I swear this newsletter touches so much more than running. Bear with me a couple more weeks until this marathon is over. Nonetheless, I hope you’ll enjoy this story and find it applicable to all those big, horrific tests of the human spirit that none of us are exempt from, by choice or force. Tip: best if read or listened to immediately after playing “Lemon Tree” by Mt. Joy.
TW: very brief mention of past eating disorder (1 sentence)
I fear I have tainted my relationship with the band Mt. Joy before it even really started. They’re all I listened to for the first 13 miles of the worst run of my life. I swear I have a new “worst run of my life” every other week which makes one wonder how I’m still at this shit. I’m reminded of the rule of thirds:
1/3 of it will be too good for words. This is the third that keeps you going with religious fervor. You are hungry and God dangles a mozzarella stick before you and on these runs, you catch it by the mouth. Second wind after a killer first half. It’s downhill and there’s tailwind and an easy PR, your friends cheering those strong legs through the finish line. MarathonFoto releases your pics, and darling, you make it look easy.
1/3 is unremarkable. Comme ci, comme ça. You roll out of bed after a six-hour night’s sleep, lace up some raggedy Asics, and grab a quick 10k before work. Nothing in your stomach. No goals, just getting the miles in. 8:45 pace. Average heart rate of 154. Four Strava kudos.
1/3 will make you wish you were never born. Maybe you came out too fast. Maybe you didn’t properly fuel. Maybe you underestimated the torture of being hungover in 87 degrees. We call this “bonking” in the running world. It most famously occurs at mile 20 of the marathon, but can really show up any time.
That last third, most would argue, is preventable. But I have lived the counterpoint. And I’m here to share it with you from a place of true neutrality; consider this neither triumphant nor cautionary. (Ok, it’s both.)
I’d been staring down this 20-miler all last week. In my first marathon training block, my longest runs were 18 miles. So this was my first time hitting 20 miles outside of the marathon itself. Here’s something I learned recently: our bodies don’t know miles. Our bodies know time and effort. I’d already run for nearly three straight hours twice during this training block. Both times went great; I fueled well and had tons of energy to spare. But something about 20 miles was daunting. The words alone had a dizzying, psychedelic quality. I shoulda never smoked that shit, now I’m running 20 miles for fun.
Long runs stir up the worst anxiety for me. You read about people dropping dead in marathons, or going into cardiac arrest like, HOURS later. There’s never a common denominator in these incidents. They’re almost always left a mystery. (Though, lots of folks in Runner’s World’s Instagram comments blame the v*ccine, which could be baseless and unethical… or not. As a v*xxed person, this worries me. I digress.)
More than fearing that fatal collapse, I fear leaving my family without another person. I fear my parentless nephews having to process a completely preventable loss. I know it sounds extreme but after losing so many people, you become this conflicting mix of 1.) more comfortable with death/less afraid of dying, and 2.) terrified to put your loved ones through anything else. You do a bunch of crazy, bucket list stuff, like sign up for marathons, or drive hours through the Jordanian desert, because your sense of mortality makes your ears ring. But then you feel really fucking bad about having taken unnecessary risk. I’d love to tell you “it’s a balance,” but that is way too idealistic. You will do this dance until you die, maybe at the hands of your dicey little adventures.
So yeah, 20-miler. I’d been kind of structurelessly carb loading all week, which means I ate pasta, toast, potatoes, etc. without much consideration for the numbers. I just figured “I’m getting this in, therefore my glycogen stores must be fine!” We’ll come back to this.
As tropical storm Ophelia made her way up the east coast, I knew I was fucked in the weather department. I can run in the rain all day. But high winds? I don’t know, is there a gun to my head? (Read: do I have a marathon in two weeks? I literally can’t even read that without getting a pit in my stomach.)
I got up Saturday morning around 7:30 AM and ate an English muffin with peanut butter and jelly. The forecast was grim, and because Andrew planned to bike alongside me for the last seven miles, I wanted to account for his comfort, too. Hours passed. I choked down an overly ripe banana and some peanut butter filled pretzels. Drank Nuun for electrolytes. Packed my hydration vest with a liter of water and NINE gels totaling 630 calories, 171 grams of clean-ass, backed-by-science-ass carbs. I was so set on doing this run right that I planned to up my fuel intake from every 5k (roughly 27 minutes at my planned pace) to every 20 minutes. Your girl was prepared for battle.
Psyching myself up for the journey, I decided to forgo a pacing plan. If I set a plan, I’d likely be out there for over three hours, accounting for the super slow warm-up and cooldown. I did not want to be out there for over three hours. So, I told myself to just listen to my body, stay in the mile I’m in, and run steadily until the job is done. Foot off the gas when the effort creeps past moderate, lean in when it feels easy. Fuel, fuel, fuel.
I love the way Spotify makes those “This is: (insert artist)” playlists. I’m only really a deep cut girl for a few select artists, so it’s nice getting the hits packaged up for easy access. The first song on “This is: Mt. Joy” is their biggest song, “Silver Lining.” I don’t love this song. More accurately, I don’t love the song sonically; it sounds like it was made for pop radio in the same factory that produces Mumford & Sons and that “Ho Hey” song. I say this as someone who loves pop. Anyway, I do love the song for what it represents, though, which is a track their frontman, Matt Quinn released years ago and flopped before re-recording it with Mt. Joy and finding commercial success. It’s a good comeback story.
When you hop on the Schuylkill River Trail from Fairmount Avenue, you can either go south toward center city, or north toward East Falls. A move I’ve added to my long runs is doing the center city route out and back a couple times to knock some miles out before heading north. It tricks my brain into thinking I haven’t run that much but really, I’ve vaporized seven miles in under an hour. And on this particular run, that leaves me with a mere half marathon distance to go. You know you’re in deep when you’re using “mere” and “half marathon” in the same sentence.
Referring back to our rule of thirds, those first seven miles were unremarkable. Comme ci, comme ça. They were clicking by pretty smoothly, but I was getting crushed by the tropical storm winds at each turnaround. It was so gnarly that I was actually laughing out loud as I trudged up the hill, Mother Nature shoving me backward.
Mile five: 8:11
Mile six: 8:15
Mile seven: 8:20
Mile eight: 8:33
Mile nine: 8:43
Fuck, I’m positive splitting. My favorite Mt. Joy song comes on.
I just found a lemon tree
It’s a bad day for my enemies
Mile 10: 8:31
Mile 11: 8:28
Yes, there’s sugar water in the breeze
And I’m ready, I’m ready
I met Andrew at Lloyd Hall at mile 13 as planned.
“How are you feeling?” he asks.
“Not good.”
If you’re feeling bad at mile 13 of a 20-mile run, you know it’s going one of two ways: downhill fast, or your continued fueling will revive you enough to finish stronger. Either way, you gotta course correct. So my first instinct was to sneak a couple easy miles in. 9:47… 10:21…
Didn’t help. By mile 15 I was officially wrecked, and it started fucking monsooning. I’d look back at Andrew and shrug and shake my head because I was so out of it, I’d gone non-verbal. It was my way of saying, “I’m sorry for dragging you into this” as the rain pelted us mercilessly, filling his glasses. Kelly Drive was a puddle minefield, and I hurdled them between strides, neon orange Nikes saturated, the blister on my left arch growing in the moisture. My AirPods died. I tried to use my back-up wired headphones, and there was something lodged in my phone’s charging port. What are the odds? No, seriously, tell me.
Perhaps the worst part of this journey was feeling like I’d read the manual and still put the thing together wrong. I kept taking my gels—these special, unaffordable gels that I’d been raving about for weeks—and my body wasn’t responding. Now, I can’t say this is the first time in my running life that I’ve felt unsafe. Too many times I’ve sworn I’d die from heat exhaustion right then and there, especially back when I was eating 600 calories a day and running 10 miles under the scorching afternoon sun in late July. But this flavor of dissociation was unfamiliar. I had the abstract sense that my legs were moving, but I couldn’t feel them anymore. The rain was melting me down to nothing.
So someone play guitar for me
I’m ready to leave my body
I don’t really try to hide the fact that I’m a weak-minded individual. I mean, I’m decisive and opinionated and all that, but I’m really trying to acknowledge my quitter tendencies to spark internal change. So maybe my glycogen stores were depleted and I came out too fast and my fueling strategy was toast. My last hope was my mind. My mind: my Achilles heel in everything I’ve ever done in my entire life. The shifty bastard that always convinces me to throw in the towel.
I hit mile 18 and reminded myself that I have trained for this. I thought about the thousands of people who do this every single day, who brave worse external conditions and worse physical health and still finish what they started. And I thought, why not me? Why can’t I be one of those people who blast through the wall of exhaustion and show themselves what they’re made of? I talked to God. I talked to my dead sister. I talked to my dead best friend. Everyone seemed pretty optimistic. So, again, why not me?
I picked up the pace those last couple miles, dropping from 9:43 to 8:43 and 9:04, then cooling down to 20 at 9:41. I hit my sub three-hour time goal, coming in at 2:59:06 for an average pace of 8:57/mile. It really didn’t matter, though. There was no immediate feeling of accomplishment because I’d lost the ability to feel altogether. Andrew and I walked home in dead silence. All I could think, and all I could say, was that I never want to do that again. I never want to experience what felt like the edge of death for something that’s supposed to be light and fun again.
When we got home, I sat in the tub for two hours. It would go cold and drain and I’d just keep refilling it with scalding hot water—the only salve for the unshakeable chill and general disembodiment. Along the bathtub sat a soggy bowl of cereal I couldn’t stomach, a Topo Chico, and an iced caramel macchiato. Andrew cooked me some ramen. There was heartbreak in the air.
When scary things affirm their scariness, it’s hard not to feel discouraged. Some would even say that by listening to the fear and not harnessing my divine feminine cosmic higher self, I manifested a bad run. Maybe they’re right. All I know is that in the 42 hours since hitting “stop” on my Garmin, not a minute has passed that I haven’t thought about that run. Sure, I’ve asked myself how the hell I’m going to run another 6.2 miles on top of that. I have told myself it’s “unnatural” to run these distances, to crush oneself mind, body, and spirit for another medal that gets stuffed in a file cabinet.
But I have also found that mischievous warrior spirit that wants to avenge the pain. I have told myself that I will go for 20-mile runs every fucking week if that’s what it takes to teach my body how to stay alive at its limits. Of course, I won’t actually do that because that's like, legitimately dangerous. But the fact that my brain is even going there shows me something changed me on that run. Something died because I killed it and now I dance on its body in wicked jubilation.
On Sunday, I woke up and my legs felt strong. My body had already forgotten it ran 20 miles. Butter sizzled in the pan: French toast, cheesy scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, and a dirty chai. Andrew said, “this is the best breakfast I’ve ever had” and I felt it in my soul. I was lucid. Nothing was taken from me. Maybe this is my silver lining, my comeback story.
I went out and ran another 3 miles in the rain.
backreading your substack (discovered it through a restacked quote from your most recent piece) and 1) i love this and 2) the “runners suddenly going into cardiac arrest after/during a marathon” thing could very well be due to previous covid infections — covid’s known for messing with the heart and causing microclots, both of which are bad!
loved this 🥹