Just because I am home back into the States guys, doesn’t mean that I stop blogging. Not by any means. In fact, it just means that my blogs are going to be written more reflectively and will be more drawn out because I have unlimited internet time and I know the keyboard, whereas what you have been reading until now was timed by the amount of Euros I had in my pocket and the fact that it took more concentration to find the periods and punctuation on the keyboard. And now, back to the marathon.
Mile 18
After mile 17, I had almost eaten a meal trying to grab food and candy from the crowds, but I still felt like I did not have enough in me to finish. Not getting my dinner the night before might have been my biggest mistake in preparation for the race, but it allowed me to leave my germ-a-phob comfort zone and grab food from strangers. Once I saw the mile 18 marker, I started thinking a little bit more positively; kind of like after a big Thanksgiving meal when you unbutton your pants in satisfaction and just enjoy the biggest meal you had that year. While I didn’t have to unbutton my pants, I did enjoy the fact that I had gotten through the hardest part of the race and could now start the countdown to the finish of the race. Through mile 18, I began to think about the finish line, the satisfaction I would get, and the fact that I now only had less than 8 miles to run (that is less than an hour left of running).
Mile 19
Mile 19, while many say it is the point at which many people “hit the wall,” was instead for me the mile to look forward to, and thinking back it is probably the mile that I will enjoy looking back on. Once you get past mile 19, you are in the 20’s which has the 2 in it that precedes the 6.2 in the length of the total race. During this mile I started thinking about all the people back at home, and on the sidelines, that had helped and supported me in signing up, and completing this race. I thought about everyone at work that would call me crazy when I was upset that I “only ran 45 minutes” one day. I thought about my family that had spent years and miles traveling to all of my cross country races just to watch me run for 20 minutes (which most of the time they might have only seen a minute of it). I thought of the people donating to my Ireland fund, the people urging me to run as many miles as I could, the ones that inspired me to travel out of comfortable Southern California, the ones that offered me advice and suggestions for my trip, and the ones that motivated me to do the things that I wanted to do. I thought about the people that never gave up on me, and that never let me give up on myself. I thought about the people that could have been here with me and the ones that couldn’t. I was thankful for everyone that had played some part in every step of the race, in every step of my trip. I thought about them, and I still do.
Mile 20
Mile 20 I started thinking about myself (surprise surprise). I knew I was on the home stretch with only 6 miles to go. I wasn’t going to get the PR (personal record) that I had secretly hoped for, but I thought I might be able to beat my previous marathon time that I had been ashamed of before I even started the race. I began to focus on my form, my steps, and my pace. I tried to calculate what I needed my splits to be in order to finish the race under 3:40. It didn’t seem impossible. But it also didn’t seem likely.