Box Girl (27 page)

I became obsessed with the careers of my old teammates. Most of them were still running competitively, many were sponsored. I looked up their results at meets, watched their races on YouTube, followed them on Twitter. I Googled pictures of them mid-stride at races: still skinny, still fit, now really into compression socks. In a decidedly masochistic move, I even dug out my old University of Colorado racing buns—the tight bottoms we wore to meets, which looked like a pair of shiny, full-bottomed underpants—and tried them on. Between the Olympic Trials, the Internet-stalking, and the sight of my butt coming out of those buns in directions I did not know were possible, it was clear that I needed to start running again.

The fact was, I missed it. I felt like a very important piece of my identity was gone. A guy I had been hanging out with for a fairly long time said to me one day, “Wait, you run?” Not even, “Wait, you're a
runner
?” He didn't even know that I occasionally went for a jog. The truth is, at that point in my life, I wasn't someone who occasionally went for a jog. I
felt
like a runner, though. In an abstract and semi-deluded way, I still thought of myself as a runner. For this reason, I wasn't willing to give up on that part of my identity entirely.

When I decided to start running again, I approached it from a much healthier place, both mentally and physically. This time, it was a hobby and not a sport. I was no longer a runner who was trying to prove anything, who was trying to be the best at anything. I ran for myself only. With this newfound freedom, I remembered why I loved to run. Running was my
yoga. And believe me, as someone who has been known to, perhaps, heckle yoga a bit (too many years waiting on mat-wielding yogis who only ordered green tea), it is hard for me to say that without sounding sarcastic. Be assured: I am not being sarcastic. There is something incredibly meditative about listening to myself breathe, feeling my feet strike the ground—
clip, clip, clip, clip
—while tasting the sweat drip off my nose, salt slipping into my mouth.

Before I knew it, running was once again a daily ritual, a commune with myself, the air, the ocean. I'd run along the beachfront boardwalk most days—standstill traffic to my right, the moody and mesmeric Pacific to my left. For the most part, I would head north from Venice, leaving the bums, the barkers, and the fire-blowers behind, seeking something less chaotic. Along the boardwalk, there is a dramatic shift in scenery where Venice meets Santa Monica. The drum circles, dreadlocks, and pop-up shops peddling plastic neon sunglasses and T-shirts that say “Yes We Cannabis” give way to outdoor yoga classes, moms pushing strollers, and white high-rise apartment complexes with names like “The Sands” and “Sea Colony.” It's less heroin-addicts-on-the-run, more middle-aged-dads-out-for-a-run. In Santa Monica, I'd twist through the tourists on rented banana-seat beach cruisers and slip under the Santa Monica Pier, where I was always sure I would be stabbed. It was a dark, dank stretch under that pier, a mammoth structure at the end of Colorado Boulevard, which operated as a year-round mini amusement park, complete with a Ferris wheel, clowns, and cotton candy, all hurtling into the Pacific. A cornucopia of carnival noises would echo above me while I ran through that corridor: the synthesized fairytale tones of the merry-go-round, the
clickity-clack-clack
of a loop-less roller coaster, the sounds of accordions and organs clashing in their own discordant warble, and children shrieking every human emotion on the spectrum.

On the other side—fortunately, I never got stabbed—peace. The boardwalk was empty, serene, salubrious. I'd normally only make it as far north as Pacific Palisades (or, on more ambitious runs, Malibu), where there was nothing but the occasional cyclist, surfers, and me. I'd smell the ocean (while I am not particularly fond of getting in the cold Pacific, I love its musky sulfur smell), and I'd watch the surfers: slick, black, human-sized seals bobbing up and over the waves. I'd breathe. Running was no longer about pain or a pursuit of perfection. At last, it was a pleasure again.

On Christmas Eve, about a year after I returned to running, I was at a party with one of my longtime friends, Jan, who was also one of my former high school track teammates. We were standing around the dining room table when she suggested we run a marathon. I thought she had had too much eggnog. Her sister Beth jumped in, too. “No really, I think we should. I've been looking at the marathon schedules.” They had been planning this. They knew, plied with enough bourbon and cured ham, I was bound to agree to anything.

“Eh, I don't think that's such a great idea,” I said.

Two hours later, with the help of eggnog, gingerbread, and grappa-soaked cherries, my Christmas carol changed its tune.

“You know what,” I said, leaning against a wall to stretch my calves/hold myself up, “A marathon sounds like a great idea!”

By the time I piled in the backseat of my parents car (because even as an adult child, I still ride in the backseat), we had picked our race: The Portland Marathon in early October. That gave us plenty of time to train, and we'd always wanted to go to Portland anyway.

Jan and Beth both ran collegiate track as well: Jan for four years at Duke, and Beth for a year or so at George Washington. They both continued running after college. Not competitively, but almost daily, Jan especially. They shared an apartment in San Francisco, so they'd be able to train together and keep
each other on a strict regimen. Unlike Jan and Beth, I put off training until the absolute last minute. While most people train for a marathon for four months or more, I waited until there were only five weeks to go. I downloaded a famous marathoner's six-week training schedule (tagline: “There's Still Time!”) and chopped off the first week. I was working freelance from home, so I had plenty of time to get in my mileage. And while I love running alone, the long runs got, well, long. I listened to music on my iPod, to books on tape, to any distraction from the oppressive understanding that, while I was one hour into a run, I still had another hour to go. Plus, I was training in September, one of LA's hottest months. For my twenty-mile run two weeks before the marathon, I had a friend drop me off at a shopping center in Palos Verdes, which is still in LA County, but barely. I ran from there, along the boardwalk, all the way to Malibu, where my run ended with me sitting on the floor of a gas station, slumped against the refrigerator, drinking thirty-two ounces of green Gatorade without stopping for a breath. I think I sufficiently freaked out the gas station attendant, who thought I was having a heat stroke. He gave me an icepack for my forehead and called a cab to get me home. I think it's fair to say, after that twenty-miler, I was feeling many miles from “ready.”

The night before the Portland marathon, we set out for dinner before sunset, along with several dozen other people dining in running shoes. We ate pasta with Jan and Beth's parents and Jan's boyfriend, who had all flown to Portland to watch the race. (I told my parents not to come since I was certain I was going to embarrass myself, or die. It just wasn't worth the trip.) Earlier that day we stopped by the race expo to pick up our bib numbers and the little chips for our shoes. Jan's dad had picked up some wristbands, which broke down the mile-splits for various finishing times, and was handing them out at dinner while talking about our race strategies.
(In attendance at every single high school track meet with a stopwatch around his neck, he was a sort of honorary coach. My dad, on the other hand, would read the newspaper in a far corner of the field house, emerging only to yell, “Go Porkchop!” as I rounded a turn mid-race.) Jan's dad leaned over her plate of spaghetti and pointed excitedly at one of the wristbands. Jan had set a fairly lofty goal for herself—to run faster than 3:40 and qualify for The Boston Marathon—and he was walking her through her target mile times: 8:23 for the first mile, 16:47 through two, under one hour fifty minutes at the halfway point. Beth was less intense but still wanted to do well, examining a pace bracelet for the four-hour finishing group. I pointed at the wristband outlining a ten-minute-per-mile marathon pace and joked that I'd probably finish somewhere around there. I refused to wear a bracelet, though, because I was too scared that I might have to run even slower than that.

The next morning we woke before sunrise. We ate bananas and untoasted bagels with peanut butter and honey, and pulled our hair into ponytails. We sipped Gatorade and stretched our quads, crammed into a corner between a hotel room bed and a fake mahogany dresser. I insisted we play “Eye Of The Tiger” on my iPod speakers to get pumped up. (Did I think we were going to box the Russians?) Actually (and perhaps more embarrassingly) it was in honor of our high school's mascot, a tiger.

An hour later, we were dropped off near the starting line. In the still-dark chill of an early October Oregon morning, we waded through the crowds, wearing spandex and tank tops, and over that, warmer layers we were willing to strip off on the course and lose forever. Around my waist, a small zippered pouch, which can only be accurately described as a “fanny pack,” was holstered above my hips by a belt of nylon webbing. I had stocked it with five packets of energy gel and five Advil—a customer at Chaya had told me to take one of each every hour. (The night before I left for Portland I realized I
had asked no one for any advice on how to actually run a marathon. A man eating a basket of fried calamari at table 63—who said he'd run three—seemed like an expert-enough opinion.) My ponytail was pulled through the back of a hat I'd bought a few days before at a running store on Washington Boulevard in Venice—lightweight and ventilated and not something I would ever wear under ordinary circumstances. But these were not ordinary circumstances. I was about to run twenty-six miles,
in a row
. As we passed more and more runners who looked like my former collegiate teammates—the high and hollow cheekbones, the quads so defined you could see every tendon, the biceps that always looked flexed, even when their hands were hanging loosely at mid-thigh—I began to think,
What am I doing?
I had signed myself up for a lot of dumb things in my twenties, but this might well be the dumbest, I thought. I had barely trained and, during my twenty-mile run—the most important, and telling, of all marathon training—I had nearly died.

As the start of the race neared, it was not dark, but not yet light. The temperature was in the low-60s, and it was spitting rain. We sipped water, but not too much—another tip from my calamari-eating Sherpa—and shook out our legs. We ran a few ten- or twenty-yard strides—as far as we could go without running into a person or a fence—and stretched in a semi-circle. Jan jumped up and down in place, like a frog, her heels hitting her in the butt, something she used to do on the starting line at track meets. Her parents had flown across the country from Connecticut, and her brand-new boyfriend was watching, too. Jan was short on words before the marathon, tense and focused—shaking out her arms, rolling her neck, like I'd seen her do at so many meets before.

I think seeing the pressure she was putting on herself actually calmed me down. There was, after all, no pressure on me. I wasn't attempting to hit a target time; I wasn't trying to qualify
for anything. I was not
racing
this marathon; I was just
running
it.
Jogging
it. Perhaps even
walking
it. Unlike my former teammates at Colorado, I was not running twenty-six miles at a five-minute pace to win—or even, like Jan, twenty-six miles at an eight-minute pace to qualify for a more important race. I was, instead, running it like a middle-aged math teacher from Long Beach: just to see if I could finish. With that in mind, I began to relax.
I have nothing to lose
, I thought. Though I was surrounded by thousands of people in every direction—race participants, spectators, volunteers—I was comforted by this thought: No one was watching me. No one was even waiting to hear my finishing time back in LA. I had barely told anyone I was running a marathon. No one—here, there, or elsewhere—had any expectations for me.
I
had no expectations for me. There was no one to let down, including myself.

With that, I embraced the pre-race frenzy with a sort of agnostic abandon.
Who cares how well I do? Who cares how quickly, or slowly, I finish the thing?
I mean, keeling over dead would be sort of a bummer, but, with no pressure to go fast, I could simply forestall that from happening by stopping to walk. A couple of minutes before the gun was fired, we joined the masses of people packed for blocks behind the starting line. With my finger readied on the start button of my rubber Timex watch, I reminded Jan and Beth for the fiftieth time, “Do not wait for me. Go without me.” Then I wished them luck and slapped them both firmly on the ass.

When the starting gun fired, Jan and Beth took off at a quick clip and disappeared into a sea of runners darting down the street. (We were many blocks behind the “real” start, where the elite runners take off at a pace faster than the maximum speed for most treadmills.) With my fanny pack shifted to my fanny, I set out at a slow trot. I was running, but not much faster than the average person ambles. I am certain I could have speed-walked faster. At nine minutes, fifty-eight seconds,
I looked down at my watch and let out a nervous laugh: I hadn't even run a mile. And I had
twenty-five
more to go after that. I began to panic.

The farthest I had ever raced was a half-marathon, and immediately upon crossing the finish, I beelined for the medic tent, dehydrated and delirious.
My god
, I thought,
how dehydrated and delirious will I be after running twice that distance? How will I not hurt myself, pass out, crumble to the ground and die?
I worried, forcing one foot in front of the other. People were passing me by the dozens. Men and women both—some younger than me, many older than my parents—surged past, leaving me to look at their fanny packs. Like being engulfed by a wave and sucked farther out to sea, the packs of people overtaking me made me feel like I was going backward, not forward.
How is everyone running so fast?
I thought.
That man is at least seventy-five; who is he to come out of the gates so hot? Do these people not know how long this thing is?
I wondered. Though it pained me to admit, I knew the truth: These people had trained properly. They could easily maintain that pace for twenty-six miles. Unlike me, they were prepared.