<4 Emilie and her friend Suzanne find joy in the early miles of the marathon.

legitimately exhausted and my joints truly starting to ache, my mind had already done permanent damage. Ihad been too hard on myself, and I had very little mental stamina left to get me over those last miles. I began a series of sad little bargains with myself: just run to that next tree. Just run to that next acorn. And so it went: mental fatigue, physical pain, and acorn counting. I eventually made it to mile 25, and I could fee/ the end, so I ran. Crossing that finish line meant that I had covered the physical distance, but more important, it meant that those voices inmy head would finally shut up. I had utterly failed at my most important goal for this race. I cried my way to the postrace food tent and slumped into a chair in the corner.

The mind games of the marathon were not over yet. My postrace misery, once Ihad rehydrated, wiped the salt crystals off of my face, and eaten some ice cream, quickly shifted into relief and, miraculously, to joy. Only a few hours after I was sobbing at the finish line, the memories of my suffering were already fading away. My legs were stiff and tender to the touch. I was sticky with sweat, I had blisters between my toes, and my hair was a wreck. And yet, with my finisher’s medal around my neck, I could feel the worst moments being deleted from my mind. I said aloud: “It’s happening: I’m starting to feel like that was all actually a lot of fun after all.” What is that all about?

Edmund Hillary said about climbing Mount Everest: “It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” And so it was for me during the marathon. I remember it as “fun” because I accomplished it. I finished it, and for almost all of the marathon, I thought I would not. My success is not covering 26.2 miles, which, if you think about it, is a fairly random measure of fitness or endurance. If the marathon were only 22 miles, or if it were 35.7 miles, would I feel any differently about it?

If [had gotten to what I thought was the end of the marathon, and the crowds yelled at me that I had another mile to go, wouldn’t I have kept running? I admit that my body was not as close to collapse as I had told myself it was. It was my brain that was screaming: “Enough! Enough!” But if I absolutely had to keep running, say, in order to save my own life or the lives of my children, I know that I could have continued on.

After all, it’s only a marathon

Thinking back on my experiences in Vermont, I’m still frustrated that I let my mind have such power over my body, which was perfectly well trained to run the distance without excessive suffering, or worse, without walking breaks. I have had many more long runs since then to think about my experience, and this is what I’ve come to: it is a privilege to train for and run a marathon. How lucky am I that the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do is to run a marathon? I’ve never been pushed to my physical limits by necessity, never experienced real danger, never had to escape a war zone with my children on my back or been forced to sleep outside in freezing temperatures. If we had to walk everywhere, lug water buckets from the river, or forage for our own food, we would probably not then drive to the gym in the evenings and hop on a treadmill on which we run and run and run but go nowhere.