So this past Sunday I ran a 4:11 here in the Wellington marathon. Actually, to be perfectly honest, I should say I survived for four hours and eleven minutes.
The rain. Here in Wellington, New Zealand it rains horizontally. These are not the small dainty drops of a mid-summer night. The drops are powerful, big and fat and filled with water. They are born out of a tempest: kin to those of a Nor’easter. The maddening part is that you never know when to expect them. One minute it’s a nice comfortable drizzle and everything is great, the next you can’t open you eyes from the blinding wall of water coming at you at warp speed. Clearly there is no escape from the madness and over time it does strange things to the nerves: you flinch now and again as you run forward drenched to your very core.
The wind. Blowing is such a gentle description for such a beast of an element. Think more along the lines of howling, violently thrashing, disrupting, challenging. It knocks into you as if to say, “how dare you run, here, on this day, on my turf.” It stands you up and screams, “take notice runner, you must earn all of it, every kilometer, step by step.” Every once in a while it comes at you so hard that all you can do is scream as loud as you can: but it won’t answer you. You need to answer for yourself. So you push forward with everything you have and remind yourself that this day you will not be denied.
The contest. The road you are on is all there is between sea and shore. You run right along the thin line where the two meet: green hills on one side, whitecaps on the other: where solid ground battles the ocean depths. It’s a fitting place to test your limits. Part of you, the physical part, stays with the land, confirming with each step that you are indeed running, ever onward. The other part, the mind, drifts out to sea to float up and down with the waves, ever fluid, and constantly changing, sometimes forward, sometimes back. In essence, as you run the road, you become the contest: you are the very race itself.
The mind. In the end the only way you finish these things is to will yourself across the line – at both the start and finish. I love marathons because the distance exposes everything about you in such a short amount of time. Over a few hours the distance forces you to make choices and tradeoffs, to deal with extreme highs and lows, to balance judgment and risk huge downside for immense satisfaction. In the end, you get back only if you are willing to give…
Today, on a lonely road in Wellington New Zealand, Nature showed up to remind us all just who is in charge and what we are capable of. By all accounts it was a glorious test of will, or as they say here down under, today was brilliant, simply brilliant!
Onward ->
SiteLock
