Goodbye, penultimate month of 2018, and hello December (and very soon, CIM).

Staring down both the final month of what has turned out to be a weird-as-hell year, in addition to the last few days pre-marathon, makes for a great existential exercise. It’s just bizarre how both fast and slow this year has gone by. It doesn’t seem like the SF Marathon was all that long ago, but here we are, an entire other marathon training cycle behind us, and the Big Day is greeting us all on Sunday with open arms to come and get it.

November is always a sentimental month for me, between my birthday, my wedding anniversary, and Thanksgiving, and this year was no different. I celebrated my 35th birthday by having (wait for it) … a baseline mammogram! Thirty-five is a pretty young age to get your knockers smooshed between a vice, but my family history sorta necessitated it (grandma’s diagnosis was at 65 and mom’s at 55, though nope, extensive genetic testing shows that we don’t have BRCA1 or 2). It wasn’t painful or anything — uncomfortable and kinda weird, sure — but I think I’d take that any day over another MRI of my head. ::shudders::

My in-laws visited at different points of the month, which was quite lovely, so C and I were able to get out for some nice quality time a bit, too.

And in keeping with our every-other-year tradition, the fam bam and I spent Thanksgiving with all our favorite Disney friends in Anaheim. On the whole, it was a good month.

 

 

And then, of course, everything went to hell once the wildfires began. The Camp Fire, nearest to us here in the Bay Area, was still a good 200+ miles away, but holy hell did it wreak havoc on our air quality for nearly two solid weeks. The destruction and devastation that inferno brought further field, up north, seemed purely apocalyptic, and for days, every.single.time I read the news updates about it, I just wept out of powerlessness.

It was so profoundly sad and tragic, and strangely, though the towns most affected by the fire were pretty small in population, numerous friends of mine here knew someone, personally, who lived up there and who lost their homes. So many lives lost and so much property destroyed; knowing what the AQ was like here, so far away from it, I cannot fathom how bad it must have been in the immediate surroundings. It hurts my heart.

With the AQ tanking for nearly two weeks, naturally, my running in November took a hit; that was to be expected. Instead of closer to 200+ that I would have likely posted, I was closer to 158. No matter. Shit, for two weeks, all types of outdoor events were cancelled or postponed multiple hours north and south of us, including a couple of A’s swim meets and the PA XC championship race. It’s pretty hard to complain about not being able to run outside for a while knowing how devastating and damaging the fire was to so many people’s lives. I mean, that goes without saying. A little perspective goes a long way.

In the wake of the fire, I missed a couple long runs — a 22 miler and a 14 — because I wasn’t keen to do them on treadmills out of trepidation more than anything; running that long on a treadmill relatively close to my goal race wasn’t a calculated risk I was comfortable taking. Fun fact: prior to the Camp Fire, I hadn’t run on a treadmill since I was pregnant with A back in 2011 (it was the day of the “Groundhog Day blizzard”), mostly because I don’t like how broken my body feels after running on them.

Way back in the day, like over a decade ago, when I first began training for marathons, I used to run on treadmills a lot, and it never bothered me. Then, for whatever reason, something happened, and anytime I ran on a treadmill, afterward I just felt like absolute garbage, like every part of me just felt broken. The remedy: never run on a treadmill again. Always run outside or don’t run at all. Done.

The unsafe AQ during the Camp Fire meant that if I wanted to run at all, I had to suck it up and hope for the best on the ‘mill and just do what I could. Fortunately, by Thanksgiving, the rain arrived and helped to send the trapped, smoke-filled air out to sea. Right around that time, the fire had been fully contained, and our skies have since returned to their lovely hue.

So here we are, right before CIM, my second go at this particular race. When I compare notes from last year’s CIM training to that of 2018, it’s almost laughable how different everything is and importantly, how different (read: how much better) I feel this time around. That, by itself, is a huge win to me.

The tl;dr version: last year, for an indeterminate amount of time, my liver was fucked, though we didn’t learn about it until my birthday in early November, a month before the race, at my annual physical. I was running hard and training hard last year, but post-SF marathon, I felt pretty bad — extremely fatigued — a lot. When it was all said and done, my then-GI determined that I was likely experiencing a rare-but-documented side effect to the medicine he had prescribed me for my microscopic colitis (which, another fun fact, my current GI doesn’t believe I have. Cool).

I went into CIM ‘17 hopeful for a great weekend, trusting in my training but unsure about how my body was going to respond (thanks to that excessive, suffocating fatigue and all). Just a couple weeks prior to CIM, I debated whether running it would be a good idea because I had felt so awful during a half marathon; how in the world was I going to run twice the distance and faster!?! Magically, I managed to eke out a three-second PR at CIM, despite feeling like just about everything was stacked against me for the better part of the quarter. (In addition to my liver nonsense, during that quarter, my husband had pretty bigtime surgery and was recovering from it; my eldest’s teacher up and quit before the first month of school was over; yadda yadda yadda. When it rains, it fucking pours!). Anyway. Three seconds in a marathon isn’t much, but to have pulled that off despite the shitstorm that was September-November ‘17 just floored me. It was hard not to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all.

 

 

Regardless of the time I post on Sunday, race day, race weekend is going to be excellent. 

Anything can happen, — alas, that’s the exhilarating and heartbreaking speciality of the marathon — but I know that the totality of my training has prepared me.

I am immensely looking forward to toeing the line with tons of friends from all over the country and to seeing friends on the sidelines, too.

What great joy and fortune we all have to be physically capable of doing this hobby for no real reason other than because we can.

It’s so, so easy to romanticize the marathon, to think that this brutal distance somehow owes us something after we’ve committed weeks and months of our lives to it. The fact of the matter is that this distance isn’t for the faint of heart. It owes us nothing, though we (I) may feel like we (I) owe it quite a lot, in fact.

It is through training for this behemoth distance — training to not only cover the distance, period, but also to cover it as quickly as we can possibly sustain — that we are given numerous opportunities to learn about ourselves and our capacity for growth, change, you name it. A lot goes down, both mentally and physically, in all those training and racing miles we post in advance of The Big Day. 

For being something intangible, something inanimate, something insentient, this distance sure makes for a powerful teacher.

It’s something for which I am profoundly thankful.  

When it comes down to it, the marathon will test every ounce of us and expose any vulnerability we have.

We will have superb patches, miles where we’re convinced that we’ve got so much latitude still to work with and tricks in our belt to pull out.

And like that, practically without fail, there will also be patches that are just insufferable and that leave us grasping for anyone, anything, to help us and save us from this self-imposed tribulation.

It’s likely that we won’t understand why we do this in the heat of the moment, but when we finish, we will.

The reasons, the meaning, will be crystal clear.

We’ve trained for all of these moments, all this facilitative stress. / let’s go

Trust yourself and in your training. / it’s there

Believe in the process. / journey > destination

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Racing: The only November race on my plan originally was the XC champs, but it got postponed a week because of the fire. The new, postponed date was just after Thanksgiving, once we returned from Disneyland. I wanted to do a LR after not doing one for two weeks, so I didn’t partake after all (sad face). Also, belatedly, I received a very nice award from the BSFM for placing fifth in my AG at that race in July. (Quite unexpected that they created awards five deep, but many thanks!).

Reading: I re-read Peak Performance this month and finished reading The Sun Does Shine, which was very powerful and very, very disturbing. 

Listening: Nothing out of the ordinary here, though I enjoyed binging on just about every NYC Marathon-related podcast I got my hands (ears?) on. Man, I love NYC. Maybe I’ll go back one day… Oh, and I recently rediscovered my love of Juanes. Lots of Juanes.

Watching: Again, nothing comes to mind here except for when the fam and I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet right after Thanksgiving. C and I are going to start listening to this podcast about the top 100 movies of all time … or something … and then watch the movies they talk about, but it’ll probably take me decades to make it through the first five at the rate I watch movies.     

Running: I’m queueing up my 2019 racing schedule… what’s on your list?!

Speedy vibes, fellow CIM racers!!!