Well, because I'm doing the scariest thing yet, and I just can't help but write about it.
Anyone who knows me is already aware of this (because I haven't shut up about it for the past 4 months or so), but it still feels weird and scary and epic to type it, or even think it, so I will give myself a literary drum roll here...
*drum roll*
...I'M RUNNING A MARATHON.
Yep, that's right. This former fatty who hates running with a vehement passion signed up to run 26.2 miles. Voluntarily. Without anything chasing me. (Hopefully.) Without a doubt my biggest and most daunting challenge yet. So of course I had to write about it in this blog that started out as a virtual fear journal.
Why today? Because the 2016 Portland Marathon takes place on October 9th... exactly one month from today. I've been officially marathon training for four months now, and to say that it has been a transformative experience for me would be an understatement. And while I do keep a "running journal" to record mileage and routes and simple training details, I somewhat regret not writing more in depth about the training process thus far. So, I'm back in blogging action. And I plan to use this blog as a way to record and remember the final month leading up to this epic challenge. You can read about it if you want... or not. This one's for me. :)
There are so many things that I want to write about in the upcoming days: highs and lows of training, the people who have helped me along the way (it really does take a village...), my attempts to balance my nutrition (spoiler alert: if you assume that marathon training is an automatic ticket to weight loss, think again, because I am hungry ALL. THE. TIME), the things I've learned and the way this process has changed me, and so much more. But today, I'm going to start out by answering the one question I've heard most throughout this process:
WHY?!
I can't tell you how many times I've been asked, "Why are you running a marathon?" There are many variations of this question, many containing multiple explatives. My personal favorite: "You do realize that you have to run in order to run a marathon, right?" Ha. Clever. But, also valid. Because why would someone who loathes running almost as much as she loathes Donald Trump decide to run a marathon? There are people out there who legitimately enjoy distance running. I am not one of those people. Some people are good at running and make it look effortless. I am not one of those people, either. Running is hard for me. I'm not good at it. I'm not built for it. I'm built to lift stuff. I don't enjoy running, and I can't "zone out" or "find my happy place" as some runners can; all I can think about when I'm running is how unpleasant it is to be running. I don't run fast, or gracefully, or in good form. I don't even know if you can call it running... more of a plodding stumble. Running is not something I love. Or even like.
So... why commit to 26.2 miles of it?
The short answer: I drank a bottle of red wine while home alone one cold January night and decided that it would be a good idea. So I signed up for it.
(Side note: I really shouldn't have access to credit cards while intoxicated. This might have been my most ill-advised drunken expenditure since the time in college when I bid on a blue electric scooter on eBay. I didn't remember I'd done it until said scooter arrived at my apartment a week later. It ended up being a really great investment... for approximately 20 minutes. We decided to take it for a spin around Blacksburg during another alcohol-fueled night of awesome decision making and promptly drove it into a large pothole. The scooter was never the same again. Maybe the moral of this story should be a little less "Emily shouldn't have credit cards when she drinks" and a little more "Emily shouldn't be allowed to drink and make decisions, ever." But I digress.)
I could blame the wine. And some days, I do. But truth be told, there was a lot of soul searching that went into the decision to run a marathon, and the vast majority of it was done sober. The wine just gave me the courage to pull the trigger. The big picture is a lot more complicated.
Let's go back to 2013... the year that started it all, including this blog. It was the year that I decided I was going to stop being the person who let fear run her life, and instead was going to spend 12 months conquering those fears in the most intimidating ways possible. When the journey began, I didn't think there was anything scarier than facing a Tough Mudder, or signing up for my first CrossFit competition, or running a half marathon. Little did I know that the fears I would face that year would be so much bigger than all of those things combined. 2013 brought me heartbreak, divorce, and a lot of tough questions. It put me at the center of some pretty vicious rumors and gossip, and subsequently caused me to reevaluate who I wanted in my life, and to lose quite a few friendships. It broke down the entire picture of everything I'd always thought I was, and forced me to start all over again from scratch in discovering who I truly am. 2013 was the hardest and scariest year of my life. But it was also one of the most beautiful. Because by surviving all of those things, I learned that true love and true happiness are worth facing any fear. And I managed to find both.
Fast forward... I have my happy ending. I am newly and blissfully married to my soul mate, who has made my life better in every way imaginable, and who just makes me feel happy to be alive every single day. I have two incredible kids in my life who have brought me a tremendous amount of joy, and who have taught me that life doesn't have to happen according to plan in order to be beautiful. I have a difficult but rewarding career that, despite my bitching, I actually kind of love. I have amazing friends who have proven that they will truly stand by my side through absolutely anything. I have grown closer to my family over the past few years, and have discovered that in addition to loving my sisters in an obligatory way, I actually kind of even like them. :) In short... I have everything I never knew I always wanted. And it's glorious.
Alas, I can never make anything that simple. As much as I LOVE this happy ending, a part of me started to miss having things to be scared of. Truth be told, fear is my most powerful motivator. And without a healthy dose of it in my life, I was starting to feel complacent. Stagnant. Restless.
The fact of the matter is, I am happiest and at my best when I'm facing a challenge. The scarier, the better. I truly believe that we were all put on this earth to pursue the things that set our souls on fire. I already pursued Jeannie, and that went pretty well. :) The other thing that sets my soul on fire is conquering challenges. Facing the things I don't truly believe I'm capable of doing, and then proving myself wrong. To me, there is nothing more amazing than knowing that we are limitless... that we can constantly reinvent ourselves, that we can accomplish anything we set out to achieve, and that we get to write our own stories. "I am the captain of my fate, I am the master of my soul." Or something. I don't know. I just know that few things in this world thrill me as much as setting a terrifying goal and seeing it through.
I spent the first 30 years of my life watching other peoples' achievements from a distance, while remaining safely cocooned in my own insecurities. Considering where I started, I have to admit that I am proud of what I've accomplished in recent years. I set a huge weight loss goal for myself, and I hit it. I became a CrossFitter, and a half marathoner, and an OCR competitor. I tried things that the "old me" only could have dreamed about, and surprised myself by loving most of them. And the more something terrified or intimidated me, the better it felt when I conquered it. After three decades of never challenging myself for fear of failure, I suddenly couldn't get enough challenges.
In 2014, I completed my first Spartan trifecta, despite Wintergreen absolutely destroying me. In 2015, I set out to repeat the trifecta and get my redemption at Wintergreen, and I did both of those things. My original goal for 2016 was a Double Trifecta, but after Spartan almost doubled the price of their season passes coming into the 2016 season, that became financially impossible. I didn't have anything to train for or work towards, and I was feeling rather lost. I needed a new challenge.
Around the same time I was finishing up my trifecta and beginning to contemplate my next move, fall marathon season went into full swing. I would see Facebook posts of people with their medals, people smiling at the camera while running past cheering crowds (WHO SMILES WHILE THEY ARE RUNNING?!?!), people at the finish line not looking like they were dying... and I was in awe of each and every one of them. And my internal reaction to all of these runners was the same as it has always been: I could never do that. I could never run 26.2 miles. I am just not physically or mentally capable of doing it. A marathon remained the one thing that I truly believed, honestly and wholeheartedly, that I simply could not do. I've always felt this way.
Only this time, my gut reaction kind of pissed me off.
I have spent so much time in the past few years drilling into my own head and heart that I can accomplish anything if I want it badly enough. So why was there not a single piece of my being that could even entertain the thought of being able to run a marathon? Why was I SO very convinced that my body could not achieve such a goal? I was frustrated with myself. It began to hang over my head... this thing that seemed so impossibly out of reach. I became silently obsessed with the thought of it. And at some point, without even realizing it, my thought process started to change from "I could never do this," to "Why couldn't I?"... and, eventually, "Maybe? Could I?"
One day shortly after Christmas, I got up the courage to confess this thought process to Jeannie, and to ask her opinion. I half assumed she would laugh at me. But, being Jeannie, she told me without hesitation that she thought I could do anything if I was willing to put in the work. She was also honest, and pointed out that I would have to stick to a really difficult training plan (which is a terrible weakness of mine, as I am typically a "let's wing it and see how this shit will go" kind of gal), and that the mental challenge of taking on something like this would be incredibly difficult for me. I knew she was right. But the fact that she also believed I could do it gave me confidence.
A few days later, I texted my friend Kris, who is both an amazing and experienced runner and one of the kindest people I've ever met. Not only could she give me an educated and honest assessment of the situation, but I trusted her and knew she would not laugh in my face. I told her that I was having this crazy idea, and asked her just how impossible this "impossible dream" really was. Her instant response: not impossible at all. She not only encouraged me to go for it, but also offered to be a sort of running mentor for me, and to come up with a training plan that would fit my ability and goals. At that point, I still didn't even remotely believe that I could do it... but an increasingly large part of me really wanted to find out one way or another.
Fast forward a week. I had a night off, an empty house, and a bottle of wine calling my name. After one glass, I started absent-mindedly googling "flattest marathons in America." After the second glass, I started considering which of those locations I wanted a good excuse to visit. After the third glass, I was getting pretty excited about Portland craft beers. And as I finished the bottle, I found myself in a moment of Cabernet-fueled clarity/insanity, got out my credit card, and signed myself up for the 2016 Portland Marathon. Immediately after hitting "send" on my entry form, I felt giddy with excitement. Take that, fear! Suck it, doubt! I'm going to run a damn MARATHON!
The next morning, however, I woke up with a slight hangover and an impending sense of doom as I remembered what I had committed myself to the night before. As it turned out, without the warm liquid courage of wine coursing through my veins, I was no more confident in my ability to run 26.2 miles than in my ability to sprout wings and fly to Portland myself. But, too late. I'd already texted both Jeannie and Kris the night before declaring that I was going to run the Portland Marathon... not to mention paid a non-refundable entry fee. Neither my pride nor my inner Jew were willing to back out. So, with a deep sense of dread, I mentally committed myself, in that moment, to at least give it a try. To follow Kris's training program as best I could and go from there. I might not be able to run a marathon... but I at least had to try.
That was eight months ago. During the course of those eight months, this pipe dream of mine has slowly taken over my life. I started building a base by running as far as I could a few days a week. At first, it was a mile. Then two. When the time came to start the official training program, I could handle 5 miles with walk breaks. As I resigned myself to 20 weeks of structured hell, I was whole-heartedly convinced that I would never be able to reach the final goal. The thought of running 15, 18, 20 miles just felt so dramatically incomprehensible that it was almost laughable. But I threw myself into the training program anyways. My first scheduled "long run" was 6 miles, and I hated every step of it. But I kept going. Kept doing the workouts exactly as written, no matter how much I had to walk or how long they took me. I kept trying.
For the first two months, I felt like I wasn't making a damn bit of progress. I was still walking more than I was running on my long runs, my interval workouts were impossibly hard, and every hill workout made me want to simultaneously cry and vomit. Some days I did both. But despite the lack of progress, a tiny part of me felt proud of myself. I was sticking with it. I wasn't giving up. I was terrible at it, but I didn't quit. And sometimes, that's all you can ask of yourself.
The longer my long runs became, the more convinced I was that I was chasing something impossible. There was a moment during my first 15-miler, when I was puking up blue Power Aid on the side of the road in 96 degree heat during my third lap around North Park, that I actually decided I'd had enough. I was done. I was ready to wave the white flag... this was not going to happen. All of my worst suspicions and fears were confirmed in that moment... I simply couldn't do it. I limped back to my car with tears streaming down my face, walked circles around the parking lot until my GPS watch finally said I'd gone 15 miles, and drove home feeling like the world's biggest failure.
Thankfully, I had already scheduled breakfast the next day with my wonderful friend Laura. Laura has played an enormous role in this whole process, and she will get her own blog post soon. But for now, suffice it to say that she gave me the tough love I needed during that breakfast, and made me realize that giving up wasn't an option. I'd come this far. What did I gain if I gave up now? What was the point of all of the hours, the miles, the sweat and the tears I'd already invested if I threw it all away now? All wasted. She told me to give it another week, and helped me to get my mind back on track. I promised I'd give it another try.
And the following week, I had my first "good" long run ever. It was only 11 miles, and it wasn't anywhere near where I needed to be to actually finish a marathon. But I ran the whole thing without walk breaks, and I didn't puke OR cry, and I finished feeling strong and happy and just a tiny bit more confident. It was exactly what I needed to motivate me to keep going. And so, I did.
Here we are, one month away. Last week, I had a slow but surprisingly un-horrible 19-mile run. It was officially the farthest I had ever moved my body, and although there were walk breaks and I certainly didn't break any speed records, it was the first time I began to truly believe in my heart that I just might be able to do this after all. Right now, I'm sitting on my back porch, and I just finished a pretty solid 15-mile run (immediately following two 12-hour night shifts and running on nothing but coffee fumes and adrenaline, no less)... and believe it or not, I actually almost enjoyed it. Next week, I face 20 miles. For some reason, that number is impossibly daunting, even though I've already survived 19. I'm already anxious about attempting it. And I'd be lying if I said that I'm not completely freaking out about hitting the "one month out" point. But it's almost a good kind of freak-out. The kind that tells you that you are getting ready to do something terrifying and nauseating and really fucking hard... but also, something really, really amazing. And if I had to give it a number, I'd say I'm 34% confident that I'll actually be able to do this thing. And that's 100% more confident than I was a few weeks ago. So, I'll take it. I'll make my legs carry me 20 miles next week, no matter how long it takes or how ugly it is. Then I will taper. And then I will get on a plane, go to Portland, and line up with tens of thousands of other people at the starting line. From there, I honestly don't know what will happen. I still can't quite visualize myself crossing that finish line. But I am going to try my damndest to do it anyways. And a month from right now, it will all be over. No matter what happens, I'll be able to say that I stuck to the training plan, and I didn't quit when everything in my soul wanted to, and I did my best. And that is a victory in and of itself.
So, yeah. I'm going to try to run a marathon a month from today. And to be perfectly honest, I can't wait to see what happens.
