Midlife Crisis Marathon (MCM) 2022

Why does it have to be so hard??? Teddy kept asking me that, in frustration over the complexity of the word search I made for him.  He’s been obsessed with word searches lately, so I made him a 26×26 grid containing 54 different dinosaur names, from Allosaurus to Zalmoxes.  It is a doozy of a word search, and I figured it could hopefully preoccupy the kid for weeks… or at least a few hours.  But why does it have to be so hard?  Because the best rewards come from the hardest challenges. 

A few weeks ago, I ran the Marine Corps Marathon.  This was my sixteenth marathon to date and my second Marine Corps, and I’m here to tell you that it was SO HARD!!! (Do I sound like a whiny five-year-old?)

The first time I ran Marine Corps was in 1999.  Yes, I am old. 

But at that time, I wasn’t old.  I was fresh out of school and living on the eastern shore of Maryland, in the lovely boring town of Cambridge.  I had signed up for the marathon with a friend of mine, anticipating crushing him in the race because I was typically better at the longer distances.  He enjoyed crushing me in return for any race shorter than five miles.  For those unaware, the marathon is 26.2 miles, or 42.2 kilometers, or 138,336 feet, or around 105 laps around a track. 

My training for the race was less than ideal, because I was learning that it’s much easier to run a lot of miles when you’re a lazy engineering student on the track and cross country teams than it is to run a few miles when you’re working full-time for a demanding construction company.  Sometimes the real world sucks. 

Then, about a month before the race, I came home from work to a blinking answering machine (this was in the days before everyone had cell phones) to find out that my mom had succeeded in suicide.  She was 44 years old. 

Certain details are still vivid today.  I recall driving to Philly, pushing the speedometer past a hundred for isolated stretches of highway, while blasting U2 “Seconds” on repeat, the second song on their classic War album.  “It takes a second to say goodbye.  Say goodbye…”  It was a dark song for a dark occasion. 

My sisters and I compiled a mixed tape of different songs to play in the background of the funeral, our mother’s favorites (Stairway to Heaven, Comfortably Numb, Silent Lucidity), because she wouldn’t have stood for the boring church music. 

I didn’t run much during this time.  It just didn’t seem important.  A few days before the race, my friend asked if I still planned to go.  I did.  I remember the easy run I did the day before the race, and thinking that three miles shouldn’t have felt that hard…

In 1999, I was running my fourth marathon.  Every marathon has its ups and downs, and you try to balance them out.  If you start out too up, you’ll come crashing down.  It’s like physics or something.  As bad as I’d felt the day before, I felt great at the start of this race, and I was pushing the pace the whole way!

Well not the whole way.  More like two thirds of the way.  And then I wasn’t feeling so great.  I was pretty miserable.  I remember thinking to myself “I want that freaking medal”, over and over again, as my mantra for the last EIGHT miles.  Living on the eastern shore, I was unfamiliar with the DC landmarks and had no appreciation for the course.  The most memorable part of the route was the beast of a hill running up toward Iwo Jima for the finish, which was killer, and not in a Kate Bush “Running up that Hill” kind of way.  It just sucked.  But I finished, well behind my friend, way behind my previous marathon times, but I still earned that freaking medal!

Flash forward a couple of decades, and I wanted revenge on the course.  I signed up to run in 2021, twenty-two years after I’d suffered through the race as a twenty-two-year-old, but Covid deferred it until 2022, ruining my symmetry.  I am now older than the age at which my mother stopped aging…

Three weeks before the race, my wife got the call that her father had passed away.  [What is it with this cursed race?]  She quickly booked a last-minute flight to Thailand, taking Catherine for comfort and leaving me and Teddy to play with word searches while they were away.  Again, my training was lacking leading into it, and being unable to go out for runs with Teddy at home did not help.  But having run enough of these and plenty of ultras, I felt confident I could fake my way through it.  How hard could it be? 

Less than two miles into the run, I felt like crap.  I’m used to hitting the wall in these races, but it is supposed to be with twenty miles down, not with twenty plus still to go!  Around eight miles in, my left leg radiated pain, going from my quad to my IT band to my hip to my hamstring, and back around again.  My right knee started to protest the pounding of the pavement after ten miles.  My left foot developed a blister by mile 12, and the right foot followed suit shortly thereafter. 

But it was a beautiful day!  Great weather, temps in the mid-fifties for most of the morning, tremendous crowd support, and I relished the route past the museums, monuments, landmarks, of the capital.  Running down Spout Run and GW Parkway, across the Key Bridge, up Rock Creek, past Hains Point, around the Mall, we toured it all. 

Somewhere around the time when both legs and both feet were falling apart, we ran along the Wear Blue Mile, a lonely stretch on Ohio Drive beside the Potomac, where instead of seeing supporting fans, we saw pictures of soldiers, aligned on both sides of the road, all killed in action. 

Much as I like to complain, it’s pretty hard to feel sorry for yourself over a couple of blisters and some sore legs when you’re seeing signs of people who lost everything.  Three hours of discomfort no longer seems so daunting.  Even when it stretches to four, or more.  Quitting was not an option.

This was my slowest marathon ever.  I missed my target time by two minutes… per mile.  I missed my previous MCM time by thirty minutes.  But three things stood out to me in the end:

1) I got the freaking medal!

2) It took me 22 years to reach the starting line the first time; 23 years to get there again; so I won’t have to suffer another cursed MCM until I’m 69 years old at this pace.

3) Did it have to be so hard??

Post Script

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. I could have saved you the last few minutes with the nasty picture below…

Post Post Script – Here’s Teddy’s Dinosaur Word Search

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ALLOSAURUS	EOTYRANNUS	LAMBEOSAURUS	SHANAG
ANKYLOSAURUS	EQUIJUBUS	MAIASAURA	SPINOSAURUS
ARCHAEOPTERYX	FUKUIRAPTOR	MEI	STEGOSAURUS
BARYONYX	GALLIMIMUS	MINMI	TANIUS
BOROGOVIA	GASTONIA	OMEISAURUS	TARCHIA
BRACHIOSAURUS	HAGRYPHUS	ORNITHOMIMUS	TRICERATOPS
CARNOTAURUS	HYPSILOPHODON	OTHNIELIA	TROODON
COELOPHYSIS	IGUANODON	OVIRAPTOR	TYRANNOSAURUS REX
COMPSOGNATHUS	INDOSUCHUS	PANOPLOSAURUS	UTAHRAPTOR
DEINONYCHUS	IRRITATOR	PTERANODON	VELOCIRAPTOR
DILOPHOSAURUS	JOBARIA	PTERODACTYL	YINLONG
DINOSAURS	JURAVENATOR	QUETZALCOATLUS	ZALMOXES
DIPLODOCUS	KENTROSAURUS	RINCHENIA
DRACOREX		RUGOPS