Sunday morning was a beautiful one, and the most painful run in my life to date. Pain pierced through my hips, my thighs, my knees, my shins and my ankles and I was on the verge of giving up. On the verge I say, because I didn’t give up but the thought plagued my mind for a good fifteen kilometres. Halfway through I was thinking whether I’m cut out for marathon running, whether I’m not just a short or medium distance runner who’s going to remain just average.
Let’s go back to the beginning….
Getting up at 4am for any reason is not fun, especially when it’s about 8 degrees outside and all you want to do is stay in bed, snuggle and fall asleep again. Even more so, when you actually haven’t gotten that much sleep because your nerves have been causing you to wake up every hour to check the clock to make sure you’re not sleeping in and missing the marathon you’ve been dreaming about for months.
The marathon itself didn’t start till 7:20am, but Jarek’s half marathon started at 6am so we wanted to be there half an hour early to make it to the starting line and have him ready to go without too much stressing. But regardless, there’s always a little stress and long queues to one working toilet cubicle minutes before the race.
I watched Jarek start his race, snapped a couple of photos and went to a cafe across the road to warm up with a cup of tea. I had an hour to spare before it was my turn to line up. I was nervous and anxious. I didn’t know what to expect. I hoped for the best but knowing that I had been sick only a few weeks earlier and my longer training runs had been few, I shouldn’t be expecting miracles.
The first few kilometres were all about weaving through the crowd and trying to run at an even pace. With over 5000 runners there was a lot of zigzagging before finding an even tempo. Unknowingly to me at the time, my Suunto Quest was showing me a slower pace than I was actually running (battery issues???), no wonder that by just past the half-way point I almost had enough.
From 25km to 35km it was torture. I kept chanting in my mind ‘You can do this, one, two three, four…you can do this one, two, three, four’ and repeating it over and over again. It did keep me going. There was a point where I uncovered two sides of me, one that wants to give up and knows how easy it is to give up, and there’s the other one who doesn’t believe in giving up. Fortunately, on marathon day, the side that doesn’t give up won. But not before using many expletives and repeating, ‘Don’t be a *&%^ wimp, get on with it!’. (yep call me crazy).
Seeing Jarek and giving him a kiss just after the 30km mark somehow gave me more energy to keep going. For the 5km before I was thinking about him and hoping that I would see him. It was what I needed to get me through the rest of the journey. And hearing that he had a good race was even better, he ran his half marathon in 1:48, giving him a PB of 10 minutes!
The final 10km of the marathon really hurt, hurt is probably an understatement. I ran, I walked (though it felt like dawdling), I drank water and ate Endura Raspberry flavoured energy gels. The gels helped a lot. I told myself to run between drink stations and gave myself permission to walk through them as I sipped on the water and poured some over my aching legs. Each time I started to run again the piercing pain grew stronger.
I would have liked to have been tougher and pushed harder to run just a little bit faster than last year, but I got to a point in the race where it was no longer about getting a PB, but about crossing the finish line without collapsing. During the race, I told myself I won’t be running a marathon again but then just a few short hours later, I realised I was looking forward to the next one. It’s as the quote goes of which my friend Monika reminded me of, ‘Pain is temporary, pride is forever.’
Distance: 42.195km
Time: 4:20:05
Split times:
5km – 27:28
10k – 26:25
15k – 26:53
20k – 27:33
25k – 30:11
30k – 32:11
35k – 36:16
40k – 36:16
2.2k – 16:46
Halfway: 1:54:37
Finish: 2:25:27
