Iron ordeal

Men's Fitness, March, 1999 by Tom Weede

Usually, running is my release. It's when I think of solutions to intractable problems, or at least temporarily forget them. On long training runs, random thoughts - about work, relationships, a Simpsons episode I saw the night before - float through my head and help me pass the time.

Not today. Now my mind focuses on the pain radiating throughout my body, and I struggle to advance each 10 feet of asphalt. I look at the trees, the ocean, that woman up ahead in bikini briefs, but my mind always comes back to the pain. Paradoxically, despite my fatigue, I have a sensation that time is passing quickly. When I look at my watch periodically, chunks of time seem to have flown away.

"The first woman just finished," some guy on the side of the road tells me, breaking me out of my stupor for a moment. I file this fact under information I really don't need right now.

As I become more desperate, I pick out landmarks up ahead and make deals with myself. Run to that light pole, I say silently, and you can walk some. I make it to the light pole, barely.

Then, like a boxer who finds his legs late in a fight, I start to feel better around mile 14. My legs are lighter, my pace faster. Maybe it's the cola, or maybe I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Whatever it is, I'm just glad. At 15 miles, the course heads off the main highway onto a narrow strip of road that runs to the ocean, snaking out and back for four miles. As I run down the side road, I mentally break the rest of the race into chunks. Run two miles out and two miles back, and there'll only be seven miles to go, I think.

When I get back to the highway, my brother is waiting for me. "You can smell the barn," he says, jogging up alongside me, and he's right. For the first time, I feel as though the gap between me and the finish line is closing instead of expanding.

In the endurance races I've run, I always struggle against the lingering voice in my head that questions my ability to stay the course. I spend the day trying to silence that voice, to beat it into submission. But there always comes a point when I realize I will finish. Now, in the early evening on the Queen K, for the first time all day, I know I will win the battle.

I have tried to race on the aerobic edge - pushing to that point just beyond which my effort would be anaerobic and I would suffer a complete meltdown. Now that I can sense the finish line, I push the edge out further. I know I can endure more pain for just a while longer.

As darkness settles over the highway, I am surrounded by other racers, all of us bonded together in the inexorable drive toward the end, to the time when our bodies can stop pushing. Few words are spoken among us, but collectively we are pulling each other forward. The finish line is no longer some dream in my head. In a few minutes, I tell myself, it will be a reality.

My breathing is rhythmic now, my feet carrying me one stride at a time. I slow down at one of the last aid stations. "Coke, ice," are the only words I can blurt out, my energy-depleted brain having given up on complete sentences long ago.