I ran the Helsinki marathon yesterday and made horrible time, but I’m happy that I simply crossed the finish line. I’m still a nascent runner. Running takes effort, sometimes I don’t like it, and it usually hurts. Nonetheless, I’m slowly beginning to understand the appeal. I can even appreciate why some people actually look forward to running rather than being happy that they went running. That said, if I ever start chattering about how running relaxes me or if I say something like “Finishing a 10k in the rain is the best feeling in the world,” please smack me. Or blow smoke in my face. Fitness cheerleaders are obnoxious. Like any habit, you come to running on your own.

When I quit smoking in March, I signed up for a half-marathon in May that rightfully demolished me. A few days later, I received an encouraging email to register for the real thing. Still puffed up by my 21K¹ accomplishment, I signed up, figuring it’d be better to run a marathon than to not run one. In retrospect, this was a rash decision. August arrived and, although I’d been training for five months, the furthest I could run was 25K and it took me forever. I began to have serious doubts, but my options were limited:

a) withdraw from the race and feel like a loser
b) feel like a loser around 5000 people.

So I decided to run the damned thing. There’s something beautiful about seeing thousands of people from all walks of life gather for a simple activity. It gave me the same thrill that I felt fifteen years ago when I first went to a warehouse in Detroit and saw all kinds of people marching in lockstep to a Basic Channel track. A clarity of purpose can generate an ad hoc community that transcends age, profession, class, etc. When you’re crying on the side of the road and hugging your knees and a lady in her seventies whizzes by you wearing a flaming red shirt that says Eat My Dust, that’s when you know you’re part of something special.

And the spectators! So many considerate people came out to cheer. At one of my lowest points, a girl gave me a high-five and an old man looked me hard in the eye and said Don’t give up! Hyvä! Hyvä! I couldn’t let these strangers down, so I kept lumbering along. And finally I crossed the finish line, where I was awarded a little medal and a granola bar.

If you’re thinking about running a marathon, I’d like to share two things that I learned the hard way:

1. Wear shorts. I never thought I would put those two words next to each other. My third rule in life is a man should never wear shorts unless he is within a five-minute walk from a recreational body of water. That said, running one hundred miles under the sun wearing my beat-up cotton sweatpants was a terrible idea. They were hot, heavy, and embarrassing Rorschach sweat blots began to appear. Out of the thousands that ran, I was the only person wearing cotton sweatpants. Now I know why.

2. Never stop running. Things started getting grim at 28km and the wheels came off around the 32km mark. From an academic perspective, it was interesting to discover the different types of pain that the body can invent. I couldn’t see straight and there’s a good chance I was crying, so I decided to stretch and walk it off. By now I’d seen hundreds of athletic-looking people stopping at the drink stations, chatting, even going to the bathroom (which shocked me — if there’s ever a time you might want to hold it…) before bounding off for another sprint, so I copied them and pulled over to stretch, drink some GatorAde, and pull myself together. The pain exploded and for the next three kilometers I alternated between running, walking, and swearing until I learned that it simply hurt less to keep running. That became my mantra for the last ten kilometers, chanted along to a Thomas Brinkmann track: it hurts less to keep running, it hurts less to keep running. There are obvious problems with this strategy (e.g. it shouldn’t hurt that much in the first place) but I still recommend it.

Enough of that. Time for a pizza and some Law & Order…

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Hipnosis/Vangelis – Blade Runner (End Theme)
from Pulstar/Blade Runner. ZYX, 1983

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¹When it comes to units of measurement, I’m a man without a country. Some parts of the metric system are beginning to make sense to me (although I’ll never agree that 30º is hot or even warm), but I’m not yet ready to walk away from the comfort of miles and pounds. After all, I still consider myself an American. For the purposes of talking about running (which won’t happen often, I promise) I will use kilometers because that’s how the race was marked here in Helsinki.