As I write this my feet are soaking in ice water. It’s a little painful waiting for them to numb, but I know this is a good thing to do after 20 miles of foot strikes, 3x my body weight of impact on each one. I don’t know how many hundreds, even thousands of times that happens over the course of 20 miles but it’s a lot. My feet hurt. They hurt at the halfway point. Marathon training can be downright abusive to any normal human’s body. 20 miles of running proved that point.
I anticipated this day for months. The longest run before the marathon. The last big one before tapering over the next three weeks. Could I handle it? Would I be ready? It was not an easy thing to get up at the crack of dawn to run this morning. To be out for nearly four hours. A daunting task to even begin.
And yet, here I sit. The 20 miles of running now complete. People will ask how it was. I have to think about that answer. Seeing the sunrise and a yard full of thousands, yes literally thousands of daffodils, was incredible. Running in shorts for the first time in months? Freeing. Thinking about the people, who in the last week have encouraged me, telling me how far I have come, wishing me the best…those thoughts pushed me through some of the harder miles. And it was hard. It was so incredibly hard. There were moments when I had to talk myself into getting to the next telephone pole, mere feet away. My feet hurt, my legs hurt, my body just ached and I said to myself over and over “I feel great.” I longed for cold water for miles, and was filled with gratitude when I was able to stop at my office at mile 18 to drink it, splash it on my face and pour it over my head. There were moments of hope: seeing 2 hawks, running down hills, feeling a burst of energy, a cool breeze. There were moments of despair, thinking this would never end. Being tired and still having 10, 6, 4 and 2 miles to go. This is how it was.
The thing that amazes me after every long run: when it’s over, I can’t believe I did it. I can’t believe that I could run 20 miles and still be able to walk and function and go on about my life (granted, I will be sore and that soreness will be a reminder of what I accomplished.) I can’t believe that I was running, convincing my legs to move forward and now I sit here relaxing with my feet numbing in ice water. It ended. This thing that seemed so daunting for so many months is now over. There was an end after all and it involves ice water, chocolate milk, cheese and crackers, and sitting and thinking “I did it.”
I did it.
It’s hard to put into words how satisfying that feeling is. How encouraging. How much in life we see something before us that seems so daunting, and in the midst of it, might seem to never end, and then it does and we can say “I did it.” Of course, running for that long is about more than getting through it. It is about finding the moments of joy along the way. But the real reward is in enjoying each accomplishment. Savoring the feeling of cold water, the well-earned tiredness and even the soreness. It’s in saying your going to do something, committing to it even when it seems scary and finding a way to finish. Running a marathon is an accomplishment for sure, but so is being able to say “I did it” after every long run. 20 Miles. 4 months of training done. 3 weeks left to appreciate the miles completed and savor every moment of the homestretch
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