Optimistic at the start of the Hyannis marathon.
When I met Bill Rodgers at the expo the day before the Hyannis Marathon, he signed a poster for me and asked a few questions about my race plans, including, “which one are you running?” When I told him the marathon he looked at me very seriously, unsmiling, and said something along the lines of, “Hmm. That’s a weird race.” Or maybe, “That’s a mysterious race.” I don’t recall exactly, but the shift in his tone makes me think, at least in retrospect, of his famous quote: “The marathon can humble you.”
And so, the next day, it did. The rain held off in the morning, and we went out at a good pace. For the first 13 miles I was locked in right at my goal pace, and I ditched my shell and hat when I passed Kristen at the end of the first loop. After that, things started getting tougher, which I’d expected. But by 16 I was thinking I wasn’t going to hit goal time after all and had begun to reevaluate my strategy for the last 10 miles, aiming to come in around my Portland time or maybe even a little slower. The temperature started dropping, the wind picked up, and it began to rain. I missed my coat. The hard winter and the impact it had on my training felt like it was showing up everywhere. Then at mile 18 my quads began to ache, which was odd since Hyannis is not a hilly course. Turns out this was a precursor of what happened at mile 19 – my right knee began to twinge uncontrollably. Took me from a run to dead, hopping stop. I walked on it for about a minute, then began to run again. Slow jog, felt okay. Pushed it back to a nine minute mile, then eight. And pop, it started tweaking out again. I went through this cycle about 10 more times between mile 19 and mile 22.5. I didn’t care if I had to walk in, I just wanted to finish. But the temperature was still dropping and the rain was starting to pound down, and now that I wasn’t running, my body temperature was falling fast. I’d started shivering hard. After one more shot at jogging and a particularly hard knee spasm that left me struggling to even walk, a race official approached.
“Do you think you can continue?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s not worth doing more damage,” he said. “Get off it now so you can run the next one. I can get a ride back for you.” It made sense, but I was still hoping, delusionally, that it was something that could work itself out, like a muscle cramp. “Let me go a little farther,” I said. He told me there was a race official and a police officer about a half mile up, and that if I got there and still couldn’t get the knee working, I could take a ride. I limped along in the rain, and the knee got worse, even as the rest of me felt more and more recovered. It was brutally frustrating. Three short miles, and plenty of everything left in the tank except for this one thing. At mile 23 a woman came up to me. She was the girlfriend of the race official I’d talked to before. He’d radioed ahead. “Can I give you a ride back?” she asked. “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so. Thank you.”
And that’s where the race ended for me. I had a nice chat with the woman while she drove me back. She’s a runner, but hasn’t been running for a while. Hip surgery scheduled for next month. I found Kris and our friends at the finish line, and at first they were worried they’d missed me finish. Nope. We waited for my friend Curt to come in – which he did in high style, charging toward the finish in a sprint against a guy he’d been running against for the last few miles. We cheered and then I went inside to warm up.
I felt hypothermic, disappointed, emptied out, oddly void of hunger or thirst, and like Bill Rodgers says, humbled. The opposite of how I felt at the end of Portland. The knee was the culmination of bad winter’s worth of training, of chronic tweaks and strange exhaustion. Looking back even further, I can’t help but wonder if I tried to do a second race too soon after Portland. I recovered from that race for less than a month before I began training for Hyannis; and I’d run Portland as hard and fast as I possibly could. Maybe that was the root of the whole crummy training cycle that followed. I’d been so buoyed by the outcome of that race that I’d succumbed to hubris and launched into the next one too soon, especially too soon for someone who’d only been running and training seriously for a year at that point (I’d been a three-mile-run, three-times-a-week runner for the decade prior to that).
So what’s next? Well, on the running front, I’m going to register for an October marathon. Probably Bay State in Lowell. I’m going to take a real rest, get my knee working again, and run light and cross train for a month or more. Work on speed, plan on some shorter races, for the spring and summer. But that’s just running. The real stuff, the stuff that makes this a pretty minor disappointment in the grand scheme of things, somehow feels especially top of mind this morning as I recuperate at home on a vacation day: spend lots of high quality time with Kris and the kids, pray always, play music, work hard. Those are the things that are the foundation for good running for me, and everything else.
Tags: bill rodgers, DF, Hyannis, marathon, Running
Wow. Completely bummed by the knee problem. Hope it is feeling better today.
But, on the bright(er) side – really good blog post.
Sorry to hear that you had such a rough time with the knee and the weather. But as the previous comment said, you wrote a great blog that I read avidly, even though the title cued me in that it wasn’t going to have the desired ending. My reminder to you is similar to a chat I had with a student last week. She had studied very hard for the test and had been confident she would do well, but did not score as high as she had hoped. She was really bummed out. “People always tell you,” she commented, “that you can do anything you want if you work hard enough at it.” I reminded her that life isn’t usually that simple. Of course hard work often pays off, but not always…Sometimes other factors come into play. There are probably hundreds of platitudes out there to throw into the disucssion at times like this…But none of them mean a thing. If you’re hooked on the thrill of the competition and the endorphins that come with your running, you’ll swallow the disappointment this time and do just what you’re doing. Making plans for next time. Hurrah!
(But as MOM, I do have to say “Get that knee checked out!”)
Hi Ernesto,
Sorry to hear about the injury and I hope the knee is not damaged. I’m concerned about the “pop” as that sounds ominous. See you tomorrow, I hope, but take care of the knee.
Terry
Damon – Thanks! Writing it was a nice way to process…
Mom – You’re right, good advice, as always!
Terry – “Pop” may have been misleading. I used “pop” there to signify the suddenness of the return of the pain, but I didn’t actually hear or feel a “pop”, which I agree, would make me much more worried about the knee than I am right now. At the moment I’m speculating a sudden, fairly bad case of runners knee, or maybe an IT band issue, both of which I can work my way through. See you tomorrow for sure!
Sorry to hear about the hard finish to your race. We’ve all been there and nothing teaches like experience… Your attitude is great. Recuperate and keep at it.
Damon’s right — good blog post, though certainly not what you originally had in mind. Sorry it didn’t have a better ending. On the bright side, sounds like your head’s in the right place and you’re still capable of banging out an editorial.
Nick
I am so sorry that you had to drop, but you did the right thing to accept the ride back and not do any further damage. How does you knee feel now? Have you had it examined? I’m sure you post an update soon.
Well, here’s the update, so far, on the knee. I figured pretty soon after the race that I hadn’t torn anything wide open – no swelling, no bruising and it unlocked and the pain stopped pretty soon after I stopped running. My legs were sore for a few days after, and the knee was twingy on stairs or walking around, but not really sharp – nothing like it was while running. So I gave it some time. Today I hit the gym after work and ran a little on the treadmill. No pain at all for the first three quarters of a mile, then stiffness and tweaks between mile one and two. I quit and rode the bike for a while when I noticed the sort of shuffle-limp come back into my gait, but before there was any real pain. I’m figuring it was strained and locked up, probably partly because my quads were so fried, partly the result of a whole mess of stupid winter injuries, and partly because I never really rested long enough to recover from Portland. Also, my shoes were out past 500 miles, and that couldn’t have helped. I’m going to ease back into things a couple of miles at a time, but I’m confident it’s on the mend.
Glad to hear that you didn’t do any serious damage. Good idea to ease back into running. Don’t rush it.