Finding Momentum

My bud­dies Matt, Josiah, Tony and I had been talk­ing about run­ning a marathon ever since late April. Matt and Josiah are dis­tance heroes, and Tony’s the only one out of all of us who’s actu­ally run a marathon.

“I’m in if you’re in,” one of us would say.

“I’m about 60% sure I’m in,” some­body else would chime in.“But if you’re running…”

I decided to set­tle it for all of us. “I’m in.” And that set­tled it. We were going to run a whole, freakin’ marathon.

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It was only around last year I acquired the goal to run a marathon. I had filed it under “Things I’d Like To Do Before I Die”–that is to say, Things That Are Highly Good But Kind of Far-Fetched. Only around last year because in years past I would have laughed it off as impos­si­ble. But then again last year I was look­ing for impos­si­ble things to do, if only for the kick of com­pil­ing them into a list.

Sure, in high school I ran track for four years and cross coun­try for three (fully enjoy­ing its ironic, sadis­tic valor). And I’d been some­what reg­u­lar in my run­ning in col­lege (run­ning usu­ally when A: dis­gusted at my gut or B: stressed out like crazy or C: a lot on my mind), but I’d never imag­ined myself doing this sort of a feat.

Marathons are cloaked in a lot of mys­tique: there’s that whole metaphor of the human strug­gle, the idea of it being about sheer sur­vival. There’s the promise of tri­umph at the end over a par­tic­u­larly impos­si­ble task. And never mind that leg­end goes that the first guy that ran it keeled over and died.

But ever since the Santa Cruz Half-Marathon we ran, I’ve been feel­ing like this is a reach­able goal. Run­ning 26.2 miles isn’t too hard. You just have to get past the first mile, and the sec­ond, then the third…

So for the past six weeks or so, Tony, Matt, Josiah and I have been train­ing for the San Fran­cisco Marathon. We’re all over the Bay Area (Josiah’s in the Penin­sula, I’m in the South Bay, Matt’s in the East Bay and Tony’s in Berke­ley) and we train sep­a­rately. But we hope to run this sucker together on August 3rd.

Training’s been good but tough. I’m cur­rently run­ning 30–40 miles a week (five days run­ning, 2 days rest). Over the course of a week, I’ll do a long run on the week­end, rest, three medium runs, rest, and a short run (in that order). It’s kind of hard to roll your­self out of bed at 7:30AM in the morn­ing and get your­self psy­ched for a run, but I guess it’s part of the package.

We’d love to have some folks (you!) involved in this endeavour:

• If you’ve been fol­low­ing my Twit­ter feed, I’ve been post­ing train­ing updates once in awhile, so feel free to fol­low along if you’d like.
• If you’d like to run with us (or even for either of both half-marathons, which both take place the same day), do let me know!
• Finally, we four run­ners are going to be run­ning this for a good cause. I’ve been think­ing of run­ning to raise money for the Inter­na­tional Jus­tice Mis­sion or another human-rights orga­ni­za­tion, but I’m still wait­ing on word from the other guys. Watch this space for more details, or let me know if you know any good orga­ni­za­tions to fundraise for.