I have had trouble putting on pants for two days because that involves a very tricky bend of the legs. I haven't been able to descend stairs properly for 48 hours. I don't want to talk about what it's like to try to sit down on a toilet. My quadriceps simply won't cooperate; I have suddenly gained the future knowledge of what it will be like to get around town when I'm 80 years old. It's a weird sensation: standing at the top of the subway staircase, before I even make a toe movement towards the first step down, my brain immediately knows that NO, this is NOT going to work. As soon as I start to bend, I know that my legs will begin to wobble and burn, my arms will clench the metal railing, and my shoulders will seize up to support half of my body as I reach my opposite toe for footing on the next step; there will be a strong exhale and my lips will be pulled inward on each other as my teeth are clamping down to muffle the scream of lactic acid's revenge.
The sensory memory of the pain in taking that step down is so strong that there's no room in my imagination for the possibility that today it could be a little bit better than yesterday. So each step is the same hurdle as the step before it, and the previous 47 hours worth of steps...it's going to HURT and I have to tell myself, before each step, that it won't. And besides that, I look like an idiot: a young, capable lady climbing and descending stairs sideways with both hands on the railing, audibly grunting through her nose. But that's what you get for running a marathon when you turn 30.
I ran 26.2 miles on Saturday. Some of it was easy, all of it was beautiful, some of it really hurt, and most of it took so much mental energy that after crossing the finish line and sitting down 30 minutes later to eat a burger, it was all I could do to keep from literally passing out with my sweaty, beanie-ed head on the wooden table of a shore-side restaurant. Pain had been my companion for the latter half of the race, starting after hour 3. The first pain shows up mentally: "Is this getting harder? How much further do I have? Oh. Right, I just passed mile 13. Everything I just did for the past 3 hours I'm going to have to do again."
Then there's the physical pain: "Ouch. Why is my shirt scraping my skin off? Is that blood? Uck. Ok, just keep going." The real work begins after mile 18; it's slow torture, running towards the end, because you know that it's just going to get worse, but you can't speed up the process unless you yourself speed up, and once you speed up there's no slowing down unless you want your friend Pain to envelope you in a bear hug until you suffocate or collapse, or both. "If you slow down right now, you're not going to make it through this next mile. Just keep going for one more minute. Ok, breathe, breathe.... La la la la la la laaaaaaa. Dooo dooo dooo. Let's just sing a little song until that next tree." All that, and your ego is long gone, since you've been basically talking/singing aloud to yourself for 4 hours now in full view and hearing range of the myriad of spectators and fellow runners. And, oh yeah, you forgot that you've been wearing that white plastic garbage bag like a sweater this whole time.
Nausea from consuming GU for five hours, burning in your midsection from the chafing of your underwire, dull throbbing in your legs with each bend and roll of the foot, and a consistent ache in your hips from the repetition of movement: these are the mind tricks Pain summons. So, you do everything in your power to distract yourself from focusing on the pain: singing, humming, counting, watching someone else run, giving a high five to a little Brownie scout handing you water, cheering on that one person you keep passing, wondering about what you're going to eat later on, watching the time, watching the scenery, wondering about how you're old enough to have kids and how this pain compares to having a baby, wondering how you would handle delivery pains at this point in your life, marveling at that autistic runner who's got a chaperone, ruminating on why you decided to do this again, praying five shots of GU caffeine won't make your blood pressure do weird things, wondering if you're doing lasting damage and hoping time will be kind to your body down the road...thinking about anything and everything else beside the fact that YOU HAVE BEEN RUNNING FOR FIVE HOURS.
If the mind would calm down about it all, if I didn't focus on the pain, if I pretended it didn't exist, perhaps Pain would get so upset at the lack of attention that it would just tear its way through me and finally let the body handle the pressure. I'm sure the body would fix itself: vomit everything up and send some endorphins to the parts where it hurts. Voila, fixed. I mean, there are people who run ultra-marathons, and I was only doing a quarter of that kind of feat.
Luckily, I was accompanied by some real friends who drove out to the country to see me run: friends who jogged alongside me at the halfway point, friends who waited in the rain for a half-hour longer than expected for my finish, friends who hand-fed me potatoes while I changed out of my mucky running clothes, and friends who rubbed my tired back as I drifted off in a post-race food coma. Those friends provided moments which eased the mind of its all-consuming fight with the pain, and offered much-needed relief from the reality of running a marathon.
But, then, when all is said and done, and you wake up the next day, the body seeks its revenge for your abandoning it to do all that WORK. And pain memory shows up for however long it takes your mind to get the message: the body saying that "if you ever put me through this process again, I swear to God this is how it will feel for three weeks, you a-hole."
Well, I don't think I will be doing it anytime again soon. Maybe, MAYBE in five years. Maybe not. I started out training for this thing because I was commemorating my 30th birthday. Now that it's finished, I can revel in my new decade of wonderment. So, happy birthday to me. Nothing says "You're 30 and alive!" quite like the inability to climb stairs or put on pants.
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