When a PB might not be

It took me a while to get around to posting my Mississauga Marathon race report, but it wasn’t because I was too busy basking in post-race celebration.  It was because I wasn’t sure what happened.

After all the confusion with the marathon finish, I logged into Facebook on Monday and came face to face with a startling post in my news feed:  “seems like maybe ALL the full marathoners might have run 1-1.5 km’s short yesterday….stay tuned….”

I stared at it for a moment, then blinked, then blinked again.  I did a search of the news but nothing came up that I hadn’t already seen.  My mind was racing; surely if it were true, there would be something in the news, but on the other hand, I didn’t think the person who said it would do so without a reason to believe it were true.  I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.  I kept an eye on the news, and checked back into Facebook frequently as instructed…”stay tuned….”

It finally occurred to me to export the data from my Garmin into Google Earth to compare it against the course map, and sure enough they matched; my splits all seemed to make sense as well.  Even still, I didn’t really feel relieved.  I felt like I’d been left hanging, just waiting for the truth.  It took me days to convince myself that someone had been overexcited by a rumour and posted too soon.  And when I finally did, I was a little annoyed.  After all, my post-race glow had been sucked out of me in an instant, a high that would usually last me a week was gone by the next day.  I felt like something had been stolen from me.

When you’re there and you cross the line, you look at your watch and you know that you’ve achieved a goal you set for yourself and it’s right there in digital numbers in front of you.  But then you find out that it might not be true, that maybe you didn’t achieve your goal the way you thought, that you celebrated too soon.

I’ve run a lot of races where I’ve missed my goal by a hair, and I will tell you: missing your goal is one thing – it’s a part of life, an indicator that you’re setting good, aggressive goals to push yourself – but to think you’ve done it, only to have it taken away? That’s way worse.