To Marathon or Not to Marathon (again)

Sometimes, I look at the calendar and plan out races.

I think of what will be happening in my life around certain times of year and I browse through the Run Nova Scotia site or the Triathlon Nova Scotia site or I click on race links and daydream.

The thing that’s the hardest to remember is the pain. I ran a half marathon a few weeks ago and while I’ve been toying with the idea of a second marathon sometime within the next 18 months, as I turned off the run route at 21kms, I could not have been happier that I wasn’t going any further.

It’s not the race, is it? That makes marathons so hard, I mean. It’s the hours logged on the road, the injury you seem to be always on the verge of getting. It’s the dark place you visit once  a week on your long run. It’s the way long runs start to overtake your life – you’re either just recovering from one or planning your next. It’s the toll it takes on your family, because when you run for four hours, there’s no energy left to run through the sprinkler with your kids.

I read the other day that we shouldn’t rearrange our lives to fit our exercise or training schedule, but that we should make and set goals that fit easily into our life. I’m not sure how much I agree with that. To a certain extent, there’s truth there, but there’s also something to be said for digging down to the depths of your reserves and seeing, first hand, just what you’re made of. There’s something to be said for surviving those last 8k of a marathon (I call it “The Dark Place”). There’s something to be said for logging hours on the road and living to tell about it.

I’m not sure when my next marathon will be, but the voice whispers to me. I look at the calendar, flip through the months, 2010, 2011… and I hear it. “Marathon. Marathon. Marathon.” I close the calendar, tell that whisper to shush, that I don’t have time for that right now. It’s quiet, for a while, until I find myself on the Ottawa Marathon site, looking at the route. “Just one more,” the voice says to me, “Just one more time and then you can put it to rest.” I suspect that this voice is lying, and one more will turn into one more and then just one more after that. I wonder if this long distance running, if this desire to catch another glimpse of what I’m made of is little more than a bug that never truly goes away.

But for now, I close the calendar, shush the whisper, and run through the sprinkler with my kids.