If I Can Finish A Marathon, I Can Finish An Article.
Persistence is the name of the game today.
Day 4 of my self-imposed torture — errrr — challenge to write every day for a month. Again. Yeah, I did this back in 2019 when I started on Medium. Then I took a little break.
For like an ice age. Now I’m starting up again.
You know I’m struggling if I use the marathon story to get myself to the end of an article.
But, hey, whatever works.
I started out with a few ideas for a piece today but then got stuck on an article about editing. I switched gears when I had a flashback to the last lonely miles of the walking marathon I did in 1996. Which, I realize, may have been before some of you were born.
I certainly was at an age when many of you weren’t even a twinkle in your father’s eyes when I signed up to walk the ordeal. At at fifty-six and counting. I’d never undertaken anything that athletic or grueling in my life.
The marathon gave me a boatload of life-lessons. Foremost was that I could do a lot of things I never imagined myself capable of once I put my mind to it.
Sadly, 56 is a little late in life to learn such an important lesson. However, I never imagined how many challenges lay ahead of me where the marathon experience was useful, and I don’t mean just getting to the finish line.
When I signed up for the marathon, sponsored by the Leukemia Society, I agreed to raise money to honor my late brother. He died way too young at 63 of lymphoma. The Leukemia Society funds research to combat this disease, and inspired by a co-worker who completed it, I said, I’m in.
Imagine my shock when I decided to prepare myself by walking home from work that day, a half-hour trek and thought I’d need paramedics at the half-way mark.
Nevertheless, I completed the training, raised twice the required donations that pay for the training, lodging at the race, and various experts they made available such as sports doctors and motivational speakers during the four-month training period. The rest funds the research.
However, nothing prepared me for getting a miserable flu that prevented me from completing my training, so I started the marathon in less than stellar condition. My trainers assured me I walked sufficient miles to get in shape and do it, though it might be a challenge.
Easy for them to say.
Things went reasonably well for fifteen or eighteen miles, and then, somewhere along the Avenue of Giants in Humboldt County, the site of the marathon, I found myself walking alone. I wanted, no, I needed to quit.
Everything ached, even body parts I didn’t know had nerves. Like fingernails.
The race included walkers and runners; most of the participants had finished ahead of me. But I was determined to reach the end, and for the last tortured miles, I would count mileposts and tell myself I could quit, but not before I passed the next milepost, each probably several hundred yards apart.
At one point, I started crying, I was so exhausted, and I told myself to stop. I’d cry at the end, but now I needed my strength to walk.
I thought of my brother and what he had gone through with cancer. I thought of all the people the Leukemia Society helped. I thought of anything that got me to the next milepost and the next and the next.
And just under seven hours after I started, I crossed the finished line, 26.2 miles done and dusted.
When I see news stories about people, young children alone, walking to safety in Ukraine these days, I’m ashamed I believed it was even hard, but back then, it was the most difficult physical challenge I’d ever undertaken.
I never imagined I’d face open-heart surgery, a second divorce, the vicissitudes of aging.
Writing a novel, much less an article every day.
Since then, I’ve used my feat of walking a marathon, an accomplishment for a middle-aged woman of low to middling fitness, as motivation to get me up and over other high bars.
But you can bend perseverance to your will. I started out to walk a marathon, planning a 26.2-mile hike. But to make it to the finish line, I reduced my walk to a few hundred yards, over and over again.
The perseverance kicked in not so much in doing a marathon but in not quitting those short bursts of painful walking.
