(And what | learned from it.)

close to downtown. Step out of the terminal, turn left, and start walking. Half a mile later, the sidewalk hits the waterfront. From there you can walk all the way to the convention center in less than an hour.

The first time I walked in, it was an adventure. Since then, it’s been a statement. Hello, San Diego. This is who I am. Take it or leave it.

So it was that on a Friday afternoon, I was pulling my carry-on along the bay, turning down offers from pedicabs as the sun glinted off the harbor. I didn’t need a ride. I was a marathoner: too deep into my taper for serious running but not in need of a cab, pedi- or otherwise. Whatever marathons are about, in fact, walking into town was definitely part of it. It was also calming. I was 36 hours from a 20-year dream. In two days, I was going to qualify for Boston.

Or die trying.

S AN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, May 30, 2003—The San Diego Airport is amazingly

Like picking your favorite child

How do you pick your most memorable marathon? In the 13 I’ve run, there are some I’d like to forget but few I wouldn’t call memorable.

Consider my first-ever, Dallas White Rock 1981. It was in early December, 11 days after I’d strained a hip flexor so badly I was barely able to carry out the Thanksgiving-dinner trash. I wasn’t able to run a step until two days before the race, but I went ahead and ran it. What did I learn? First, that it is possible to overtaper. From mile one, I couldn’t hit my target pace. I also learned that if the first step hurts, it won’t be any better at mile 26. After the race, I had to use my hands to lift the injured leg into the car. But I finished.

Then there was Detroit 1982. Despite unseasonable heat and humidity, I blew 39 minutes off my Dallas time, blasting by people in the last 10K so fast it was

© Holly Hight

hard to pick one to chase before I’d caught him. A family member joined me toward the end, only to be dragged to the second-fastest 10K of her life. “Go on! I’m holding you back!” she kept urging, but nobody else was within two minutes per mile of our pace.

Or there was the marathon IJ didn’t run. At least, not much of it. Not that I DNF’d: I walked the final 25.2 miles. If that sounds strange, it’s because it was an Ironman triathlon in which I came off the bike in 14th place, excited because I felt strong and everyone ahead of me was walking. I was smelling a win. Then Iran from the shaded transition zone into 104-degree Midwestern humidity. You could die, 1 thought. Literally. What did I learn there? That once you’ve walked a half-marathon, “run” is no longer in the repertoire, even if the temperature drops. But “quit” wasn’t, either. I remained 14th but finished last. Everyone else had dropped out.

And there was my lifetime PR, Dallas White Rock 1984. In a quest to break 3:00, I’d run up to 85 miles a week, with long runs as high as 23 miles. But race day served up a 25-mile-per-hour wind. Struggling around exposed lakeshore headlands felt like running through molasses, time inexorably dripping away.

Worse, I ran in 1984-vintage racing flats. By mile 20, I was sure I’d blistered the entire soles of both feet. Still, when the last miles led into a tree-sheltered residential neighborhood, I pushed hard, desperate to make up lost time. At the end, my feet weren’t blistered (though they were cherry red from toe to heel). And my time? I was so disgusted that the only thing I wrote in my log was “26.2 miles.” To this day, I’m not sure what my marathon PR actually is: “3:01-something” is the best I can say.

Even at the time, I knew I’d never break it. I’d have had to wear the shoes again. For some things, ignorance really is bliss.

A decision about shoes

SAN DIEGO, Saturday, May 31, 2003—The day before a marathon is never my most memorable. I went to the expo and picked up my packet, thought about the fact I had a whole day in which to exert myself as little as possible. Forget the mounting nerves; days like that are just plain boring. I walked (slowly) to Balboa Park and went to museums. Worried that I was spending too much time on my feet. Went back to my hotel and stared at my running shoes. I’d brought two pairs. One was an old friend, tried and true, but it had more miles. Was it past its prime?

Decisions made in the 24 hours before a race are almost always bad. “Almost” being the operative word. I planned to wear the older, tested shoes. But they looked beaten down. I put each pair on, walked around. Changed my mind a dozen times. Maybe I should have stayed in Balboa Park.

Eventually I decided to go with the newer pair. I wondered if it was a choice I’d regret. Decisions made in the last 24 hours are usually mistakes.

About Boston

It had been 19 years since that foot-slaying Dallas. In the interim, I’d not run another marathon.

For a while, the half had become my favorite distance. But as I aged, I became increasingly appreciative of the 10K. Even the 5K, which I’d once disdained as a sprint, changes as age makes it take ever more time.

But there was one thing I’d never gotten from the marathon, and it wasn’t just the elusive 3:00. I’d never qualified for Boston.

Back in my PR days, that took a 2:50, relaxing to 3:10 for men over 40. (Women under 40 needed a 3:20.) When I’d run the 3:01, I’d been 32, reasonably confident I could run 3:10 at age 40, even without murdering my feet. But an injury deflected me into other sports, and by the time I got back into running I was 45. Boston was one of many things that hadn’t happened and presumably wouldn’t.

Fast-forward to 2002. I’d just written the first of two running books with Alberto Salazar and had thought that in the second one it might be nice to include

a list of Boston Marathon qualifying times. And, lo and behold, they’d changed. With age 50 looming, I need only a 3:35.

I number-crunched that through the age-grading tables and was impressed: it was the equivalent of a 32-year-old’s 3:12:34. A 3:13:27, in fact, because Boston graciously truncated seconds, counting 3:35:59 as 3:35. That was within reach. Even without the killer shoes, I’d run two faster marathons. Better yet, it’s your age on race day that counts. Thanks to a late-in-the-year birthday, I could run my qualifier at age 48. Game on.

A tough break

The first setback came within weeks.

My favorite run is a trail to the top of a 1,000-foot hill, which my club does every Thursday. But it’s not uphill the whole way; there’s a 200-foot drop midway through. Normally, I charge the up and pussyfoot the down. But I wanted a PR, and the only way was by pushing the whole distance. So I did . . . stepped on a root… and broke my ankle. So much for running a Boston qualifier before my 49th birthday.

Luckily, if you’re going to break an ankle, I’d picked a good bone to break. Within weeks, I was hiking. Soon after, I was running.

Alberto gives me a lift

The next setback involved a woman (one of the risks of being a single male). She was faster than me—a 2:59 PR—but not impossibly so at shorter distances. “Would you like to join me… ?” she said, and I shouldn’t have but did.

The result was a pulled calf, five weeks before the race.

I struggled for a week and then turned myself over to Alberto. He started by telling me to dump the junk miles. From here out, only quality workouts mattered. Then he gave me heel lifts, cobbled from shoe inserts.

Heel lifts are good at relieving pressure on the calf, but they can transfer it to the knees. I live in Oregon, where even in May, I’d be lucky if the temperature for my last 20-miler would be above 55 degrees. If the knee hurt, it could be a long, cold walk back to my car.

Alberto had once told me about training for his 1996 victory in the Comrades Marathon (a 54-mile ultra). Wanting a soft surface, he’d put in a 35-miler on a treadmill. I’d seen the treadmill. It was in his basement, where there was nothing to look at but a tiny window and no entertainment but a radio.

If Alberto could do 35 on a treadmill, I decided, I could do 20.

It was only later that the significance of that statement sank in. Alberto wasn’t just another marathoner. This was Alberto Salazar, legendary victor of the famous

“Duel in the Sun” Boston Marathon against Dick Beardsley. Who was I to say that I could even come close to matching one of his toughest training runs?

The treadmill solution

Rather than running in my basement, I ran in a health club. And instead of radio, I watched TV—though on a Saturday morning, radio might have been better.

Alberto had lined up water bottles on a shelf so he could run his 35 miles nonstop. My health club had a problem with water bottles on treadmills, so I took a break every hour and hurried to a water fountain.

By the end, I’d lost six pounds and drawn a lot of attention. But amazingly, it hadn’t been all that bad. Some things you just do. It was only later I learned that I’d apparently set some kind of health-club record. When I did 16 the following week, it almost felt easy.

About the heat … and humidity

SAN DIEGO, Sunday, June 1, 2003—Alberto had given me one other piece of advice. “You know,” he said, referring to Rock ’n’ Roll, “that race can be hot.”

“No problem,” I’d said, thinking to that long-ago Detroit. “I do OK in heat.”

It wasn’t the most brilliant statement of my life.

Race day was typical San Diego June. Low clouds merging into thin fog. Sixty-one degrees. Walking from my hotel, it felt cool. It was only later that it crossed my mind that fog meant humidity.

I dropped my warm-ups at bag check and cycled through the toilet line, remembering the race plan. I needed a 3:35:59. That was only 8:14s. Everything in my training said I was faster; I’d done 20-milers in which I’d tried in vain to keep the pace slower than 8:10s. My marathon PR age-graded to 3:21, and I’d been running age-graded PRs at shorter distances. Realistically, 3:25 to 3:30 was a good target. Boston, with minutes to spare.

A 350-foot net descent made Rock ’n’ Roll a fast course, but in the first 10 miles, only one mile, the second, was flat. Mile one climbed a slow, steady hill. Mile three began a series of big bounces: 350 feet down, 300 up, 300 down. What this meant was that mile two was my only chance to find the pace . . . a pace that would translate into the correct effort level through the hills.

Mile one was the typical mob scene. Surge. Slow down. Dodge people who had no business being in the front corrals. Amazingly, I hit 7:59. Too fast.

But now [had running room, and even easing up the effort, I wound up faster. To my horror, my watch read 7:41. Then I was starting the downgrade and the next split was 7:38. Again I tried to back off, but my body was having none of it. The splits rolled by: 7:08, 7:18, 7:46, 7:55 (uphill now). My training said I could run this fast, and that’s what my body wanted to do.

At least the new shoes were proving a good choice. And the calf, while not pain free, wasn’t going to be a problem. The main concern, other than my body’s overwhelming refusal to listen to the race plan, was that miles seven through 11 were on a freeway. I’d thought that would be exciting, but it proved to be slanted concrete. Uphill wasn’t too bad, but the moment I started down, all I wanted was a better surface.

Then we were back on an access road, my body still clicking along at 7:30s and 7:40s. As the course flattened, I got the 13.1 split: 1:39:42. But the sun was starting to work on the fog. Cool and clammy at the start, but 100 percent humidity as the haze thinned. The day was en route to turning into a sauna.

One of the other things Alberto had taught me was the value of gels. During my other memorable marathons, they’d either not yet been invented or I’d never heard of them. This time, I was wearing a triathlon race belt to which I’d stapled gel packets, being careful not to puncture them into gooey messes. Alberto had suggested one gel every half hour, which for my target pace had meant seven. They felt surprisingly heavy, even though my stapling had stopped them from flapping, which they’d annoyingly done on training runs.

I’d taken one gel at the start, another somewhere around mile four. The plan was one every four miles, but by mile 12, my stomach was feeling gelled out. I would eventually finish with two or three leftover packets.

Meanwhile, the parade of fast miles continued: 7:27, 7:31, 7:38. Until mile 16.

The marathon has never been my best distance. When I was younger, my shortrace times consistently predicted marathons eight to 10 minutes faster than what I’d then be able to do. Partly, this was due to a body that simply wouldn’t handle high mileage for more than a few weeks. But I was also a cramper. South African exercise physiologist Tim Noakes, author of Lore of Running, has subsequently told me a certain percentage of runners, particularly men, have this problem. He has theories as to what causes it (the rote suggestions about needing to eat bananas and keep hydrated not being among them) but admits uncertainty. “Give me a few million dollars, and I could probably figure out,” he said. “But it’s hard to persuade a grant agency that it’s worth that much to find out why a few people cramp up after running for several hours, while others don’t.”

In other words, my problem was a mystery. But it was also real. In my youth, it usually hit somewhere around miles 21 to 23, starting in the forearms and spreading to the hamstrings, strongly enough to make me lurch when a muscle unexpectedly contracted. But I’d run PRs through it. Negative splitted, in fact.

This time, the first spasm hit my arm a little after mile 16.

I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened. After all, arm cramps aren’t the end of the world. But by mile 20, I was heading, crampwise, for totally new territory.

There is nothing like hitting mile 20 feeling like you’ve run 26.2. I stopped and walked through an aid station—something I’d never done before, except in

Tronman triathlons. Maybe a gel and a good drink would help.

They didn’t. Goodbye 7:30s. Hello… ? My log says 8:35, 7:46, 9:18. My memory is a blank. All I knew was that I was still running. Still heading for Boston. But no longer confident of getting there.

Mile 21 came and went, then mile 22. I simply could not run the rest of the race. I wasn’t sure I could run another minute.

Luckily, [had a lot of minutes in the bank. Icould lose 10 and still win a trip back East. Once upon a time, I’d been a 3:01 marathoner. Surely I could run 4.2 miles in 45 1/2 minutes.

Major-league math problems

But I couldn’t run. The cramps were near constant now, attacking calves, forearms, neck, hamstrings. What would happen if I tried to push through? [had a vision of a full-body charley horse: lying by the side of the road as my trip to Boston ticked into oblivion. I staggered, lurched . .and decided to walk again.

Ran.

Staggered.

Lurched.

Walked.

© Holly Hight

I tried to find a rhythm. Runa hundred steps. Walk out the minute. Run another hundred and again walk out the minute. Mile 23 rolled by, a 9:05. I could now make it by running . . . what? 11:15s? I couldn’t do the math.

Mile 24, still below 10:00, even though sometimes I had to break to a walk before the one-hundredth step. I could now make it at 11:40s. But that was still faster than I could walk, especially in my present condition. I had to keep running.

At mile 26, I wanted to break the pattern and run all the way in. I tried.

Cramped.

Lurched.

“You can do it!” people yelled. “You’re almost there!” Only I couldn’t, and from my point of view, I wasn’t. The full-body charley horse still threatened. It would be silly to collapse here.

I walked.

I did it again at mile 26.1. And nearly again, just before the finish. Until finally, I was across: 3:31:52. Not far from what I’d been targeting but run the hard way. But I was in Boston, with more than four minutes to spare.

Not that I was ready to celebrate. Years later, I was at the finish when someone I coached qualified for the Olympic Trials. I’m not sure she was off the timing mat before she was bouncing with delight, leaping at me with an exuberance that nearly knocked me off my feet.

I didn’t have a coach at the finish, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I collected three bottles of water, looked around, and decided that now that I was no longer running, the veiled sun peeking through the leftover fog seemed nice. I lay down in the warmth, set my water bottles beside me, and waited for friends to find me. Or not. At the moment, I didn’t care.

Just let me lie in peace

By the time I did care, I discovered that getting up posed its own problem. Push with my arms and they stared to charley-horse. Move my legs and they cramped. And if I tried to sit up, or even flinched in a manner that might indicate the tiniest desire to do so, my abs charley-horsed.

I lay there for an indeterminate period, until the heat started to mount. Then, somehow, I made it to my feet and walked, if that’s the right word, to a patch of grassy shade, where I risked future cramps by lying down again. Another indeterminate time later, I was joined by two friends, one of whom had also qualified for Boston, with a much more spryly run 3:08. The other had run a first marathon, somewhere in the 4:30 range. As far as I was concerned at the moment, she could have taken 14:30: all I wanted was to stay where I was. But with a bit of cajoling, they got me to my feet and heading for their car, an interminable mile away.

That night, at the rock concert that helps give the marathon its name, I balked at the stairs in the amphitheater. Even with a handicap ramp, the descent into the concert bowl was all my quads could handle. My friends thought it was funny, but I was too busy trying to figure out how to go down sideways to care.

Nevertheless, the following morning, I loaded up my wheeled suitcase and walked .. . slowly . . . to the airport. This is who I am, San Diego. And no, I don’t need a pedicab. Or at least, 1 won’t take one. But a week later, when I tried to rise from a kneeling position, I still screamed from the pain in my quads. By this

time, though, it had finally hit me: I was going to Boston. My quads had 9 1/2 months to recover.

I’d also told Alberto about my race, admitting I’d started faster than planned.

His response surprised me. “‘Nice job. Some of the most satisfying races are those that don’t go according to plan but in which you persevere, anyway.”

He also added that I was tough.

Tough wasn’t part of my self-image. Never had been. I’d gone to high school in a town where football was king, basketball a close second. But my first driver’s license showed me as 5 feet 1, 103 pounds. Not to mention that I had no desire to wreck a knee in PE-class blocking drills. They had a word for people like me, and it wasn’t “tough.”

I didn’t even take up running until I was in grad school, and in my first race, my main goal was not to be last. As for marathons? Well, running them is simply what marathoners do. Heat, head winds, blistered feet? They’re all part of the game. What fascinated me was the question of what I could and couldn’t do. That had never before marked me as tough. It just made me . . . curious.

And what | learned from it

I’d like to say I learned about the importance of pacing, especially in the first miles. But I already knew that. The fact of the matter is that I was decently trained and the pace I was running wasn’t necessarily inappropriate.

What I learned was a lot more specific.

1. You haven’t lived until you’ve charley-horsed your abs.

2. The full-body charley horse is possible. Noakes says it happens in Comrades.

3. If I had it to do over, I’d try salt tabs. But I wouldn’t be all that optimistic. When I was young, the same type of cramps could hit my forearms on long canoe paddles—even in cold weather when I couldn’t possibly be dehydrated. It seems to be what my muscles do when taxed beyond a certain point.

4. Alberto Salazar thinks I’m tough. Talk about a single thing that changes your self-image . . . which, I guess, is how it is with marathons in general: in the course of only a few hours, they can redefine who you are. It only took me 22 years to realize it. ps