Plodders have a place

…but the New York Times wonders, is it at a marathon?

I know I’m not that much of a runner, compared to some.  In fact, my performance has actually fallen off since I started:  my best time for a 10K race is 41 minutes, and these days I can barely manage 50.  I ran my best 1/2 marathon at 1:40 minutes, and this year I finished my first marathon at 4:07.

I was heartbroken, because barely an hour earlier than that I was running behind a middle-aged fellow whose wife was chasing him from waypoint to waypoint with a whiteboard, updating him on his pace.

“YOU’RE STILL ON PACE FOR 3:38!!!!!!!” it said, when I saw it.  She had a huge smile on her face, whooping delightedly as she waved her sign, and her enthusiasm brought one to his expression too, tired as it was.  I was right behind him.  It was my pace too, until I hit the wall and struggled every inch to the finish line.

So what infuriates me isn’t that there are people out there who think, somehow, that those who run 26 miles over the course of 5 or 6 hours are unworthy of being called “marathon runners”.  It’s no surprise to me — everyone wants to think their suffering is more acute, their effort was more noble, their work was somehow more real than the people who are walk-running or just painfully trudging as hard as they can.

What takes my breath away is the implication that somehow these people do not deserve the accomplishment, however long it takes them.

The first time I ran at all, it was to support a friend of mine who wanted to join the Army Reserves, and needed to make sure he was in shape to do it.  But he’s a social runner, and he asked me to go with him to keep him motivated.  So I did.

Four hundred meters later — which is a single lap of a track — I was breathing so hard that it felt like blood in my lungs.  He was convinced I was going to die.  He held back, and back, and back some more just to show me that I could get around the track a second time, a third, a fifth, a tenth.  I never felt more a failure than those times that I had to stop, and he encouraged me with what his track coach taught him:  “It doesn’t matter how slow you go, the important thing is just not to stop.  You can keep going, you can always keep going.”

Funny how things stick with you, because that’s what popped into my mind when I was staring at the CN Tower, with hilly Queen St. West between me and the finish line.  I can always keep going, it doesn’t matter how slow, as long as I don’t stop, then I can do it.

What would I have done, if I had listened to Adrienne Wald or Julia Given instead?  If I had been made to feel as though there is something more I had to do to simply earn the right to be a proper runner, like them?  What possible reason would I have to even keep going?

Running is beautiful because there is no such thing as proper, there is no such thing as perfect, and no such thing as acceptable. There is you, your feet, the road and time.  Whatever else happens, those things are true, and the rest is entirely up to you.  It is marvelous and liberating for that reason — if you go slow, then that’s how you do that day; if you go fast, then you celebrate that perfect combination of body, weather, energy, hormones and luck.  Whether it’s twenty-six seconds, meters, minutes, kilometers or miles — each and all of them are yours, for you.

If a race organizer is willing to take your fifty bucks to see what you can do, it’s between the two of you.  Never let an Adrienne or a Julia take that away from you, or make you think you’re unwelcome.  Just look to around you on race day, at all the people just like you who are excited to test themselves against the most difficult thing they’ve ever tried, and feel proud that you’re among them.

Because you should.

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