In the last twenty years I’ve run about half of the local flagship marathon’s annual events: the Edmonton Marathon usually happens mid August and every other year or so I decide to stick around over the summer and train for (usually) the half marathon (a comfortable distance) or the full (which I’ve run locally twice.) In fact, I’ve even officially paced the half, wore the bunny ears, carried a sign and everything. Pink was not my colour.
The secret to writing a successfully like this (and I know I’m only a couple weeks in with this particular writing project, but trust me… I’ve been doing this for a quarter of a century) is queuing up articles in advance.
That is to say, I’m writing this post over a week before I actually run the local half marathon I’m training for, and this post will not go live until at least a few days after I run the damn thing.
Here’s the other thing: writing about a future race and saying something meaningful about it for an article that will not be read until the race is long over is… well, awkward… moreso because I’m not feeling particularly confident as I write these words.
I had a plan.
Had.
And then I went and developed a pain on the sole of my foot six weeks out from the race, and that plan? It fell off a cliff.
I’m feeling ninety-five percent healed, foot-wise. But I’ve been trying to log some distance in this last few days leading up to race day and I’m not sure whether I should be making excuses for an impending poor performance or writing a motivational victory post about racing through adversity. Even this morning I got up and logged a quick six klick dash around the neighbourhood and it wasn’t what I would call a stellar showing. It was modestly okay, and here I am still planning and overthinking and curbing my anxiety about the upcoming race thinking that if I can show up with my gut cooperating and my foot not hurting and my knees behaving themselves (a whole past injury thing I’m sure I’ll write more about soon) maybe it will be a bit of both success and excuse.
Either way, you might know the results far better than the poor schmuck writing this post.
I’m a bit jealous.
Definitions
- august
- In the month of August where I live summer peaks and the days are often relatively hot (in the high 20s or low 30s) muggy, smokey and dry. Rain is infrequent, but when it arrives it comes in the form of drenching downpours and epic thunderstorms. We begin our runs earlier in the day because the local marathon runs late in the month and our training distances are maxing.
- klick
- As a Canadian I run in metric. As a writer, I find the word kilometre clunky and clinical. I'll usually use the colloquial "klick" or "klicks" to substitute in for this.
- october
- Fully into autumn, October is a month of shifting seasons, short days, long shadows, and gorgeous sunsets. The cobwebs are hung on the eaves in preparation for halloween, and here in Canada we're running off Thanksgiving dinner for a couple weeks after a proper good meal mid-month.
- race
- You train and train and train some more, and then for no clear reason you pay a bunch of money to run as fast as you possibly can at a very specific time with a bunch of strangers along a course lined with more strangers (or along paths lined with trees if you are an ultra runner) at the end of which you are handed a medal and a banana and a sense of achievement unlike anything you will feel again (until you sign up for your next one.)
