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November 3, 2006
Well done (Final Team In Training Update): As part of my training for the Dublin, Ireland marathon, I've kept a journal and have occassionally published entries here. These are the barely edited thoughts and feelings about this process and I have used it as a way to keep people who have taken an interest in this project up-to-date on my progress. While my event is now over, you can still make a donation for 60 days following October 30 by clicking here or by mailing a check or money order payable to the Leukemia-Lymphoma Sociatey to Dave Copeland, 612 Arboretum Way, Burlington, MA 01803-3831.
There were 12,000 stories at the Dublin Marathon on Monday. This is one of them.
(It's also self-indulgent, but I feel like I've earned it after 5+ months of training. Feel free to skip this and go look for Borat video clips and info on snorting mini-thins if you're so inclined).
* * *
 There's a whole bunch of nervous fidgeting and more than a couple of bare asses as we line up at the start line with 12,000 other runners. Everyone is in the last minute preparations of stretching and applying Body Glide (hence the PG-13 nudity). A woman stretching near Rob, Christina and I is smoking back-to-back cigarettes as she gets ready to run a marathon. Not only is it annoying, it's amazing.
Only if you're tall and, even then, only if you stand on your tip toes on the curb, can you see the arch of inflated, red, white and blue balloons marking the starting line (we'll talk more about the start line later). Officially, the race begins at 9 a.m. but it takes a full 10 minutes to get to the starting line. Any nervousness I have -- and there was a lot, enough to jolt me wide awake at 4 a.m. that morning -- dissipates.
The next six hours are incredibly emotional, stretching from utter jubilation to complete sorrow. I spend a lot of time -- particularly the first and last three miles -- thinking about my Dad. I realize that this has become the classic guilty pleasure. Despite the doubt and injuries I have honestly enjoyed every minute of the five months leading up to this, and I am enjoying the actual event.
Would I be here if he hadn't gotten sick? Would I be here if he hadn't died?
It's one of those things you can't ask ''What if?'' about. The point, I quickly tell myself, is that I am here. And I am happy. I'm worried about the foot problems and sort of dreading the next 26.2 miles, but I'm happy. And the first seven or eight miles seem to fly by. The marathon starts as the best run of my life. Instead of my usual run-a-mile-walk-a-tenth pattern I run three miles at a time with walk breaks of no more than a minute or two.
I am foolish enough to think that I can keep this up for the rest of the race. By mile six I have done the math in my head (a big feat for someone more inclined towards words than numbers) and decide I will be done in five and a half hours. If things go really well, 5:15.
But I'm a dumb ass and a marathon doesn't work like that. For me, at least, it quickly turns into one of those things where the further you go, the more it seems like you still have to go. The last mile will end up being 10 times longer than the first mile, and by mile 18 I will have a momentary breakdown where my bad math puts my estimated time of finishing at infinity.
But all that is later. Right now I have a more pressing problem. It comes not long after I see my coach, Kelly, and my buddy Scho, who flew in from London for the weekend, for the third time of the race. They had been bouncing around the course and I love seeing them. It calms me (for now).
* * *
The pressing problem is a chunky blonde woman, poured into a pair of spandex like butter into a sack. She's also a Team In Training runner and is working under the assumption that our mutual affiliation gives her free license to be the most annoying person in Europe. I feel her before I see her -- she is stepping on the backs of my shoes.
''I'm not being fresh,'' she says by way of apology. ''I'm just drafting off of you.''
Let's get something very clear: drafting is something competitive runners do. It's not a technique readily embraced by those of us searching to break the elusive 12-minute mile. ''Drafting'' is her way of saying she is using me as cover from a suddenly noticeable and firm head wind.
The cold wind from the front is quickly overwhelmed by the hot wind from my back. She's a talker. But not a talker who actually talks about interesting things, but a talker who talks for the sake of talking about herself. She's from a southern TNT chapter (in the interest of protecting the guilty I won't reveal which one specifically). Her questions are all delivered in a tone that invite me to ask her questions about herself. For example, when she asks ''Is this you're first marathon?'' what she's really saying is ''Ask me how many marathons I've run so I can tell you that this is my sixth.''
I pick up on this rather quickly and just make grunting noises whenever she asks me something. But she still talks. And when I don't ask her questions about her and and how wonderful she is, she just tells me anyhow. At one point she asks me to slow down. Later on she asks me to speed up. She tells me she needs to run the New York City marathon the following weekend and that the Dublin marathon has derailed her plans to run a marathon in all 50 states. She asks if I've considered a triathalon because, well, she's training for one.
She never asks me if I give a crap. If I had had a gun at that very instant I can't honestly say I would have resisted the urge to use it. I'm not saying I would have killed her, but at the very least she deserved a bullet in a knee cap.
There's a TNT tradition to decorate your singlet the night before your race and the most important thing you can put on it is your name. The best way to put it is that it kicks ass to hear an Irish accent yelling ''Well done, Dave!'' every couple of minutes. Yet my new friend tells me she decided not to put her name on her singlet because she didn't want to hear it over and over again throughout the event. This is her way of reminding me that we've been running together for nearly two miles (it seemed like 20) and I haven't even bothered to ask her her name.
''And what's with all this 'Well done!' stuff?'' she blurts out after hearing the common Irish phrase for the tenth time in a minute. ''I'm not done yet.''
It's mile nine and, without telling her, I decide it's time for a nice long walk break. I hear her continue to babble to me as she cruises on ahead. It is quite possible she continued to talk to me for several miles before realizing I was no longer right behind her. It's quite possible she's still talking to me.
* * *
Freed of my bubbly friend I find I have a new problem. The adrenalin that got me through the first nine or ten miles is suddenly gone. I suspect I used it all suppressing rage and an overwhelming desire to throttle a complete stranger. I have 16 miles to go and I'm hitting a wall.
I suck down an energy gel and even contemplate popping a candy handed to me by a guy standing on the side of the course. But I'm a paranoid American and I decide the candy looks a little too pill-like and the guy looks a little too shady, so I toss it in a gutter. I will be hallucinating on my own soon enough, thank you very much.
Mile 10 turns into mile 11 and the wind is still strong. And this is where the marathon gets a lot less like the feel good event of the year. I see people -- people who are in significantly better shape than me -- break down. They stop to stretch and massage their own calves and thighs. They apply thick coats of Ben Gay at the aid stations (I later heard that at least one person mistook the Ben Gay for Vaseline and applied it to his chafing thighs). I see the smoker talking to the spectator who had lit her cigarette at the start.
''That's it,'' she says as I run past. ''I've had enough. Let's go home.
There's no other way to put it. People look like shit.
I want a Kelly/Scho fix. It's been five miles since I've seen them and I'm anxiously scouring the sidewalks in hopes of finding them. I fear that I've slowed down so much that they've had to move on at each stop to stay with the faster runners in our group. I don't get my Kelly/Scho fix at mile 12 but I get the next best thing -- Dave.
 Dave is the gregarious coach of the New Hampshire TNT team and the official, on-site coach for our chapter. He's one of those overly likeable guys who works on an amazingly little amount of sleep and has a propensity for permanently borrowing pint glasses at every bar we've been to. On the course he loudly calls your name every single time he sees you. It's exhilarating and embarrassing all at once.
* * *
I later learn that Kelly and Scho had gotten lost and instead of me missing them, they were missing me. I'm still not exactly sure how that happened, but as best as I can tell it had something to do with Scho ordering a massive sandwich, the sole ingredients of which were bacon and gobs of Mayo.
Those of you who know Scho will understand.
* * *
Miles 10 to the end, in a word, blow. I got a mild burst of energy at mile 13.1 when I realize I'm halfway through, but that thinking quickly turns itself on its head when I realize I'm only halfway through. I do the same thing at mile 16 when I realize I have now run further than I ever have before when I start telling myself ''I've never run this far before.''
But there's loads of good humanity on a marathon course and not once from the starting line on did I doubt I'd finish. Yes, an injury could have cropped up but that wasn't something I allowed myself to dwell on. Even at the worst of it I was convinced I would finish. It was never a matter of if, just when.
* * *
There's loads of good humanity on a marathon course, but as the miles drag on and on, I become less and less a part of it.
Around mile 11 I am passed by two men who are each holding the end of a rubber tether that looks alarmingly like one of Cosmo's chew toys. The guy on the right is wearing a sign on his back that reads ''Caution: Blind Runner.''
We will leap frog one another enough times over the next 15 miles that I will learn that his name is also David and that it's his first marathon as well. It is an inspirational sight at first (apologies for the pun), but I am getting in that ''bite me'' phase Kelly had warned us about. That phase where all you want is the damn thing to be over with and you say and think really harsh things to people you'd normally be nice to. Kelly had given me a blanket ''apology accepted'' before the race covering anything I may say to her in those closing miles.
The blind guy isn't so lucky. Being the prick that I am, I quietly vow if I accomplish one thing and only one thing today, it will be to beat the blind guy.
I'm a bad ass like that.
* * *
Everything blurs from mile 20 on. Rob, one of the guys I trained with and who had hoped to finish in under four hours is hit with a knee injury and has to walk most of the second half of race. At some point I pass him and don't even realize it. I hear that a Russian won the marathon and think ''That's impossible -- we're only 90 minutes into this thing.'' I look at my watch and I'm shocked when I see I've been out there for more than five hours.
I'm not the only one going through the delirium. Other runners ask me ''Are we at mile 22 or 23?'' when I thought we we're only at mile 21. Even the blind guy -- that inspirational, blah, blah, blah -- seems to be faltering.
I get a boost at mile 24 when I see Scho standing on the side of road snapping pictures of me. To thank him I bite his head off.
''How do you feel?'' he asks.
''How the fuck do you think I feel?'' I ask.
Two women running near me laugh at Scho. I instantly feel awful and to compensate, I'm overly nice when I see Kelly 100 feet later. I'm still not sure if I mistook her for him or if I thought good karma directed at her would translate into forgiveness for my sin against the friend I hadn't seen in seven years who took it upon himself to be there for me.
* * *
People who line the sidewalks during the last mile of a marathon are full of shit. They're great and they really do get you through it, but they're also fantastic liars.
In that last mile I hear ''You're almost there!'' and ''It's right around the corner!'' constantly. And for a while, I actually believe them. I especially believe them when I see an arc of red, white and blue balloons hanging over the street.
I bolt past Blind Guy for the last time. I give everything I have left to get under that arc. I later learn I'm not the only one who did that. But there are no pads underneath the arc to record my time from the chip attached to my shoe. What I had run under was the starting line of the loop course for a second time. I still have more to run.
For the first time that day I come to a dead stop. For a split second -- and only a split second -- I rationalize it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to become the only person to drop out of a marathon with only a couple of hundred yards left to go.
 But from there on out it's like being a rock star. I walk for a minute to collect my bearings and then I start running again. It's an angry, let's-get-this-the-hell-over-and-drink-gallons-of-Guinness kind of run. The finish line finally pops into view. I didn't have time to count but it seems like there are hundreds of people crammed shoulder to shoulder on either side.
They are cheering. They are cheering for me.
Any misery -- and for the past four hours or so it's all been misery -- is erased the moment I cross the line. My chip time ends up being 6:00:24, 24 seconds short of my initial goal of finishing in six hours. But the time doesn't matter. I waver between a point just short of bursting into tears and laughing uncontrollably. Words still escape me. For people who have done it, for people who know, no explanation is necessary. And for those who haven't, no explanation is possible.
* * *
The adrenalin rush lasts for days (it's still there at this writing). That night I stay out until 2 a.m. even though I was up at 4 a.m.
But there's something else going on. It's a low-grade depression, a sudden sadness lingering in the back of my mind. Like losing your virginity, you only get one shot at running your first marathon. It's the one you train for not knowing whether it's in you to finish, it's the one everyone takes an interest in and the one you're allowed to devote thousands of words on your blog too (I swear I'll shut up about this soon). It is the one you'll always remember.
And when something that has consumed a portion of every waking hour -- either in thought or in training --for nearly six months suddenly disappears from your life, there's an understandable void.
A void that lasts at least until you start training for the next one.
More photos.
Previous “public” entries:
Letter to friends and family seeking support, May 9, 2006
Update #1, May 20, 2006
Update #2, May 26, 2006
Update #3, June 15, 2006
Update #4, June 19, 2006
Update #5, June 25, 2006
Update #6, July 10, 2006
Update #7, July 11, 2006
Update #8, August 14, 2006
Update #10, August 15, 2006
Update #11, August 28, 2006
Update #12, Sept. 1, 2006
“Quick Update,” Sept. 20, 2006
“Wish Me Luck,” Sept. 28, 2006
“That Was Fun,” Oct. 1, 2006
Update#16, Oct. 9, 2006
Thank you, Oct. 27, 2006
Mini- Post-Race Update, Nov. 1, 2006 Labels: running, TNT
Posted at 12:06 PM
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