What Inspires Me

I've written here before about my running inspiration, Greg.

Now I'm about to start training for my second marathon. Team in Training is running a "What Inspires Me" campaign right now, and I'd like to elaborate on my mission statement and talk about why I'm doing this all over again.

To tell the truth, after I ran my first marathon, I never thought I'd run another one. Sure, that race was exhilarating. It was also, at various times, both hilarious and terrifying. It was hot and horrible, but there were also great friends and awesome coaches and Loveless biscuits afterward. It gave me a new appreciation for what my body could do - but did I want to go there again? I trained for my first marathon in the cold. I'll be training for this one over the summer. I lost four toenails last time around - shall we go for five?

But the real reason I'm running a second marathon is that I want to cross the second finish line that Greg didn't get to cross.

When Greg was sick, he knew he would need a liver transplant, and he was upfront with me that the call could come any day - even if he seemed healthy at the time. He got one, a few months after we started dating, in July of 1999, from a woman in her 30s who died from a stroke. We used to joke that having a woman's liver kept him in touch with his feminine side. But the reality wasn't as funny. Transplant recipients often go through bouts of survivor's guilt, and Greg felt this keenly, often wondering aloud to me why he was alive and his donor wasn't.

But it worked. For a year and a half, that transplanted liver worked. Greg's eyes, yellowed from jaundice, turned blue and white again. He went skiing with friends. We went to the beach and sat in the sun and told each other we were in it for the long haul. Greg crossed the finish line. Or so we thought.

That liver started to fail sometime in late 2000. His eyes turned yellow again. He lost weight he didn't have to lose. And so Greg's dad gave him a chance at a second race for life: a piece of his own liver. Did you know livers regenerate? Like starfish? They do.

And so our second marathon began. But it was off to a bad start - think heat, humidity, dehydration, leg cramps, spectators yelling "Almost there!" at mile 6. Lots of hospitalizations. Scary ER trips. We went back to the beach but this time it felt like what it was - a last hurrah. We hit the wall. On New Year's Eve 2001, Greg went back to the transplant unit at Mt. Sinai Hospital and never went back home. He died six weeks later, on his 26th birthday. DNF.

I don't know why he didn't make it across that finish line, when I was sure he would. But I can. He can't, so I will. I'm going to take my body, which has betrayed me in its own ways this past year, and run and run for two of us. I'm going to run through the town we had just started to call home, and I'm going across that finish line in Central Park with my hands in the air and my head held high for the both of us. I hope it brings us both peace.

NYRR Fred Lebow Classic 5-Mile, January 9, 2010

That's me, way over on the right with my foot going out of frame. I sacrificed a fair amount of warmth to sport some Team in Training Gear and have my number out prominently during this race, and this is the treatment I get from Brightroom. Hmph.

So there's no photographic proof, but there is proof in the form of numbers. And those numbers show I kicked some major ass in this race. Five miles in 43:40. What those numbers don't show you, and only my new watch (Timex Ironman, a Christmas present from my wonderful dad) showed me, was that I ran negative splits the whole way - and finished with a 7:46 final mile. Kick. Ass.

Did I mention it was about 20 degrees, less with the windchill, at the start? It was cold. Very, very cold. I had to talk to a friend for a few miles just to keep my face from going numb. However, my best races tend to happen in weather like this - I fade quickly in heat.

I started this blog last year with the goal of becoming a runner, as opposed to someone who signed up to do a half marathon and felt compelled to follow through. In the last year I ran a marathon, two half marathons and qualified for the 2010 New York City Marathon by running nine New York Road Runners qualifying races and volunteering at a 10th - another goal I set out to chronicle here. Running my marathon was really hard. I didn't love all of those qualifying races. But I did become a runner. I go out for runs now and it's no longer a struggle. It's become something I have to do, a part of me. I was away from the city over the holidays for three weeks, and while I was gone I made an effort to run regularly, in places both familiar and un-. I found a playground that time forgot near my grandmother's house and discovered that hill training pays off when running in my parents' neighborhood (at one point I found myself running perpendicular to a hill).

Team in Training reeled me in again this year. I signed up to run the Long Branch Half Marathon in New Jersey on May 2 with them, as a way of beginning my training for NYC. They asked me to serve as a mentor captain, which was an honor, and I'm enjoying the challenge of keeping my fellow mentors plugged in. I'll probably follow this season with the fall one and train with them for NYC. There's not enough space on this blog to talk in detail about how much the TNT family has given me, but suffice it to say I owe them a lot more than my fitness, and a lot more than I would likely fundraise even if I participated in every season for the rest of my running-able life.

2009 was one of the most difficult years of my life, personally. I dealt with a salary cut and layoffs at work, lost my grandmother, miscarried twice, struggled with a lot of Deep Thoughts and overall spent the year wondering what, exactly, I had done to deserve such a karmic blow. It was a year of loss. Running kept me sane (well, that's a questionable word - perhaps "balanced" is better) through it all. Remembering that I set goals to improve my speed, my times, my race performances and to qualify for that marathon kept me going. I owe many people - coaches, running partners, friends and family - lots of thanks for getting me through, and here's to a better 2010.