#7: returning from the abyss with Lucky Number 7
Oy. How to start, howwwww the heck to start.
It’s been a year and a half. So I guess I’ll start wherever I want.
I want to try and talk about my experience training for and running the Berlin marathon.
The race itself was surreal at first, then kind of nice/fun/cool. Walking to the corral for what seemed like a very long time and standing on the starting line of this race that I’d been thinking about for months – none of that felt remotely real to me. After we started running, I had the wherewithal to relish both hearing large woodwind instruments I didn’t previously know existed and getting to share a few miles with another woman going for the standard.
(An alphorn!)
Then it got painful – emotionally and mentally, not physically. Yep, there it is.
I can confirm as I type this that it definitely still hurts to think about how the race went. Not as much as it did in the first few days afterward. I was weepy. I was just sad. I was sitting in a nice, crisply clean hotel bed with all my belongings in sealed trash bags in the bathroom. (I’ll come back to this.) Indirect daylight snuck through the enormous window and helicopters buzzed along in the sky, headed to a nearby hospital landing pad.
I think I was experiencing some sort of low-level, shadow-grief process. Nothing like the grief of dealing with death or another major life upheaval. It was a sneaky, unexpected shittiness that was raw and dumb – as if my subconscious felt the need to prove to the rest of me that in case I’d forgotten, I did care about competing and especially had in this specific race. Many thanks, subconsciousness 🤗.
I think it’s an extremely natural reaction to want to understand what went wrong as a way to comprehend why and how to avoid it. I sometimes listen to this podcast called You’re Wrong About and I have a distinct memory of Sarah Marshall and Blair Braverman discussing how people crave clear explanations of why bad things happen with a remarkably prescient quote, but I’ve listened back to the episode (one of my favorites, on the Dyatlov Pass Incident) and I can’t find it. Maybe it was a different ep. In my mind the quote goes something like:
We’re all just big bags of meat constantly looking to reassure ourselves that terrible things won’t happen to us.
For runners, a tip-top terrible thing is probably: being in peak physical shape and feeling great and healthy and then not being able to perform on the day it matters – the specific day you’ve been training toward for 12 weeks. I still don’t really have a satisfying answer for what went wrong. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a way to know exactly, truly what the root cause of this day was. Maybe it was a perfect storm.
I hit miles 17-19 and things began to shift sideways – nothing sudden or debilitating happened, just the sensation of a slow fade, an emptiness in the reserves. Which, let me tell you, is not what you want at mile 17. My plan had been to get to 20 and *then* **begin** to grind. I’d been doing well with fueling and I’d felt smooth up to that point, but when things started going sideways, I mentally lost the thread. In a rude twist, I realized the real detriment to my race was not the barely-perceptible fading I was feeling, but instead the anxiety and panic that it was bringing up. I used all the jedi-mind tricks I could think of to fight those feelings off, but they kept rising up and up and up. I think that’s where my lack of sleep and stress in the last couple of days leading up to the race stepped in to land the final, figurative punch.
It was a very weird, hovering-above-body experience to watch that day slip between my fingers – to know that I was actively letting go of a dream at the moment that it started to happen, and then the next moment. And then the one after that. I saw my goal disappear as if it was something in front of me and apart from me that I could spectate and observe, not something inherently tied to my body. I’m sure my acute consciousness of whether sub-2:37 was possible as it floated away from me is precisely what made it not.
So, my diagnosis, if you were forcing me to make one: I think it was mostly a brain problem. I think it felt like there was more at stake in this race than I’d been willing to admit to myself and I think that added to the astonishingly destructive mental combustion I described during the latter half of the race.
Also, I’m not counting out the bed bugs. (Bet you didn’t expect that collection of words eh?!?) Four days before the race I woke up with welts on my back and side and ankle. Having had the debilitatingly unfortunate experience of dealing with bed bugs before, I was immediately nervous about the provenance of these extremely itchy bites. These things are not your average mosquito bite. They’re terrible. We ended up seeing two literal bed bugs crawling on the wall and in the kitchen and squished them on sight. (In hindsight, it would’ve been good to photograph them before squishing them for the purposes of proving our claim with AirBnB, but alas.) From then on, my main focus was trying to not think or worry about the bugs until after the race.
(A close-up of one of the disturbing welts on my neck. Photo by Joe Hale, welt by bed bug :/// )
If you’re following along, I was focused on not focusing on something. Not not an oxymoron. I switched beds and kept waking up with bites. I was having a very hard time actually getting any sleep. The moment we got back to this spot after the race, Paul and I put all of our belongings in trash bags and sealed them and showered and wore only the items of clothing that had been nowhere near the beds and checked into a hotel. We piled our cute little mound of trashbags into the shower in the bathroom and closed the bathroom door. We had to wait until the next day to go to a laundromat and wash and dry everything on high heat because it was a Sunday. We threw out our luggage and backpacks and got new ones. I think we did the best we possibly could have to make sure we didn’t spread the bugs anywhere. Anyway. Not the ideal pre-race situation. A very ridiculous, unexpected scenario. But life goes on. ZAFA ZAFA KNOCK ON WOOD I’M GOING TO UTTER THE NEXT STATEMENT AT A WHISPER AND THEN SPIT THREE TIMES ((we don’t seem to have brought any insects to any of our subsequent places of lodging)).
I feel a surprising amount of satisfaction and resonance with the construction of time periods neatly categorized and titled, like the following:
- “The Year of Magical Thinking”
- “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”
- “The Fortnight of Equality”
(Two of these are a couple of my favorite books and one is the period of time each year where I’m the same age as my husband.)
So, I’m going to call the past couple of weeks (since the race which was on September 25) my Fortnight of Puttering. In my puttering, I thought a lot. Some of it verged on overthinking. (Me?! Never.) And then, I came to a thought from a surprising source. There’s an old verse by Childish Gambino that occasionally sticks in my mind. Never expected to be quoting this out loud, or in writing, but here we are.
She said to write her somethin' nice on the next track
But she cute, so I wrote her ass a whole rap
Man, I threw that shit away, it felt dumb
Believe me, it was bad, we're better off, you're welcome
I worked hard on that song like day and night
That whole song, made this one verse crazy, right?
I guess it all goes somewhere, you know that
I’ve thought of this verse often when I’m writing. It feels so incredibly discouraging to spend lots of time and effort and energy writing something that you love and are proud of, only to realize the next day or even later the same day that you need to get rid of it entirely. But the thing that I tell myself on those occasions is that I can save it for later. Maybe the darling will be resuscitated exactly as it was and used at a later time, or maybe just the act of writing that piece will have made me a better writer.
My training for Berlin was something that I think I’ll remember with adoration forever. I know that’s a nauseating sentence. Really, what I felt was: Butterflies. Daisies. Popsicles. So much, unending sweat. A shared burden, which made the burden feel light.
I look back on the time from July 1 to September 25 and I can only conjure about half of a negative emotion no matter how hard I try. It wasn’t a piece of cake. I ran the most I’ve ever run. Again, I cannot stress how much sweat I lost. But I also never felt myself falling deep down into the hole of exhaustion that I’ve flirted with in the past. Which I think was a good thing! I can count on one hand the number of times I really dreaded getting out the door for a run and had to force/drag myself to do it. I credit that incredible, unprecedented fact to the crew of shining, beautiful people that were all training alongside each other at the same time in the same place for similar (if not the same exact) thing(s). That kind of lightning just does not strike twice.
I have to believe – I am willing and forcing myself to believe – that all the training from this summer has gone somewhere. It is not wasted. And even if it was, if all that effort and energy went directly into a black hole as if it’d never existed, I still loved experiencing it. It was like being back on a college team, but with the added autonomy of adulthood and the perspective to fully appreciate how cool and rare it is to strive for something big right alongside people you love in the unique way that results from sharing dreams and difficult tasks.
Gotta leave you there, because this has now becoming embarrassingly long. But since I’ve now started this substack back up, I feel compelled to include the 10 Things. At one point I promised I’d always include it and I don’t want to break that promise! Thank you for reading all this blathering. I do not take it lightly that you’d read to the bitter end of this long, dumb soliloquy. <3
The Idiot by Elif Batuman - this was good! Not my favorite book ever, but the writing was good enough to mask the fact there wasn’t really a story which is certainly saying something.
Better Things - I watched this entire show in 2020 and devoured it. Rediscovered it on the plane home from Paris and seasons 2-4 are just as good as I remembered. It’s on hulu!
Little Miss Sunshine - Also watched this on the plane home from Paris. Cried profusely. Such a good freaking movie.
The devastating discovery that my new favorite kind of Haribo is not commonly sold in the US.
This electric tea kettle (big lol at the voiceover). Paul spent 72 hours in the UK recently and returned an avid fan of tea so we acquired this last week.
Smoothies from Don Pepe. I’ve had 2 since I’ve been back in the US. They’re healing me.
The last orange wine(s) of the season (?!) in Paris. At this bar. Unless. Can orange wine be a winter thing too?? LMK pls+ty.
So many incredible bread-based things from this bakery in Paris that a co-worker of mine recommended. We ordered so much that they threw in two free things. I’m sure they were shocked at our American gluttony.
Two extra toothbrush heads!! I ordered four replacement toothbrush heads for my electric toothbrush and six came. What a blessing. An auspicious omen even. Is that prescribing too much meaning to small bits of plastic?
A beautiful, perfect early-October weather run in Prospect park.