DANIEL STYLER
<Staff Writer>
Shortly before Christmas, two friends and I discussed the possibility of running a marathon. What is 26 miles when you already jog for 20 minutes on a semi-regular basis, anyway? Within an hour, we had all signed up for a marathon that would take place in early May.
Four months later, I have managed to successfully follow the first 13 weeks of an 18-week training schedule that requires me to run six times a week for a total of somewhere between 50 and 75 miles per week. I have missed only two runs.
Unfortunately, a lower body casualty has cost me one of my running partners. First, he hurt himself skiing. It wasn’t clear when, because he fell a lot. Second, he hurt himself from overexertion during his recovery from said injury. Now, he is weeks behind in training, has what he describes as a “twisted muscle group,” and may miss the marathon that he told everyone he was going to run. We joke that they may have to amputate; if they did, I suppose he could crawl.
Luckily, I have managed to avoid significant injuries. Sometimes, though, I feel like I am aging at an unnatural rate. I wake up in the middle of the night because my knee feels like someone is repeatedly hitting it with a hammer. I take Tylenol pre-emptively. I also walk like Frankenstein some days because I can’t properly bend my legs.
When we were about two weeks into the training schedule, we would gleefully talk about how this could become a yearly tradition. Why stop at one marathon? Why not ten or twenty or two hundred? We could run one on every continent (even Antarctica). Nothing was stopping us.
I signed up for a two month trial membership at a certain gym that prides itself on how extreme it is. During my initial sign-up period, some overly muscular guy came up to me and said, “Hey, have you signed up for a long-term contract yet? We can lock you in for the next year for only $70 per month. That’s about a quarter of our regular price.” For some reason, I couldn’t rationalize spending $70 per month for the next year when I was only paying $14 per month for my trial membership, particularly when I hadn’t set foot in the actual workout area yet.
I dutifully ran alongside my Extreme running partner, virtually every day. Our long runs took place on Sunday, which would almost always be followed by a comically large combination of pancakes, bacon, and eggs (and maybe alcohol) that my girlfriend graciously prepared.
And then something slowly started happening. I grew to resent running, just like I resent people who unnecessarily ask questions in class or getting on an unmarked St. Clair West turn back train. I ran, but I ran angrily.
There is something that is both mind-numbing and soul-crushing about running up to three hours on a treadmill. You see people come and go, doing normal people runs. You finish the bottle of water you brought, and rapidly dehydrate to the point where you can no longer sweat. You watch an entire hockey game, and get mad when the game doesn’t go into overtime because you have nothing else to watch.
And then you finish. You walk home, lay down, and no one really cares. It makes me feel like a nihilist, asking questions like, “What is it all for?”
The recent warm weather has reinvigorated me, though, which would lead me to believe that signing up for a marathon that required me to train almost exclusively in the dark depths of the Canadian winter months was not a good idea.
Running outside is a revelation. You actually see things other than a wall or your reflection in a pane of glass. It is a little more difficult than running on a moving object, but this difficulty is more than made up for by not running on a rubber belt destined for nowhere.
I am going to run this marathon on May 5th, and I will temporarily feel an inflated sense of self. I imagine myself being showered with adoration upon reaching the finish line, and my running partner and I being carried off into the distance by all of our closest friends.
That may temporarily mask my feelings about these past four months. Let this article serve as a reminder to me of one thing: I will never do this again.