I really am getting too old for this

I just can't help myself. I really can't. There was no good reason for me to run another marathon. I hadn't run more than 13 miles all year... except the other marathon I had no business running (or were there 2 of them this year...? I forget.) In fact, I hardly think I'd run more than 10 miles all year, and I only made it to that distance once all autumn. But that never stopped me before, right? So when a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with my life coincided with my friend telling me that she wouldn't be running CIM after all, I just couldn't help myself. I offered to take her number off her hands. Hello, for the morning of December 4, my name is Caitlin.

CIM is the site of my best-ever marathon (a day when everything went right and I finished in 3:25). And two years later it was the scene one of my worst ever marathons which sent me through a dozen doctor's appointments to find out why I could no longer run faster than a 10-minute mile, nor string more than 3 of them together. The jury's still out on why my body suddenly quit on me, but the most likely explanation is that I'm just too old for this shit. Or too old to get away with the kind of high-volume, low-rest training that brought me to that incredible season of PR's in 2013. Now that I was starting to get my body back, it seemed predestined that I should run CIM yet again, although I didn't know what the moral (or punchline) to that story might be.

It's called
"Walgreens chic,"
and I'm rocking it.

So that's how I wound up back in Folsom, yet again on the coldest day of the year so far, hunkering down in a gas station parking lot. I'd learned my lesson from previous years and was wearing every stitch of warm and ill-fitting clothing in my closet:

• $8 Walgreen's hoodie that I'd bought before this race last year (one size too big)
• $8 Target sweatpants from the boys' department that I had bought for some other race (I thought Boston, but it must not have been because those sweatpants got donated to charity with an iPod still in the pocket, making them a good deal more expensive) 
• $5 Walgreen's thermal shirt that I had bought just because it was a good deal, and has now become one of my new favorite shirts 

Doing your everyday clothes shopping at Walgreens, and cherishing your purchases with the same fervor as you loved those trendy and chunky platform Mary Janes in 6th grade is an indication that you most certainly are getting old. Usually I don't use the gear check. It's just another thing between me and food at the finish. I would rather freeze my ass off at the start or throw away a perfectly good Walgreen's sweatshirt that I could cherish forever than deal with gear check. But I had become attached to my bargain sweats, and so I waited until the last possible moment, and then started stripping in the gas station parking lot, lovingly putting my $20 "outfit" in my clear gear bag and hoping I would see it again.

This is a picture I found on the internet, not one I took myself.

Luckily, the 11,999 other runners also had the same idea, and it was nice and toasty warm in the crush of people trying to get to the gear trucks. Picture the mob outside the Soylent Green trucks, or an overdue food delivery at a refugee camp and you'll have an idea of what it was like trying to get to that gear truck 5 minutes before the start. In the 40º morning, it was wonderful! Like cuddling with the love of your life in front of a warm fire on a chilly evening.

I wasn't quite sure what I'd feel like on this run. My preparation had basically consisted of taking a day completely off of training the day before, and then eating a week's worth of breakfasts in one sitting. Breakfast was a mistake. The oatmeal had turned to a cinderblock in my stomach, and I spent the first 5 miles trying to relax my way out of the side stitch it had given me. Once the stitch finally passed, I noticed that my hamstrings and calves both felt particularly tired and tight. That's another thing that's come with age: an awareness of my body, because now pretty much everything aches. Around the 10K mark I started to realize that this whole race wasn't just a "concept." I was actually going to have to run 26 miles today, with my legs. These legs with the painful ankles and hamstrings and calves and glutes. I started to really wonder how was going to finish this thing. I mean, I knew I could get there. But what mental reserves was I going to draw from to get me from here to there. I honestly had no frigging clue. The worst races (and experiences) I've ever had are the ones where I wrote a check that my body could cash, but my inspiration could not.

By mile 10 I had a pretty good idea of how it was going to go: not well. As I may have mentioned, I'm getting too old for this shit. I used to be able to sign up for a marathon and on very little training gut my way through it. But ever since I blew out my body, I have acquired an inhaler and quite a bit more mortality.

I never used to run with headphones. I used to like to enjoy sharing the experience of the race with those around me. But ever since smartphones everyone seems to be running with headphones. Even those nasty old coots running in cotton race t-shirts from 1987 that are so stinky and threadbare that you can see their back hair through the material wear headphones these days.  Since 2010 I have spent entire marathons where I don't exchange a single word with another living soul. For example: around mile 9 I looked over to the side of the road and saw something strange. "Are those goats on leashes?!" I asked the guy running next to me (who was not wearing headphones). He looked at me and said nothing. As we came closer, I confirmed that they were in fact goats being walked on leashes like dogs. I turned back to the same guy, "They ARE goats on leashes!" This time he didn't even turn his head. I live in a world where not even goats on leashes elicit a shared experience with those around me. So now I wear headphones.

This is another picture I found on the internet. Enough options came
up when googling "goat on leash" to convince me that
this is actually a thing that people (and goats) do.

Back to the race: I'm at mile 13, the wheels are starting to fall off, and I'm listening to music to distract me from my lonely existence. I decided that after every mile marker, I would finish whatever song I was listening to and then I could walk the next song. Once that song was over, I had to run until the next mile marker, then finish the song before walking again. For the first 2 or 3 miles it was pretty brutal. Instead of figuring out a way through, I started trying to figure out a way to drop out. I was serious, too. For those 15 or 20 minutes, if I had been racing under my own name I probably would have turned off course at the next intersection and called an Uber back to the hotel. (More on this later.)

Great job, Mason. Daddy's totally going
to get to the finish line because of your
inspiring art... Okay, that's a lie. But
your scribbles really will be the thing
that turns it all around for a complete
stranger with a fetish for drugstore sweats.

Then, in an instant something changed: A grandmother and a toddler were sitting on beach chairs at the side of the road with a sign that said, "Run like a T-Rex, Daddy!" Behind the clumsy block lettering, the sign had a really little kid's nonsensical scribbles. The lettering was all off-centered and unevenly sized, some of the scribbles were over the writing, and the whole thing had the effect of making it the jenkiest, ugliest, least inspiring sign I'd seen all day (including the woman who had painted "Go Marvin" the cardboard from the bottom of a flat of soda cans).

I don't know what it was about that T-rex poster, but I got a flash of what had gone into creating that crappy-looking sign: Grandma and toddler toiling away at their crime against graphic design, and the toddler genuinely believing that his scribbles would help Daddy. Grandma surely knew that the sign was crap, but she wanted to cheer on her son, and knew her grandson wanted desperately to help. Two-year-olds are pretty useless at helping with anything, so the people that love them channel their destruction into any old stupid thing and then congratulate the kid for on a job well done. Usually that annoys me about kids, but in that moment I understood that love just means pretending convincingly sometimes. When Daddy came by, he would know that his son had done the most useless thing ever and so would stop and pretend convincingly that he felt good because of Junior and his dumb sign. Daddy would pull his shit together for his family, they would all be happy to see each other, and they would all share in his marathon experience for a few seconds, and for the next mile Daddy would forget that he was pretending and actually feel a lot better.

Being a voyeur on that moment that had absolutely nothing to do with me (and that I didn't even see) turned it around for me. As lame as it sounds, that sign made me remember why I love big races and particularly this race. For the rest of the day, I never once had the wish that the race were over already. At Mile 16 I recognized the spot where I had borrowed a cell phone from a spectator the year before to text Richie Porte that I wanted to drop out. This year I felt possibly worse than I had the year before, but if Daddy could run like a T-rex for his family (honestly, what does that even fucking mean?!) then I could pretend convincingly and grit out 26 miles. I pretended so convincingly that I think I actually enjoyed myself the rest of the way.

It's a good thing that I had a good attitude, because I was destined to finish the rest of that race all alone, surrounded by people. The only human interaction I had was a woman yelling at me to get the hell out of the way as the 4:08 pace group overtook me during a walking break. (Fuck you, lady. Did I mention I ran a 3:25 here 3 years ago?) Coming through a relay point, I saw a "guide" for the visually impaired runners that was a dead ringer for Scott Jurek. I looked around me, and there wasn't a soul without headphones that I could say, "Was that who I think it was?!" (In fact it was Scott Jurek: I saw him at the finish... while I was at gear check).

On I went, leap-frogging with a woman I called "Pants" and a man I called "Jewish Santa Claus," in my head of course because no one would talk to me. Before I knew it, I was within the last mile. I'd sucked off my inhaler again around mile 23 and was starting to feel okay, so I thought I would pick up the pace. That's when I got a muscle cramps I've ever had. I never get muscle cramps, but my right hip shot through with pain as I swung my leg in front of me, and it nearly didn't hold my weight once it struck ground. For the rest of the run (about 3/4 of a mile), my leg threatened to collapse if I tried to lengthen my stride enough to run faster than a 9-min pace. I imagined all of the spectators at the side of the road thinking that I looked particularly pathetic. "Oh lord," they would think, "that one really is a sad sack. Some people just shouldn't run marathons, or should prepare better... Quick! Does anyone have an ugly sign with scribbles on it? I think she might die." I wanted to scream at them, I ran a 3:25 3 years ago! But of course, they were right. I had no business trundling down this finishing chute. I hadn't prepared. The 4:17 I ran proved it. It was slower than the race that had sent me to the litany of doctors' offices. But I can accept a 4:17 that I didn't train for far more easily than a 4:07 I did train for.

I still had a problem: Hotel check-out was at noon, and it was now gone 11:15. I saw Scott Jurek and his wife at Gear Check, and then called the hotel to let them know I was going to be late. The night before they had told me that I couldn't request a late check-out until the morning, and when I called at 3:45 in the morning, they said that they'd already awarded too many late checkouts. "Okay, well I'm going to run as fast as I can. I'll do my best..." I warned them. Seriously, what did they expect me to do? Drop out at 15 miles once I saw that I might miss my hotel checkout time (this was an excuse that I had actually considered a couple of hours before). I suppose that I'd broken my promise to the Marriott front desk; I hadn't run as fast as I could. But at least I was doing better than the guy over there puking his guts out while a cop stood over him and waited for EMTs to show up. That guy was definitely going to miss his checkout deadline. So when I called the hotel to let them know I was on my way, and they threatened me to be out by 12:30 "or else," I thought, You don't know how lucky you are to have a conscientious and responsible rule-breaker like me staying in room 406...

I put in a request for an Uber and... my phone switched off. I have that battery bug that makes your phone commit seppuku if you have an emergency with less than 40% power, and if I try to revive it, it only works for about 10s before it dies again. I spent 10 desperate minutes on the verge of hysterics telling my phone, "I hate you, you stupid fucking thing!" and then "That was all a lie. I'm so sorry, I love you! I love you! Please come back!"

Let me take a moment to thank Uber for the tremendous foresight to keep your ride request active even if your phone has committed honorable suicide, because after seeing my life flash before my eyes a nice retired woman named Cynthia came to pick me up. And the gods were really smiling on me, because Cynthia had been in a car accident in the 70's when she lost her sense of smell. So I sat in her warm front seat and emitted odors freely all the way across town as she told me her life story. I limped through the hotel lobby and up to my room at noon. Part of the reason that the bubonic plague spread so widely was because medieval Christians believed that anything that felt as good as a bath must be a sin. This was the kind of shower that would send a prudish 13th-century European straight to hell, and I honestly considered paying the fee and whatever else the hotel's "or else" entailed in order to stay in that shower past 12:30. It was torture pulling myself out of that bathroom. But  I'm a conscientious and responsible rule-breaking guest, and I was down at the desk at 12:26 checking out. I had even remembered to leave a wet, sweaty $10 tip (which had traveled the entire 26.2 miles in my bra) on the dresser next to the key. Yes, I am courteous guest indeed. Just ask Cynthia, she gave me 5 stars.