As is tradition, time for another marathon essay. I’m sorry that the newsletter has been dead for so long. However, I haven’t forgotten.
At this point, the act of posting feels inappropriate. A lengthy post about one man’s marathon that occurred five months ago is the most un-newsworthy topic imaginable.
Here’s how I think of it. I’ve been playing a lot of tournament mode in Zynga Poker to pass the time during the quarantine. When you’re losing in a Zynga Poker tournament, it's easy to just mindlessly fold and wait until you run into pocket kings or another player crashes out. In this passive way, you can maybe salvage some fake money by not risking everything on a sub-optimal hand. However, the game doubles the blinds (the minimum bet, for non-poker fans) every three minutes, which means folding everything will eventually bankrupt you. Suddenly, it’s time to pay the big blind, and you’re all-in on 2–7 off suit (the worst possible hand in poker).
If I keep folding away “bad” ideas and hiding away hoping things work out, I’m going to run out of time and sharpness. I keep waiting to find some perfect plan that is both engaging, cutting-edge, and entertaining. I’ve been waiting for three months. There’s nothing else coming down the pipe while I’m stuck at home, and the only news topic is a wave of despair that is best left to the experts. After being reminded of my thin grasp on existence nonstop over the last month, it’s clear that I must write something, even if it’s about a small marathon in Sparks, Maryland I ran last November.
Besides, distance running is my old standby, and I still haven’t found a better way to start processing everything that has befallen everyone in the last four years. Thus, writing about running comes easily to me. The previous two marathon essays or other works on the seldom-updated blog are proof of that.
The previous two marathon essays have been self-centered elegies about my failures, and I’m honestly sick of that shtick. To quickly sum it up, this marathon, my third attempt to qualify for Boston, was also a failure. It was about two minutes faster than the marathon in suburban Illinois, but still 18 minutes off what I needed. The reasons why are exactly the same as the first two. Once again, I didn’t run enough miles beforehand. Once again, everything in my body cramped up after mile 23. At least I further delayed the abject pain this time.
People who know me or read my work would be surprised to learn that I haven’t internalized this into the giant, all-encompassing cloud of inadequacy and anxiety. Sadly, I’m not one of those “competition is fake and we should all just be chill” people yet—give me another 30 years—but I’m less inclined to call this race a total indictment of my philosophy toward life. I save that for my day job! Ha, haha! Haha!
Ok, so here’s why I haven’t descended into my usual crisis of confidence.
You see, I have this tendency to lose my shit after bad races. In high school, after I ran poorly at the last cross-country meet of senior year, I went into a downward spiral for three months. After the first marathon, I went into a downward spiral for 15 months? After the last race of club XC in college, I didn’t run more than twice a week for five months. This time, I was back in the saddle after a month and have slowly brought myself back to good shape. Incredible.
That last downward spiral took place at the start of 2019, and it was more of a sabbatical than a break. This was part of a total lack of interest in anything, especially after I graduated from college and had no idea where to go or what to do. In March of 2019, I had run approximately 20 miles over the previous three months and had no conception of racing ever again.
There are words for this anhedonic hellscape: burnout, identity crisis, existential crisis, meltdown, major depressive episode, etc. I know many people are in the midst of that right now or have been in collapse mode at some point in the last year. In fact, with no exaggeration, humanity is effectively in that state right now. Of course, I have takes.
There are four things I learned from this disastrous period (most of 2019) that I think can be extrapolated outward.
1. I often found myself in a nonstop cycle of blaming myself and feeling bad about long-term problems that just had to be the root of the issue. This is the equivalent of going “we live in a society” to yourself. This is, I feel, one of the downsides of therapy, which, like your nihilistic friend, can’t initially analyze anything without stressing the bigger problems. But that’s what therapists must do. Until they get to really know you, which takes several sessions and money/time that many people don’t have to spend, everything revolves around railing against massive, grand issues that get more granular over time.
Even if you don’t end up going to therapy, making everything a huge issue can only take you so far. Trying to simultaneously solve massive issues with parents, family, addiction, relationships, and so on is really difficult. It’s not impossible, but good luck trying to hold down a job or keep things functioning “normally” while hashing out the past. Short-term issues like “hey, maybe I should run and exercise regularly” or “my tone of voice is completely flat” or “why am I chronically late to everything?” seemed completely irrelevant. After that, I moved onto the medium-term issues, such as: “where should I live in three months?” and “what would I like to be doing?”. Eventually, things got better.
2. Eventually. Everything took a while. My main issue was an overwhelming sense of being not up for the task. I don’t even think that has gone away, really. I still feel completely and utterly inadequate in the face of seriously distressing moments. This is the worst! I think that helpless feeling drives people into relapses way more than the traditional, “wouldn’t it be great if I could drink this again?” scenarios you see in movies. Also, this is another function of problems that are outside of your control: lack of funds, lack of a stable home, lack of comfort, etc. The self-awareness of the problem becomes a giant problem that cannot be fixed.
Running was a big part of that process. As I got better, I started running more, which I’ll get to later.
3. So, yes, these are essentially the early steps of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which, at the end of the day, really does help. It’s true, they give you a goal-oriented approach with small, meaningful ways to cope and get better. However, I think there’s also a massive element of luck for all of this. First, you must find the right person and have the right health insurance, which is another travesty that I won’t get into here. Then, and this is something that they really won’t tell you because it isn’t very cash money and sucks…you really need to have some things break your way. I tried this process at least three different times before anything remotely close to progress happened. Your friends and family need to buy in. Everybody needs to get on the same page. Even then, growth is non-linear and subject to the caprices of a world that does not care and does not have time for people that are mentally ill, no matter how much PR BS the celebs can throw out about how “it’s okay to be _____.” At a minimum, a short-term leave of absence can lose someone their livelihood, and any prospects of an exorbitant hospital stay or rehabilitation process are effectively reserved for the wealthy.
4. These systemic breakdowns are always, without question, the result of long-term problems. Fixing them may start from the top down, but burnout is a disease from the foundation. As we go through a public health crisis that triggers a mental health crisis and an economic crisis (in that order of importance), every commentator worth his/her salt is crowing about how it’s revealing all of the structural flaws in the American system. Obviously, they’re right. However, frankly, that also applies to individual people. If the fundamentals are not there, it doesn’t take much to get pitched overboard.
Anyway, back to running. The road to the NCR Marathon in Sparks, Maryland started only three months before the race itself. I was not planning to run a marathon in 2019, but I decided, as part of this CBT experiment, to give myself a tangible running target that I could conceivably achieve. This was, in fairness, a stupid idea. Why decide to run a marathon and chase down a Boston Qualifier with three months of training? Why not run a half? Is this thing on?
Like the other two marathons, I wouldn’t have raced without having someone sign up with me. I’m not sure if I actually wanted to run or merely took this random offer as an excuse. Up until two weeks before, I seriously debated just running the half. Honestly, I should’ve just run the half, as it would’ve saved me a lot of trouble. The training process involved long runs in the peak of a Washington D.C. summer, which I now believe is one of the worst weather situations to train for anything ever. Luckily, I had some good comrades in D.C. to get me out of bed, but it was still a drag. Immediately after Thanksgiving, I toed the line for the start.
Of course, the night before, I had flown back from a family gathering in San Francisco and had about six hours of sleep, which was a whole fiasco that I don’t want to explain. Many people, including me, spend the night before a race stressing out about how they will perform. Thankfully, that didn’t happen this time because I was far too exhausted to do anything but sleep.
For the third time, I failed to bring any substantial energy snacks or Gu products to the start line. I’ve learned that most marathons have those snacks for free later in the course, and I figured that I could just tough it out. Somehow, despite this being my third marathon, I still have not realized that those are only out after the halfway point, as they expect you to have properly fueled for the first half yourself!
I won’t bore you with splits. This time, I think I paced the damn race perfectly. The first half was right where I needed to be, and everything was going quite well until I cramped up (again) at mile 23. There’s just not much you can do when you have a history of cramping, not enough food/fluid, and not enough base mileage. But we already know this.
I suppose this must end with the depressing realization that marathons and road races, as we know them, are not going to be possible for a long time. I don’t really see how huge crowds can congregate in a single place for the foreseeable future. I was planning to run a half in April, but it got canceled (if anyone at the Loudoun Half Marathon Staff is reading this, please refund my damn money). Runners, an irascible bunch in the best time, are probably pissed off. I’m sure many are finding new and exotic ways to prove their superiority via live stream, Strava, or Zoom.
For me, all I can say is this. After driving back from the race and picking up fast food, I hobbled my way to the Amtrak station at BWI Airport. Unlike my previous two post-race experiences (total exhaustion, massive vomiting), I was in good spirits. The future was manageable. Things had improved. The next race would be better. As I walked up and over to the other side of the tracks, wracked with awful pain, the fight to get down the stairs suffices to fill my heart; it is necessary to imagine me happy.