The runners, more than a thousand of them, were gathering for the start of the Seaside marathon. We walked along the street toward the beach and watched them jogging and stretching. It was already past eleven o’clock, and the race was less than half an hour away.
My friend Joe and I were supposed to be among the runners, but I had developed shin splints and, when they kept recurring, was forced to stop training. Joe hadn’t run since he hurt his back about a month earlier. Still, it was such a nice day — no rain and not much wind — that I was itching to put on my racing flats. We watched a dog do a trick with Frisbees and I said to Joe, “There’s still time to get changed.”
He shrugged it off as if I was only kidding, but I could tell he was fighting hard not to get caught up in the excitement.
“Come on …”
“No.”
“You don’t have to finish. Just look at it as a workout with a bunch of other people.”
“No, if I start I have to finish.”
Then, as luck would have it, my wife said she needed to go to our room at the Ebb Tide to get a coat. We walked there with her.
“I’m going to do it,” I said, once in the room. “I’m changing.”
“You’re crazy,” Joe said, but he started changing, too.
Sloane (that’s my wife) could hardly believe it, but she helped me by pinning my number, 549, to my sweatshirt. We had only about fifteen minutes to get into our gear, relieve our nervous bladders, and get back to the starting area.
All three of us were laughing and shaking our heads as we left the hotel. “I don’t believe this,” Sloane said, more than once. She snapped a couple of pictures of us stretching on Broadway, then rushed off to tell the others in our party what we were doing.
We were standing near a hand-written sign that read, Over 4 Hours, but everyone pressed forward as the time drew near. Then I heard a pop that hardly sounded like a gun and we were off.
Slowly at first, we started to jog. The street was lined with people, but we didn’t see Joe’s wife, or her parents, or anyone in our group. Did they see us? No matter. We had a race to think about now.
There were hundreds of runners strung out in front of us, the leaders already out of sight before we had run two blocks. The temptation was to go with the flow — that’s how we had gotten into this thing in the first place — but I wasn’t completely out of my mind.
Joe said, “I want to go a little faster than this, don’t you?”
I said no.
Our first split was nine-something. Too fast, considering I hadn’t logged a single mile in the past month and had been able to run only fitfully in the weeks before that.
Joe seemed surprised our pace had been that fast. The news didn’t slow him down, though. I tried again to tell him to relax, enjoy the race.
“It’s hard for me to do something I did competitively just for fun,” he said.
Our next split was eighteen-something, still a little faster than the pace I would have preferred, but I felt good. The sun was shining and I was enjoying this. As we approached the first station, I let it be known that I was going to walk through it rather than try to drink on the run.
Joe said OK.
By now I had no idea where we were, but there were plenty of runners to follow, and Joe knew the course, having run his first marathon here last year. He told me, as we ran, where it would be taking us, but it didn’t really mean much to me. I knew all I needed to know: the course was 26.2 miles. What I didn’t know was whether I could go the distance.
This was my first marathon, and I knew I was not ready for it. I thought: Maybe, though, if I forget about my time, I may just be able to get through this.
“What was cross-country like for you?” Joe asked.
“What was it like?”
“Yeah. What did you think about it? What was it to you?”
We had run together in high school, more than ten years earlier. Joe had been my best friend. A gutsy runner in the Steve Prefontaine mold. I was a middle-of-the-pack team member.
I told Joe I had enjoyed the camaraderie and had felt I was contributing to the success of the team. I also told him I regretted not having pushed myself harder.
We ran past the place where Joe had first met his support crew the year before and kept going for several miles before our impromptu crew honked and waved on its way by in the Town Car.
A little while later we spotted Sloane on a corner, focusing her camera on us. Karen, Joe’s wife, was there, too. We asked for Vaseline.
Karen: “We don’t have any.”
Joe: “Go to the store and buy some.”
He was in pain. His shorts had been rubbing him the wrong way for miles.
We started running again and Sloane ran beside us for a short distance.
“Are you going to finish?” she asked.
“We’ll see.”
She shook her head, smiling.
“You guys …”
But I was experiencing some chaffing, too, and I could tell I was going to have blisters on both feet.
The next time we saw our wives, sure enough, they had the petroleum jelly, and we stopped just long enough to smear some on our thighs.
On the run, I told Joe about my blisters and he said that when we saw the girls again I should put Vaseline on my feet.
“I hate to stop. They’re not too bad right now. But it might keep them from getting worse.”
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll help you.”
The girls caught up with us again just before the half. We had been running for two hours by then — matching my longest training run. The miles were starting to take their toll. Already I had walked up one hill, trying to conserve energy, and had started to concern myself with running the shortest distance between points on the course.
The girls ran beside us along Highway 101 until we could find a suitable place to sit down. I ripped off one shoe, Joe ripped off the other. We got my socks off, and Sloane dolloped jelly on the ball of each foot. I caught a glimpse of one blister, and it looked worse than it felt, which so far wasn’t bad.
Back on the road, I tried to keep the pace down without being too obvious.
“How ya doing?” Joe asked.
“I feel fine. No problem breathing or anything. My legs are just getting a little heavy.”
The stretch along Surf Pines Road took a lot out of me, though. It was shaded and scenic, but the rolling hills sapped my energy.
We made it to mile sixteen. Ten miles to go.
“How ya doing?” Joe asked again.
“I’m just going to try to hold on to this,” I said, meaning my pace. “You can go ahead, though.”
“No,” he said, “we’re going to do this together.”
I’m sure he meant what he said, but I had to walk up the hills and that was death to him.
“It’s too hard for me to start running again once I do that,” he said.
I tried to keep running, but once we got on Del Rey Road, that little out-and-back leg, I said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to walk.”
Joe kept going and that was fine with me. I didn’t want to hold him back. The last time I saw him he was on his way back down Del Rey.
“I’ll wait for you,” he offered.
“No, go ahead.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, go on.”
So I was on my own. I jogged when I felt I could and walked when I had to. I remember Joe saying how demoralizing this leg had been for him the year before, and I could see why. It seemed to go on forever.
Getting down on the flat didn’t help. I jogged a few yards, but that was all. Walking was the best I could get out of my legs. (By contrast, Joe would rip off a few seven-minute miles starting here.) It was cold, with traffic stirring up a chilling breeze, and my legs felt like they might cramp on me at any moment. Under my sweatshirt, my T-shirt was soaked, which was making me cold, but what could I do? I hugged myself. It didn’t help.
As I walked from mile nineteen to mile twenty, I started to ask myself what I was doing out here on this desolate road. I had thought about it before, when I was in training, but my answers did not seem as convincing now. I was out here to test my determination, to see if I could reach a distant goal. But was it really that important, this goal?
What I was after, I think, was that certain sense of self I had found through cross-country running in high school. It was then that I discovered I could do more than I thought I could. I had surprised myself with my endurance and gained a quiet sense of confidence in my abilities. I wanted to feel like that again.
But now, being passed by frail old men and chunky girls, I was ready to quit any time — and why not? I hadn’t been able to prepare for this race. I never expected to finish, not really. This was already farther than I had ever run. Dropping out now would be no disgrace.
I did some figuring and realized that even if I ran ten-minute miles, I’d still be out here more than an hour. And there was no way I could muster that kind of speed, not even close. Better to give up now.
Only one thing kept me going: the Town Car was nowhere in sight. I had no choice but to keep moving.
There was an aid station at about mile twenty and, after taking some water, I started to jog again. The course turned to the right and away from the heavily trafficked street I had been on. Just getting away from the cars made me feel better, and I jogged for maybe two miles, nonstop. I even tried running backward from time to time. That involved different muscles, fresher ones, and felt good, but I couldn’t see where I was going. Very unsettling, even if you keep checking.
I knew once I came around the golf course and saw 22 painted on the road, I would finish. I stopped thinking about how long it would take. Four miles was all I had left. I could crawl that far if I had to.
Joe was probably finishing about now, though I wasn’t thinking about that. He would be struggling when he crossed the line, but not as much as the year before when he went out too fast and was practically delirious by the time he collapsed in the chute.
Someone on the side of the road said I had 3.1 miles to go.
“Seven-eighths of the race is behind you,” she said.
I liked the way she phrased that.
More than anything in the world, I now wanted a Hershey bar — it was a strangely vivid imperative, a demand from my body to my brain — and when I saw Sloane along side of the road I made her promise to get me one as soon as this was over.
She had gotten worried and walked the course backward until she found me. I was moving slowly, but had not collapsed in a heap somewhere along the side of the road as she had feared. She was prepared to jog with me, and I tried it briefly, but mostly I just walked. I thought I would save whatever I had for the promenade. I didn’t want to be walking then, with everyone watching.
As we reached the promenade, there was Joe. His arm around Karen, he leaned on her and limped when he walked. He had a smile for me, and a word of encouragement.
Then we started running, Sloane and I. There weren’t many people around, but that didn’t matter at all. In fact, it was better that way, for me.
I glanced at my watch for the first time in about an hour.
“Let’s pick it up a little,” I said. “I want to see if I can break five hours.”
We did pick it up, and I had more left than I thought I would, but the finish was farther away than it looked at first. I could see before I got there that too much time had elapsed.
Sloane peeled off, and I stopped looking at the official clock. I concentrated instead on the finish line.
