The Agony

The marathon is by far, the hardest thing I have ever done. I have never been in as much physical pain as I was so much of that race. After running miles in the double digits, my feet are burning, my legs are tired and my hip flexors and IT Bands feel like snapped rubber bands. They are moving, but nothing is cushioning them or protecting them from the constant friction. But pain is one thing. The length of the pain is entirely another.

I think the grace of suffering in life is that we don’t often know the end point. So we are forced to take things one day at a time. I don’t want to minimize the hell that not knowing the end point can bring with it. It could go on forever. Or it couldn’t. The thing is, we just don’t know.

With a marathon, you know. You know the end point. You know at any given time (if a race is well marked) how far it is away and how long it may take you to get there. You know that you have 10 miles to go or 16 or even a seemingly small distance like 2 or 4. You know that you can’t stop until you complete every one of them and that it’s going to take a long time to do that. You know all of this at the same time you know that putting one foot in front of the other seems impossible right now. Much less for ________ more miles. You know that this pain isn’t getting better. There were times when I couldn’t imagine my legs and feet hurting worse than they did and I knew, somehow, they were going to. The only way for this to end was to go through more pain, for a long time, to get there.

Finding a will to finish even with all of the knowledge of how long it will take and how much it will continue to hurt is what makes a marathon so difficult. Why keep going? You pay to be here, you did all of this training, no one is making you do this race. Just sticking with training is accomplishment enough. So why go on? Fortunately I found a reason.

There were moments, when the magnitude of this race hit me. When I saw the name of one of the victims (just past mile 21), one who was on the news a lot in Milwaukee after the bombing, tears welled in my eyes. Not to mention the people I saw with shirts that said names and had pictures of who they were doing this for, parents, friends, siblings, husbands and wives, children…all victims with surviving families running this race. Or the firefighters in full gear who were walking the half. This was a race of hope. In a tiny, tiny way, my being there, and my running was a tribute to that hope. In the moments I remembered that, I remembered why I had to persevere and finish, not because it would be an accomplishment for me (at mile 22, if I could have had a cab, I would have said “screw accomplishment” and got inside) but because I believe that hope is stronger than any pain we feel. Therefore finishing was the only choice. Pain wasn’t going to win this time. Hope was. For me, and for all of the people there who believed in it. I had to keep going, to endure the agony, because this wasn’t about me. It was about hope.