My Perspective

One of my life goals was to run a marathon, but it really didn’t look too good for me the night before the race. As my friends could testify to, I was in pretty bad shape with the cold. I was rather depressed thinking about all the months of hard work I put into training for the marathon and I really thought it was for nothing. In fact, I had already resigned myself to not finishing and had begun looking ahead to possibly running the Surf City Marathon or the L.A. Marathon just in case. I took everything humanly possible within what’s considered safe to get a good night’s sleep, which never came. As soon as my head hit the pillow, my nose became a water fountain and every spring in the sofa bed was digging into my side. I think I slept a little, but amazingly when my alarm went off at 4 a.m. (yes 4 a.m.), my head was clear and I was surprisingly not tired.

As we started our race in Goleta along with over 3100 other participants, I think we all felt nervous not knowing what to expect. A lot can happen in 26.2 miles. I still felt like I was dragging and didn’t know when my legs would give out, but Patty and C’s pace kept me from falling back too much. They were looking really strong. As the spectators kept cheering, “Go team! Go team Santa Clarita!” I really felt like we were a team. We were feeding off of each other’s strengths. We all managed to stay pretty much together until mile 18, when C dropped back a little. I tried yelling back every once in a while to make sure she was there, but at some point she must have fallen back further and could not hear me. We know better than to try and look back because as Patty almost demonstrated when she ran into the curb, it's not such a good idea. It was mile 18 through 24 that Patty really pushed me. She was really running strong and I tried to not let her get too far ahead of me. If it wasn’t for the fact that she was pulling me along, I don’t think I would have met my time goal. One thing about Patty is that she is like a horse drawn to water when we are near the finish. She seems to sense the end and picks up the pace. This really helped me get through those painful miles. Then it was my turn to pick up the pace from mile 25-26. (This is the way we always seem to finish our runs) I had a feeling with the way Patty was running she would have no problem staying with me. I was shocked to see that we were running 8.35 to 9 min pace in the final miles! I always pictured us crawling at this stage of the marathon. Coming down the hill the last half mile to the ocean, I had so many feelings going through me that I was starting to tear up a bit and completely embarrass myself (I hope the finish line photos don’t show that part). For one thing, I was in a lot of pain in my right quad, which began cramping up about 1.5 miles before. But mostly, the tears were from shear relief that I did it. To go from not knowing the night before if I was even going to run to crossing the finish line in under 5 hours and meeting my goal (4:48:59.8), I was just so relieved that it was finally over. Patty kept telling us that running a marathon is like being pregnant and then finally giving birth. It’s all those months of training and then being in pain all those miles so that when it is finally over, it is such a huge relief that you can’t help but be emotional.

I can’t say enough about how mentally and physically strong my training partners are. It has been quite a journey, one with ups and downs and at times we’ve even tested each other’s patience, but in the end I think we’ve come away learning so much more about each other and appreciating our friendship even more. Did I mention that my other life goal was to climb Mt. Whitney? When do we start training? Go Team M.O.R.E!