...
Things weren't looking great on the sleeping front to begin with. Our hotel was conveniently located only about a 5 minute jog from the starting line, but it was on a very loud street. We arrived in Florence on Friday night, and all night long from our room we could hear very loud cars, trucks, ambulances, police cars, and especially motorbikes. I resigned myself to another sleep-deprived marathon, and moved on in life. But then something strange happened. While I didn't sleep eight hours or anything crazy like that, I got up on Sunday morning having slept at least half the night! I would estimate at least four hours, maybe five. I felt fine, not very tired at all. Confident, even. We had our breakfast in the B&B kitchen while chatting to a friendly young man who had made his way to Florence from Slovakia for the race [FN12], and set off down the street to the starting line.
We did some light jogging to warm-up, and we stood in the starting area waiting for the race to begin. Things were still fine. The race finally started, and it wasn't exactly a great start. There were just too many people everywhere and it was impossible to go the speed you wanted. I tried to get to the outside, and after the first kilometre I was already a full minute behind my goal (upper-bound) pace of 4:59. No matter, however. I kept to the side and upped the effort level just a little bit to start making up time. I saw the blue balloons of the 3h30 pace group just ahead in the distance, and I congratulated myself on the discipline that I was about to display by not getting nervous and speeding up too much to try to catch them right away. I was going to go just a little faster, slowly gaining on them km by km, until perhaps around the half-way point I would catch them and could then slow down a touch into an easier pace. This strategy started off rather well. My second km took 4:54. My third was 4:46. A touch too fast. The fourth was 4:57, and then 4:56. Then I rattled off a 4:49, 4:57, 4:57, 4:51, 4:54, 5:02, 4:55, 4:54, 4:57, 5:03, 4:53, and 4:54. For those keeping score at home, that means that after 17 km I had been running for 1h24m33s, which means I was 27s ahead of my goal time. I had made up for all the disastrousness of the first crowded km, and I was cruising. Or at least the statistics might have suggested as much...
You see, for the previous several km's leading up to 17, I was experiencing some grave discomfort. Not so much in the heels, calves, glutes, or shins, but in the umm... digestive area? I really needed a bathroom and I needed one fast. I don't think that we require any more details than that I did eventually come upon one between km's 17 and 18, and immediately felt a lot better. My next km came in at 6:02 which actually isn't that bad. An entire bathroom break only took a minute away from that km. Fine. I was then 35 seconds behind schedule which is way less than the minute I found myself behind after only the first km. My next two kilometers were right back on track at 4:56 and 4:51. I then reached the half-way mark: the 1/2 marathon point in the race.
Reaching the half-way point normally does one of two things to you: either (1) you gain some confidence because you've made it to the half-way point; or (2) you lose all confidence that you previously had because you've only made it to the half-way point which means that everything that you've just done you have to do all over again. This time, for me, it was fully the latter. And let me be clear here that the slow start and the short call from nature are not excuses. These are natural, even common, things that pop up on race day and you deal with. What happened was, as with everyone and with every race, I started to feel a lot of pain. The problem was, I was in no mood to be dealing with it.
The more pain I felt, the more I slowed down. As I slowed down, the pain continued, and I got even more wimpy and even less determined. There were water stations every 5km along the course, and starting at 25km, I began to walk during the water stations. That is never a good sign. Now, in theory I could have kept running through the water stations. But I was tired and I was in pain and I just wasn't very tough that day. A big wimpy wimp. And so, I drank my water and my sport drink ("Sali" they call it), and I walked. And then I jogged another 5 km, and did the same thing. I even walked for about a minute at the 40km water station with only 2 more k to go and according to the race statistics let 300 people in my age group pass me (up until that point my age-group position had been steadily increasing with each water station [FN13]). I just didn't care. My legs hurt and I was tired and I wasn't tough. When I finally lumbered across the finish line in shame, the time on my watch read 3 hours, 42 minutes. Or, a full 12 minutes slower than my upper-bound goal.
So why did I do it? Why? Post-race analysis. It's all about looking back and analyzing and seeing what could have been and what happened where, etc. That's what races are all about!
Oh, and how did Sandi do? Incredibly. She finished in a time of 3h26m. The 85th female of 1,458. She was not a wimp. But I was.
[FN1] My editorializing, see infra text.
[FN2] The whole thing probably never really happened but I guess you never know.
[FN3] Sort of like Batman Begins or Man of Steel.a
a Terrible movie, by the way.
[FN4] Imagine trying to run the Beijing marathon... Yikes.
[FN5] Or, as they call it, the Firenze Marathon. Even though the Italian word for Marathon is Maratona. So, they translate the city name but not the race type name. Even more interestingly, many people had made their own shirts (!) for the race and these shirts proclaimed the full Italian translation: Firenze Maratona (even though I think the proper grammar would be Maratona di Firenze).
[FN6] Or as Nike would put it, the 8,685th loser.
[FN7] Not literal "rodeo" but like the saying "this ain't my first rodeo".
[FN8] It was actually my fifth "open" marathon (as the Triathletes call it), but my sixth if you include marathons that are only small components of bigger races like the Ironman.
[FN9] But I suppose it is plausible.
[FN10] Or country. It's usually Kenya.
[FN11] Which isn't to say that we're definitely not, by the way.
[FN12] And who, for some reason, didn't believe me that Germany still has a terrible hockey team.
[FN13] Around each water station they have a timing mat that records your position. This allows you to get detailed timing information for different points throughout the course, and helps to prevent people from cheating.
