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Phil Willis Online |
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Nov 25th, 2002Everything you've heard is true. I just completed my first marathon in Philadelphia on Sunday! |
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300 or so miles (585 km) of training for one day's work: 26.2 miles of pain and here is the race report. Much like the marathon is to the half-marathon, this report is twice as long and nowhere near as funny. Let me just start by saying when I woke up on Sunday I really didn't know whether I was going to do a marathon or not. About six weeks ago I hurt my knee pretty badly in training and since then haven't run for more than 3 miles at a time. But I decided since I'd already paid my cash and I had no other plans that I would enter the marathon anyway. Nice and easy does it - a bit of walking a bit of running. The course itself was a figure eight with the start-midpoint-finish at the crossover point (which was only 6 blocks from my apartment). My original plan was to take it slowly, do a half-marathon, get close to home, then call it quits. As ridiculous as it sounds: yes - a half marathon is my idea of taking it easy!! So with a plan to walk-run-walk-run I headed to the starting line. I went straight to the back of the pack. Nothing peeves people more than slow runners starting up the front. Runners etiquette demands that fast runners line up at the front and slow runners start at the rear. The back-of-the-packers (or as I call them, the "anti-Kenyans") were as mixed a bunch as you could expect. On a day where the wind chill brought the temperature down to a frosty 32 deg F (sub-zero Celsius), one guy was dressed only in shoes, socks and shorts. In stark contrast, another elderly gentleman was resplendent in a powder blue tuxedo, complete with ruffled shirt and navy blue cummerbund. The gun went off and so did the crowd. It was at this point that I realised I had made a crucial error in my walk-run-walk plan. In hindsight it should have been a run-walk-run plan, because in less than a minute I was last. Dead last. Not merely walking with the 80-year old grannies. I'm talking incontrovertibly last. A guy with a prosthetic leg overtook me, and that's when I knew I had to throw the plan out the window. The second mistake I made was to write "PHIL" in huge letters on my shirt. Now I faced the humiliation of walking dead last with everyone yelling out what they must have thought was encouragement. "Go Phil!" "You can do it." But I knew they were thinking: "Oh look at the retarded boy. Isn't he brave? What an inspiration. He's gonna walk the whole thing." I was coming last AND everybody knew my name. The first few miles were the worst for my ego. But it didn't take too long for the walk-run-walk ratio to allow me to catch up with (and overtake) the one-legged man. I even passed the ladies with running shorts made from Texan flags. I thought you would have been killed in Texas if you dared bring the sacred flag so close to your butt, but apparently this was considered a very patriotic gesture. In the first half-marathon I gradually got used to the bystanders yelling my name. After a while my responses to "Go Phil!!" started to change as my mood lifted, in order they were typically: Mile 1 "Get bent! I don't need your pity." Mile 2 "*$&*% yanks" Mile 3 "Do I know you?" Mile 4 "Yeah - whatever" Mile 5 "Hey - it's not how fast you start it's how fast you finish" Mile 6 "Thanks mate" Mile 7 "See you at the finish" Mile 8 "Man I'm starving. Grab me a cheesesteak!" Mile 9 "Hey you! Fancy seeing you here!!" Mile 10 *wink* "Helloooo - how YOU doin'" *wink* *wink* Mile 11 "Thanks - I couldn't have done it without you" Mile 12 "Rock and ROLLLLL!!" By mile 13 I couldn't hear anyone for the Rocky theme playing in my head. It wasn't a hallucination either. Some frat boy from Delta Sigma Tau had setup a stereo on his front porch. "Working hard now . . ." So by the time I arrive at the half-marathon point, I'm within a mere six blocks of my house, I'm pretty pooped but feeling OK. Time to make my quiet getaway and sneak off home for that cheesesteak I'd been thinking about for the past 2 hours 45 minutes. But I had forgotten one thing . . . The mid-point was ALSO the finish line, and by now a huge crowd has gathered to welcome in the serious runners that are doing their best to qualify for the Boston marathon (3 hours qualifies you to enter the Boston). On one side of the course I have hundreds of cheering spectators all yelling "Go Phil!!", on the other side I have a steady stream of very fast, very fit athletes working hard to fulfill their wildest dreams. What was I going to do? Stop, throw my leg over a barricade and say "Sorry folks, I'm feeling a bit tired, I'm gonna go home for a little lie down now"?!? No way! So I kept going. Yes, you heard right: peer pressure made me do the marathon. I can't deny it. I can't help but think that if I had just not written my name on my shirt I might not have achieved the milestone I did. As I pressed on towards mile 14 and inevitable pain, it was pretty inspiring to see the guys coming in the opposite direction towards the finish line. They hadn't written their names on their shirts, but I started yelling out to them anyway: "C'mon blueshirt!" "Attaboy redhead!!" When I yelled out "Go son!!" to one lean guy he took a surprised look at me and promptly projectile vomitted a chocolate stream of goop. To his credit, he kept running, but even now I can't help feel a little bit guilty. I hope I didn't screw up his time. The next bit of the race probably could do without too much detailed description, but it was so bizarre it would be remiss of me not to mention it. A group of pro-life demonstrators had lined the course between miles 14 and 15 with poster-sized colour photos of what could only have been late-term abortions captioned with bible verses and taglines. Inappropriate? Yes. Effective? You betcha! If I agreed with their views I would have said it was an act of guerrilla marketing genius. As it was I thought it was tasteless, vulgar and probably responsible for even more spews than me yelling at runners. Up to mile 20 was the hardest psychologically. I'm now running further and further away from home with no way to get back except the way I came or in the back of an ambulance. When I hit the turnaround point at mile 20 I was elated. I knew I was going to make it now. At four and a half hours, the police starting picking up the traffic cones, reopening the streets and directing the remaining marathoners onto the sidewalk. At first they were pretty calm and polite about it, but they were dealing with people stubborn enough to want to do the marathon in the first place and many of them weren't about to move over for anyone. One cop's temper snapped and he yelled into his megaphone: "Get off the road. The race is over." I yelled back, "It ain't over until I say it's over," which raised a subdued cheer of solidarity from the straggling remnant. Mile 24 - Everything hurts. I thought by this stage, people would be running or walking together in small groups, but surprisingly, everyone was just doing their own thing. Everyone has their own pace. It's too painful to run faster than feels right, and too soul-destroying to go slower because you just want it to be over. The rare times I did travel with others were not uplifting. "God has got you this far, and he'll get you to the finish too," came the unsolicited piece of advice from a well meaning participant. "Yeah - either that or Gatorade," I replied. I was too tired to begin a debate on the nature of God and whether She did or did not exist. At mile 25 a woman was taking photos of each individual participant as they went past. Based on your bib number, you can go the website and buy copies of the photo at ridiculously inflated prices (around $25 Australian each). I must have still had some fuel in the tank because once I saw I was going to have my picture taken, I started running as if I was fresh as a daisy. Then once out of sight of the photographer I slumped back to my painful loping stride and made my way to the finish. Even though I was finishing strongly, there was one last reminder that I wasn't exactly setting any world records. After leading him for the vast bulk of the race, the one-legged man overtook me in the final 400 yards. As it was in the beginning so it was in the end. Probably the most common question I get asked is what my finishing time was. I've decided that unless you have run a marathon I won't tell you. I don't think I'm being mean or that I'm embarrassed about my time, I just don't think a five digit number would have that much significance unless you've done it yourself. It's like asking someone who's just given birth: "So - did you have an epidural?" As if giving birth wasn't difficult enough. If you told them you'd just climbed Mt Everest, these are the people that would ask: "So - did you do it with or without oxygen?" Would I do it again? Probably. I'd still like to see how I'd perform if I did start the race feeling 100%. And my advice for others who want to do the same? Think twice before writing your name on your shirt. |
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