Yesterday marked “1 week” until the race. The last few weeks I’ve been traveling a lot for work. I’ve been meaning to write, specifically about my amazing experiences running in Paris, but I digress from the true intent of this entry. Paris can wait, but I do promise to write about it for anyone hoping to run there.
So I am in Orlando right now, sitting in my hotel room in the wee hours of the morning with a mild sunburn. That’s the trouble I get into when I don’t have long weekend runs. We are tapering so I’ve only been running a little bit and am grumpy. Our head TNT coach, Ramon (who is only ever so slightly out of his mind, the man finished the Lake Placid Iron Man in like 10 hours, or so the folklore goes) sent an email about the San Fran race next weekend, with all the important info - how to run it, about the course, etc. So I’m sitting here with a cup of bad hotel coffee reading this email and crying. He starts going on about how if this is your first marathon, to cherish it, because you only get “one first”, and of course I get all teary.
It was really in 2003 when I watched the Boston Marathon for the first time when I said to myself that I wanted to run a marathon. At the time it seemed like such an impossible feat, but that’s what goals are for right? And now, as I am less than a week away from running my first marathon I don’t really know what to feel. I am nervous; nervous that I am going to do something wrong to jeopardize my hard months of training (like get a sunburn), or I’m going to come down with some awful Ebola-like virus (or maybe just the flu), or I’m going to be too nervous to eat enough the night before, or I’m just not going to reach my goal or I’ll be too eager to reach my goal and burn out and not even finish. So I’m sitting here, thinking about all these things and crying, when really I think this emotional reaction to Ramon’s email is more about the fact that I’m coming to the end of a long journey.
I know that I won’t stop running, it’s in me now like a plague; OK, maybe not with the negative connotations of the plague, but you get what I mean. But he’s right, I’ll never have another “first marathon”. I guess I’ll just have to search out for other firsts. Who knows, maybe an Iron Man is in my future, a long distant future.
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