Uphill Journey - The Whidbey Island Marathon

Let me tell you about the Whidbey Island Marathon. Saturday, we took a drive down to the race expo to pick up my race packet and decided to drive the course so I would know where I was going in case, as in the Birch Bay run, the volunteer force was diminished by the time I came through and there was no one handy to show me the way. After getting lost or nearly lost in Prague, Mudgee, and Birch Bay, I’ve learned my lesson: Study the route.

As Bill drove, following the course map, pointing out the turns, I kept repeating, “Holy shit! Another hill.” The course was up, up, flat, up, down, up, up, up, down, up, up, flat, up, up and so on. I’d heard this course had hills, but every time I brought it up during my training, Bill would reassure me, “It’s no worse than Mudgee. You’ll do fine.” But now I was seeing with my own eyes that this race was much hillier than Mudgee. Bill continued to tell me that it would be no problem, even as we put the car in second gear up the mile-long hills I would have to traverse the next day.

Self-doubt is a tenacious little monster, isn’t it? A thousand other people can tell you you’re great, or capable, or smart, or strong – but ONLY your opinion of yourself can chase away self-doubt. I fought with that doubt as we continued to drive the route, vacillating between, “I’m trained well. I know I can do it,” and “You’re hosed. Those hills are going to kick your ass.”

“Well, I guess I can walk if I have to,” I concluded as we sped past Oak Harbor High School where the finish line would be. I would fall back on my motto: I don’t have to be good or fast, only committed.” So, although I had hopes of beating or at least matching my time from my last marathon, I could see it was unlikely, and I fell back on my belief that “doing” is more important than “winning” or, in my case, “not sucking.”

I managed to sleep on Saturday night and get myself up in time to dress, drive to Starbucks and order a double, short, sugar-free cinnamon soy latte and make it to the starting line ready to run for more than five hours. Bill caught a glimpse of Dean Karnazes, the Ultra-marathon Man, crossing the starting line just before I came through.

The course was beautiful (hills notwithstanding) with rolling fields and glimpses of the harbor, and the weather was at least partially cooperative, sprinkling only a little rain on me at about mile 17, but the highlight of the race was running with a man I met along the way at about mile 12 who, with his own determination and commitment to the marathon, took my self-doubt, crumpled it in a little ball like used foil and tossed it off to the side of the road. His name is Mel and he is seventy-five years old. Bill had pointed him out to me before the race began, so I knew a little about him when I caught up to him on one of the rare flat points in the race.

He ran with hunched shoulders and his head tucked down and thrust forward with determination. Mel’s pace was actually slightly slower than my own, but I was happy to reduce my speed to have a talk with him while I recovered from one of the hills we had just conquered.

“Hey. How’s it going?” I asked as we settled in side by side.

“So far, so good,” he answered.

“I heard this is like number four hundred for you.”

“No. Only three-hundred and thirty one,” he corrected. This didn’t change my awe. How, and more importantly, why, does anyone run hundreds of marathons?

“When did you start running?” I asked.

“I didn’t start until I was fifty,” he told me. It turns out that he had watched his father throw his hands up and let life go “down hill,” at fifty. Mel had decided that fifty was the time to start playing, and for him that meant running. “Yep. The first year I ran one marathon and hurt so badly afterwards that I told myself I’d never do it again.” I knew the feeling. “But I recovered. And so the next year I ran two, and the year after that four. The year I retired from work I ran more than twenty.”

I looked over at him. He wasn’t any taller than I, and he was of average build. His posture wasn’t great, and he was breathing heavily enough for me to worry that this could be his last race. But he wasn’t slowing down. The more we talked, in fact, it seemed to me, the faster he ran. “Last February,” he went on, “I fell out of a tree and hurt myself. Had to take some time off.” He had just started up running again in the past few months. The last week he’d run a race in Yakima, this week the Whidbey Island Marathon and next weekend he would do Wenatchee. The goal was to run without walking. This is how he would know he was back up to speed, despite the pain he had in the hip he’d broken falling out of the tree and the pain he had in the other hip from accommodating his broken side.

We ran silently together for a while. I contemplated the privilege I felt running next to Mel and made a conscious decision to put aside my self-indulgent worry that the hills on this course were going to make me miserable. Maybe they would, but I was just getting started in this life. The journey was hard for all of us, but if Mel could do it, with his chipped hip and his seven and a half decades of life, I would do it, too, and be grateful that I was on my feet.

I bid him goodbye and ran ahead on the next downhill. There is little exchanging of names during a race, I’ve noticed. People cross paths, just this once in their lives, during a brutal endeavor that takes every ounce of focus. Those of us who run slowly enough to hold conversations with one another do so in virtual anonymity. We want the camaraderie in the moment, but the commitment is to the task, not to the relationship at hand. Mel wouldn’t know who I was or how our discussion challenged me to stop my internal whining.

Most of the rest of the race I ran alone. I started to hurt at mile 21, a gigantic uphill that was followed by a steep, fast down before the beautiful homes and beachfront of the West Beach Road came into view. I took the downhill slowly to save my knees and when I finally reached the flat stretch that rode along the water, I saw Bill’s smiling face coming toward me in the other direction. I was thrilled and grateful to see him. He replenished my water and snapped a few pictures and, most importantly, gave me a push up the second to last hill before running ahead to meet me at the finish line.

When you run slowly, like me – or Mel – the finish line isn’t what it is for the people at the center of the pack. There are no crowds, little cheering, and sometimes, all the food has been eaten. The awards ceremony is over and the port-o-potties are being hauled away. This is the scene I saw at the finish line as I came in on Sunday. Even Dean Karnazes had departed the event, leaving the back-of-the-packers to ourselves.

You have to have an internal locus of celebration, I have decided. You have to let your own sense of accomplishment serve as the reward for the long journey you’ve just traversed. I crossed the finish line of the Whidbey Island Marathon at five hours and thirty-one minutes. I took my medal, grabbed a bottle of water and continued walking for about twenty minutes, stopping to stretch now and again, to prevent my legs from cramping. Bill was there to take my picture and offer a high five – and to drive me home, back to our lives.
I did it!!

I checked the race results on the web, by the way, and Mel came in at five hours and fifty-five minutes.