It’s been a little over a week since the Grand Rapids Marathon and a day hasn’t gone by where I don’t stare at my middle toenail and wonder when it’s going to fall off. I’ve read about this phenomenon with runners and Cheryl Strayed, who hiked the 2,650 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail and included a graphic description of her fallen toenails in her autobiography.
One of the first things I said to Don, as he was easily talking me into running a marathon five months from when we met, was that I couldn’t imagine losing my one of my toenails. “Oh, it just happens,” Don said in the nonchalant way you, who have met him, can imagine and he, who is reading this, is probably chuckling at in familiarity. I don’t know if it’s the overshadowing pride I feel from completing my first marathon or the nail polish I used to hide the crack that signifies my toenail’s inevitable separation, but losing a toenail is the least of my concerns now.
I ended up having about 4 hours, 40 minutes and 57 seconds to reflect on where marathon training has taken me. With that amount of time to ponder, I wish I had a better reflection blog for you, but I wasn’t thinking about what I’m saying here while I was running there.
I was thinking about running by the new Atwater Brewing Company en route and knocking on the windows so my new coworkers could see how cool I was for running a marathon (they didn’t)...
I thought about running through Part I of the Serengeti and hoped Brian’s inspirational “You Look Like Shit” sign would be propped there for that surge of motivation we needed within the first 6 miles (it wasn't)...
I thought about how much that 4-mile Indian Mounds switch-back strip is going to suck and wondered where I’d be, physically and mentally, when we got around to facing it (still there, still running)...
I also thought a lot about how the storyline to The Expendables III could be rewritten to actually be good along with a great screenplay suggestion for a Rambo V (neither were great)...
But mostly, I thought about how there was no way I could have done this five months ago.
The feat, in fact, seemed unreal to me from the beginning—I assumed I would end up walking or crapping my pants at some point during the elongated jog (you know, sexy stuff). After predicting my finish time at a modest 6 hours on the registration form, I never would have imagined I’d be crossing the finish line at 4:40:57.16, almost 18 minutes earlier than the pace team I was following, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Pace Team, at 4:58.
This marathon taught me a lot, and I see why all you crazy people (proudly including me now) run them. I assumed I would exhaust my love for running during this marathon (after all, it knocked out five days worth of recommended FitBit steps), but my brother and I are already discussing signing up for the Groundhog Marathon in February. We caught the bug, guys!
Congratulations to every single person who took on running between 13.1 and 26.2 miles that morning when any of us could have easily filled that time with sleep, pancakes, and a Netflix show we’ve already seen. Whether it was your first marathon or an addition to your endurance collection, I am so proud of you and honored I got to run with you that Sunday. Keep this triumph in the forefront of your mind because, when Life gets hard, I’m using this personal victory as a reminder that I can do anything (except get Sylvester Stallone to respond to my tweets...I also still can’t do pull ups).
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