When I was in elementary school, I thought a mile was a distance
unfathomable. When I was in middle school, two was well above my maximum. In
my freshman year of high school, I aspired to complete five in a row. And in
the October of my sophomore year, I decided to try for a major 13.1 -- a
half-mary.
       It probably wasn’t a wise decision. I was in my second year of rowing, and
fancied myself to be in tip-top shape. Over the summer, I had managed to run
six-mile stretches, once or twice every few weeks. I had spent laborious
hours sprinting up and down stadium seats, and commuted a total of four
hours a day, twice a week, to row on open water from a rowing club in
Sausalito. With the fall rowing season extremely uneventful, and the spring
season many months away, I wanted something exciting to do with myself. And,
well, something exciting sprang up.
       It was the end of practice; the sun would be setting soon, but hadn’t begun
quite yet. Shadows were long, and the orange-leaved trees were filtering the
sunlight in flickering patterns as the wind wove through them. I was
standing on the curb with one of the others in my carpool, waiting for the
always-late ride.
       “I hellof need to go running.” It was something I had said many times since
school had started again, in late August. Despite my ceaseless endurance
work over the summer, I had run our first four-mile test in
ten-minute-miles, and done our first four-kilometer rowing test with two
minutes and fourteen seconds per 500 meters. My times weren’t shabby, for a
sophomore, but I knew I could do better. I wasn’t in the top boat.
       “Yeah, so do I,” Erin replied, as she always did.
       Silence.
       “We should run together.”
       “Yeah.”
       Erin was a coxswain, rather than a rower, but she took pride in doing our
land workouts with us, and it made her one of the more well-respected
coxswains on the team. She had gotten in pretty good shape, but she was
tired of being slower than the rowers. We both had motivation to do some
real outside-of-practice running. “When are you free?” she asked.
       “Same time as you,” I said. It was the one scheduling advantage of being on
crew -- nobody had the time to do any other extracurriculars, so we were
always available at the exact same times and days of the week.
       “How about Friday?”
       “Sure.” I thought for a second. “Right after school?”
       “Fourish.”
       “At . . . Bancroft and Bonar, then.” I named an intersection a few blocks
from my house, and even closer to hers: from there, we’d be in the perfect
position to run to the Bay Trail, a route that I had grown fond of over the
summer. “I know a trail we can go on.”
       “Awesome.”
       From there, all it took was to show up. Which was actually pretty
difficult, as I got home at 3:35 on Friday wanting little more than to throw
down my heavy backpack and do some hardcore Sitting In One Place. However,
having made plans with a friend, I was not about to break them. I changed
into running clothes, grabbed some water and a snack of raisins, and was out
the door just in time to reach the intersection at four sharp. Erin was
there, waiting. Despite my initial laziness, I was excited to have a running
buddy, and Erin seemed the same.
       Breaking into a slow but dependable jog, we headed West to the railroad
tracks and beyond, sharing what little we knew about running and pretending
to be connoisseurs of the activity. Running past the scenic yet polluted
Aquatic Park Lagoon, we took the pedestrian bridge over the highway, and
onto the Bay Trail. The Trail was broken into four lanes, including a
specially-paved bit for runners, but that part wasn’t wide enough for two to
run abreast. I allowed Erin to take it for the “out” portion of the trip,
pointing out knowledgeably that it was better for her knees.
       It wasn’t long before we were both tired, and when we reached the end of
our route, a small, polluted beach with a little wooden pier, we stopped for
an elongated “stretch break,” in which we pretended to be in dire need of a
lengthy stretching as an excuse to stop and catch our breaths. We each did a
variety of stretches, then repeated a few of them, each hoping the other
wouldn’t notice.
       Eventually regaining a sense of well-restedness, we picked ourselves up and
started on the return trip. This time the running path was mine, and Erin’s
knees were sacrificed to the asphalt alongside it. Having run out of bits of
running-related wisdom, we discussed instead the ever-complicated soap opera
of crew team politics. F____ wasn’t trying hard enough. The novices weren’t
wearing enough clothing. S_____ wasn’t helping put the boats in at the
beginning of practices. And always the constant chatter of gossip and
backstabbery among teammates -- a phenomenon that we were only perpetuating
with our dialogue. It was only a mile or two before we took another
“stretch” break, this time in the middle of the trail, as there were no
resting points nearby. We then ran home, walking the last half-mile as a
cool-down. As we reached the point where she turned in a different direction
than I, we established that we’d be running again, same time next week. “See
ya,” I said.
       “See ya.”
       It was on our second run that Erin brought up what had really been on her
mind. “You know,” she began as we jogged down Bancroft, “just running is fun
and all, but it’d be cool if we could do something with it. You know, if we
could run with some sort of goal. A race or something.”
       “Yeah,” I acknowledged absentmindedly.
       “I don’t know if you want to do this, but I think it’d be cool if we ran a
half marathon.”
       “Um,” I replied. “Okay.”
       “I mean, wouldn’t it be awesome, just being able to say, ‘Hey, I ran a
half-marathon.’?”
       “Oh yeah. Not that you’d say it like that, of course.“
       “Oh, of course not. More like, ‘Hey, what are you doing this Saturday?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, RUNNING A HALF MARATHON, maybe . . . “
       “Most definitely. Or just ‘Gosh, I’m so sorry I can’t do anything with you
that weekend . . . I’ve got a haircut then, and I’m having lunch with Suzie,
and then I’m running a half marathon.’”
       “And then you’d just watch them gape.”
       “And it would be amazing.”
       “And wonderful.”
       “And so full of bragging rights.”
       “There’d be no competition.”
       “‘Oh, you saved Northern Europe from being consumed by a volcano? That’s
nice; I ran a half marathon.’”
       “And just like that, you’d win the conversation.”
       “Hell yes.”
       “Not that it’d be a competition.”
       “Oh, no way. I’m far too gracious. I’d just win.”
       “Without a doubt.”
       For a few miles, our conversation consisted mostly of variations on that
theme -- offhand ways of telling others that we were running a half
marathon.
       It took me a long time, but eventually, I asked the question that had been
nagging at me. “How far is a half marathon, anyways?”
       She burst out laughing. “13.1 miles.”
       “Oh.” I took a moment to think. “That’s actually kindof doable.”
       “Yeah. Awesome, isn’t it?”
       “Oh yeah. Kindof funky distance, though.”
       “Yeah. Like, you run 13 miles, and they’re just like, ‘Haha, now you have
to go .1 more.’”
       “What bitches,” I replied.
       “Seriously. How dare they make us run the entire race!”
       “We should protest.”
       “Most definitely.”
       We continued our run.

       Between then and the next Friday afternoon, we filled our evenings with
frenzied correspondences, using LiveJournal, AIM, email, even the telephone,
proposing different races taking place in the next few months, and
discussing why each and every one wouldn’t work. This one was far too far
away. Those two took place exactly a week before two different rowing races
--events at which tired legs were not an option. That one was on the day of
one of the races itself. And all the  ones after them didn’t come ‘till
spring, the main rowing season, when we wouldn’t have a single weekend free.
       There was, however, one half-marathon that we had previously dismissed
because it was too soon, but came back to when all the others were
eliminated: the Silicon Valley Marathon, an event taking place in San Jose
on Halloween (a Sunday, that year).
       Halloween was a little less than a month away, and we had little desire to
rush our training so much. The best of online authorities had said that
half-mary training would take two months, three months, four months. But we
were determined, impatient, and entirely unrealistic about what training for
a half-marathon meant. We couldn’t do any of the other races, so we would do
this one. It was as simple as that. We wondered if any of the racers would
be wearing costumes.
       Our training from there was . . . there are a lot of words that could be
used to describe it. Rocky. Inconsistent. Inadequate. More than a little
stupid. We found no training plan entitled “Training For a Half Marathon in
Only a Month For People Who Really Don’t Get It,” so we carefully formulated
our own using information dug up in many hours of research. In other words,
we continued to run once a week on Fridays, with additional runs as time
permitted. We hoped that, supplemented with our rowing-related fitness,
running that much would be enough.
       On the first friday after deciding on the half-marathon (a little over 3
weeks before the event), I unwisely tried to run while ill. We only made it
two and a half miles before I was forced to stop and walk home, with Erin
running veeeeeeerry slowly beside me. On the second (2 weeks), I was busy
and couldn’t run with her, so she ran alone on Friday and I ran alone on
Saturday. On the third (1 week), we managed to get six miles done. The
Friday before the Half-Marathon, though we had discussed doing a “taper” of
some sort and only doing a few miles, we ended up running six instead. It
was our favorite route, after all.

       There’s this joke. It’s a pretty bad one, not very funny. All these army
guys are in a dining hall, or whatever army guys eat in, and one of them
declares a challenge: he’ll give a hundred bucks to anyone who can do 200
pushups in a row, right there on the dining hall floor. So a few guys try
and fail, collapse miserably. And this one dude, he’s watching it all with a
cautious eye, and he excuses himself from the room. Comes back fifteen
minutes later, a little sweaty. Takes the first guy’s challenge, and drops
to the floor. Does a hundred and fifty before he’s so exhausted he can’t go
on. Collapses, breathing hard and shaking, a frustrated look on his face.
When he gets his breath back enough to talk, he says, “I don’t get it! I
just did 225 in the bathroom!”
       The Saturday before the race rolled around, and we still hadn’t done any
training runs longer than eight miles together. We had no delusions of it
assisting us in the next day, but we had to prove to ourselves that we were
capable of running the distance, before we could prove it to 3,000 strangers
in a race. So, the Saturday before Holloween, instead of sitting around on
our asses and eating pasta, we went for a run that we approximated to be
around 9.5 miles long. We didn’t want to run the half-marathon beforehand,
after all; just prove that we were capable of going the distance. When we
finished that run with a little energy to spare, we became pretty confident.
We had not idea how fast or slow we would run that half marathon, but we
knew we’d be able to run it.
       And then it was race day. Neither of us had gotten much sleep, partially
because of our excitement and partially because, being used to going to
regattas, we had decided that it would be wise to get up absurdly early (the
race was at 7:30 AM) and arrive at the course a little over an hour and a
half before start time. When Erin’s dad dropped us off, it was still dark
out. There was a big banner hanging over the road on which we were to run,
and very few people under it: the walkers, who started an hour before the
race began so that they could finish with the runners, and the race
officials, sitting bored at their fold-up table with a few stacks of paper
and a disarray of safety pins. We nervously approached them and told them we
wished to register for the half-marathon, called Erin’s dad on her cell so
he could sign our forms (mine fraudulently). When the paperwork ordeal was
finished and the appropriate amount of money handed over, we were given blue
rectangles of numbered paper to pin on eachother’s chests. I was participant
number 2091. Erin was 2081.
       We watched the walkers start, them went to get a bite to eat, unwisely
passing up the chance to use the restrooms before the crowds arrived. When
we got back, the lines were long. But we had nothing else to do. When our
turns finally came to step into the little green and gray port-o-potties, we
changed into our running shorts and T-shirts and got out of there as quickly
as possible. In the spirit of Halloween, I had brought a Tinkerbell dress in
a fabric appropriate for running and with a slit down the side for
unrestricted leg movement, but wimped out at the last minute when I didn’t
see enough other runners in costume.
       We decided to kill some of the remaining time by warming up, though we
later learned that such things weren’t necessary for long-distance running.
But because we didn’t want to go too far from the start, lest the race
officials spontaneously decide to begin the race 20 minutes early, we only
ran up and down the one city block, perhaps twice. People were congregating
under and behind the great banner arching over the road, so we decided to
join them before the area got too crowded for us to squeeze into, or the
race started without us. We placed ourselves safely in the area for people
planning to run 11-minute miles. Others were stretching, so we did the same.
We greeted a few of the runners around us, and gossiped with eachother about
others.
       “I wonder who the folks in the highlighter yellow are.”
       “Maybe they’re from one of those charity training programs.”
       “I dunno. Can you tell what their singlets say?”
       “Not from where we are.”
       But we were too close to the beginning of the race to distract ourselves
that way or long, and soon our intelligent discussion lapsed into “I’m so
excited!” “So am I!” and various rewordings of the idea.
       “Augh! It’s about to start!”
       There was a clock counting down. We watched the seconds pass, waiting for
the Big Moment.
       3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . an then it was the beginning of the race. Ahead of
us, people broke into runs, but it took some time for any sort of movement
to reach the 11-minute-miler section, the crowd of runners being so thick.
It was even longer before that movement turned from shuffle to walk to run.
A full minute passed before we and the people in our area even reached the
bannered starting line, less than a quarter of a block away.
       And then we were off. The congestion dispersed and everyone was running. I
was; Erin was. We were running with the 11-minute-milers, but with all the
adrenaline the pace was too easy. I sped up, passed through the crowd. As
the two of us wove through the people running, I ended up a few feet, a few
yards in front of Erin. I looked back, but didn’t slow down. I was running
the race on my own, now. I looked at the strangers around me.
       The first few miles of the course ran through city streets, past houses and
parks, winding around corners and turning from asphalt streets to gravel and
back. On their porches and in their yards, residents shouted encouragements
and bore signs with their friends’ names, or just drank iced tea and watched
with their children, as streams of people ran by.
       I kept my pace slow and cautious for those first few miles, unsure of what
pace I would need to get through the whole 13.1 without exhausting myself
before I reached the end. To indulge in my own competitive nature (and with
pacing as an excuse), I started choosing other runners semi-randomly and
running a few yards behind them and to the side, not letting them run any
further ahead of me. The first five miles passed quickly, weaving through
city streets and listening in on the conversations of runners who were still
with their running buddies. At that point, I still felt like I could run
forever. I had endorphins, adrenaline, and Gatorade. I didn’t need anything
more. I was happy. I grinned every time I saw a little metal wicket with a
number taped to the top; these were the milemarkers.
       Around the sixth mile, we abandoned the streets to run on a creekside path,
that rose and fell in gentle waves. Still full of energy, I ran each
downhill extra-fast. A man started to run beside me, who I didn’t know. He
was one of the people in the highlighter yellow singlets. As I had chosen
him to pace off of, he had chosen me. For the next few miles, whenever I ran
extra-fast into the little valleys of the path, he would do the same. And
every time he chugged up the incline on the other side, I was keeping up.
But he was a fast runner, and I was starting to feel tired. Near the end of
the seventh mile, I grudgingly acknowledged to myself that I would not be
able to hold this pace for the entirety of the half marathon, and let him
pass. I would find someone else to pace off of.
       We crossed a bridge, continued on the other side of the creek for a few
miles, and crossed back. Passed water stations and grabbed for paper cups,
tossed the empty shells onto the ground. Some gave out water, some sports
drinks, and each one was followed by a colony of paper cups, scattered on
the ground. I was no longer feeling as buoyant and ready for acceleration as
I had at the beginning of the race, but I could hold my pace. I noted
oddities in the crowd. One man had jumped on his bike and cut across city
streets to reach where he was running now, but nobody seemed to care. His
inaccurately low time would not affect theirs. I thought it was silly that
he had chosen this group of runners to cheat his way into. I guessed myself
to be running with 10-11-minute-milers.
       We crossed more bridges and wound our way around trees, fields, small hills
and people playing with their children. Extremely fast runners of the whole
marathon had already reached the half marathon end and turned around, and
were now running past us on the trail, in the opposite direction. The looked
tired, but I was impressed with their speed.
       The tenth mile wound to the left and farther away from the creek; no water
was in sight, now. I felt like I was running fast, but each mile seemed like
an eternity. Every time I saw a milemarker wicket, I would feel surprised
that the distance hadn’t been farther. Surely a mile couldn’t be this long .
.. . I was tired.
       In the eleventh mile, I felt a sudden sharp pain in my side. This was not
good. I recalled crew practices and under-12 soccer games in which I had
been humbled by side stitches. This was not a good time. I ran on, but every
step, every breath hurt. Eventually, my endurance ran out and I walked.
       But I would not be beaten so easily by a mere cramp. I allowed myself to
walk, but only for a few yards at a time, and at a relatively fast walking
pace. I chose another runner, a plump woman with absurdly long hair, and
vowed that I would not let her get too far ahead of me. Somehow, I worked my
way to and past another mile wicket. I was in the home stretch.
       The course veered off of the pleasant park path, and back onto a city
street, but this time the route was direct. Ahead of me, there was a public
school, and runners were running into it. I practically limped my way
through the gates, and onto a track. One lap around the track, and then to
the left side of a partition that would take the full-marathon-runners to
the rest of their course. After what seemed an eternity, I was on a field,
and the very end of the half-marathon was in sight. I somehow managed to
sprint the last bit, though it brought back the pain in my side with an
intensity that was almost intolerable. Sprinting the last few meters of a
half marathon is only a symbolic victory anyway; the few seconds saved on
your final time are insignificant. I ran under a banner, and grabbed a
bottle of gatorade from the table on the other side of it as I was given a
medal for finishing by one of the volunteers. I walked along the grass,
looking at the things around me. There was a path leading up to the road,
and people were taking it, presumably to drive or take the shuttle to the
post-race celebration. Attached to the chain-link fence were a few sheets of
printer paper, bearing names and times of many of the runners who had
already finished. Mine was, of course, not yet on the list. There were a few
tents scattered across the grass, one with a masseuse and the others bearing
the names of the corporate sponsors of the event. I found a place where I
could watch the race clock and keep an eye on the last bit of the course
while stretching a little. The clock read 2 hours and 15 minutes. I wondered
how long ago I had run under the banner. Had it been five minutes ago? Ten?
What was my time? Either way, it was much faster than the 2:30 that an
eleven-minute-mile would have given me. I waited for Erin to finish.
       Soon I recognized her orange tank top and black shorts, and cheered for her
as she passed me. I met her at the end of the finishers chute. Her time was
2:25. I grinned and congratulated her.
       Someone was posting more papers on the chain-link fence, so I ambled over
to it and checked my time: 2:02:25. My pace, it said, had been 9 minutes and
22 seconds per mile. I was giddy. This was faster than I had even done on my
last four-mile test for crew -- less than a third the distance. I was happy
to have finished, and overjoyed to have finished as fast as I had, not to
mention surprised. When I had started the race, I hadn’t even been sure I’d
be able to run 11-minute miles for so long. Temporarily energized by my own
success, I gave Erin a high-five.
       From there, we got a ride from Erin’s dad to the post-race celebration
area, where the finishers chute for the marathon runners was. We watched
people run through it and cheered, cringed every time a man ran through with
bloody nipples where his shirt had chafed for 26 miles. There was an
age-based list of the half-mary finishers taped to the back of a parked
water truck, so we went to check that out. We saw that we were the youngest
female finishers there, out of only six in the 19-and-under category. We
placed third and fifth in our age group, 87th and 218th out of female
runners as a whole  (there were three-hundred-something of them in the
race).
       We wandered around the post-race expo, grabbing freebies from the race
sponsors, things like wierd-tasting energy bars and handbags proudly
endorsing a local dentist. We went to a table manned by race volunteers, and
asked about getting our race T-shirts, since we had registered on race day
and therefore not gotten a packet of such things in the mail. We were given
T-shirts significantly larger than our bodies --the only size left--, but we
didn’t mind. We now had undeniable proof that we had run a half marathon.
       The awards wouldn’t be given out for a while after that, so we piled into
Erin’s dad’s car and drove back to Berkeley instead of staying. When he
dropped me off at my house, I was started to feel the exhaustion in my
muscles as I climbed the steps to the front door. The first thing I did when
I got inside was to take a nap; the second was to sit very still and watch
television. Everything in me was exhausted . Muscles I didn’t even know
existed were sore. I was particularly fascinated by how that little muscle
that holds your knee stable when you tilt it to the side was sore. I had
never guessed that there even was one there, but now I had indisputable
proof.
       The next day at school, Erin and I did exactly as we had planned to,
mentioning  the race seemingly offhand at every opportunity. We saw
eachother between classes and at lunch, and high-fived. I was even wearing
my race T-shirt, though I had decided that wearing any sort of medal
--particularly a finishers’ medal-- would be unforgivably tacky, and tucked
mine into my backpack instead. I went through the day unfazed by anything
that I might encounter. After all, I had completed a half marathon. After
that, I could do anything.