Runner's Delight

On Sunday, I ran my third half-marathon (the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Half-Marathon). Go, me.

I felt nervous before the race started. It was still dark outside when Dave and I arrived at Nathan Phillips Square at 6:45 in the morning. The caffeine from the cup of coffee that I downed before leaving the house had given me a buzz: it made feel energized and excited, but it might also have been the source of my jitters.

Or, maybe it was all of those serious runners that made my stomach fill with butterflies. Some of those runners looked real intimidating, like they had a giant electrical current running through their bodies that made them ripple from head to toe every time they took a step. But I tried to ignore the hardcore racers and visualize the race that I was going to run. I said good-bye to Dave (he started in a different corral than me since his pace is much brisker – they were colour-coded according to your estimated finish time) and felt slightly at ease when I looked around at the runners gathered in my corral: these weren’t superstar marathoners. They were average people like me, who were probably just as anxious to get started as I was. Some of them wore humours, self-deprecating t-shirts that said “Training for Boston 2043” and “I will finish this, whether I run, walk, or crawl.” I smiled, which relaxed me. I felt at ease with the average-joe runners surrounding me. They weren’t there to win the kitty, or break world records: some were running for their mothers who were battling breast cancer, while others were running for their nephews diagnosed with bone marrow disease. They were running to prove something to themselves: that they could reach their goals, no matter how much blood, sweat, and tears it took. Let alone hours.

Once I started running, my fear evaporated and I felt good: there were no aches and pains, no doomsday thoughts dragging me down. The sky grew lighter. By the third kilometre, lots of people in my corral had slowed to a walk (amateurs, clearly; started out with too much gusto) and I breezed past them, still feeling confident, relaxed, ready to work – and yes, maybe a tad pompous, because I had so much steam left at a time when others were strolling lackadaisically, as if they were window shopping on Bloor Street.

Kilometres passed. I climbed hills, gave the “thumbs up” sign to my cousins whose cheering made me run faster (thanks, guys!), and wondered why I was doing this again, as a creeping ache colonized my right calf.

When I got to the 19 km mark, I said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” I wanted to quit and walk it in (head bowed in defeat). All I could see in front of me were sore, tired runners who didn’t look like they would make it to the end. Seeing all of these people ahead of me made me feel claustrophobic. It made the finish line seem impossibly far away. “If I just stopped now…” I started to think, but I put the kibosh on negativity and made a compromise with myself – the same one I had made during the previous half-marathons: “Fine. I’ll run to the end. But I’m never doing this again” and I kept moving my legs, one foot after the other, until I crossed that damn finish line. (As I neared the end, I could hear my mother’s voice calling my name – “Katie! Katie! Go, Katie!” – from the large group of spectators gathered on the sidelines. I looked left to see if I could spot her, but everything was a blur. I couldn’t decipher her in that faceless crowd, but just hearing her chant helped me squeeze out the last dregs of energy needed to cross the finish line just a tiny bit sooner.)

Finally, after 2 hours and 2 minutes, the finish line had been crossed (conquered). Relief. Exhaustion. Dehydration. I walked with the enormous hoard of runners as we snaked our way through the fenced-off finish line behind City Hall to the open space of the square and I realized that, though I usually despise crowds, I didn’t mind this one so much; because this was a special kind of crowd. This was an accomplished crowd. This crowd didn’t have a subway to catch, or a meeting for which they absolutely could not be late. People felt proud – pooped, sure, but proud. They (we) wanted to languish in the charged glow of achievement. We wanted this rare, blissful, fleeting feeling to linger. And we wanted to do it right smack in the middle of the city.

As I broke away from the crowd to find my friends and family, I thought, “Why can’t people always feel this good? This proud? This unbothered by the strangers around them?” I spotted my posse by the fountain (Dave was there too, victorious). They were smiling and I returned the gesture, feeling very happy to see them and glad that the run was over.

And then: “Never again,” I promised myself. “Never again.”