marathon

I did my first marathon yesterday. It was painful from start to finish due to a couple of injuries, but it was still a very enjoyable experience. That may be in part owing to the fact that I went at a more or less leisurely pace on account of said injuries.

What I’ve noticed (and what pleases me) after re-entering the world of competitive sport and serious training is the way my brain immediately grasps at the slightest hint of a challenge and deposits it into a kind of immutable to-do list. It’s this weird little urge that fights against the part of me that generates wise and reasonable notions. The challenges I’d make for myself in swimming - small ones like doing a bunch of 50’s without breathing, or big ones like swimming 200×200 - each started as a small spark of a feeling that this would be something really cool to do, and quickly cemented into a very difficult to defy commitment to do them. I’ve been lacking in such feelings ever since swimming faded from its once-prominent position in my life, so it’s been fun to encounter some new ones. I guess it started with my first long runs earlier in the summer, where I rotcheted up my longest-distance-yet-run by 30-40%. And the ~340 km biking plus race weekend, made slightly unpleasant by a cold. And then the marathon in which, after convincing myself that I wouldn’t run the full distance if I was in a lot of pain, I decided after the first 2.5 miles that I would run the full distance in a lot of pain.

That propensity to readily jump at the chance to do crazy things is a quality of my brain that I’m particularly fond of, so I’m glad to see it hasn’t atrophied in the few years that I’ve starved it of challenges. I’ll bet it will come in handy with the impending ironman training too.

In other news, there was a guy who did the marathon on stilts, and I thought that was really impressive.