Ten years ago today, I ran the New York City Marathon. I’d
almost forgotten I’d run it, even though I have a poster from the marathon
hanging in my study. Then I started reading about Hurricane Sandy and how it
devastated New York. I read about plans to hold the marathon, then read about
plans to cancel it and then realized I was having trouble remembering about my
own NYC race.
So I started going through drawers and closets and plastic
bags full of running gear. I found the short sleeved t-shirt that all runners
received as part of our entry fee. It was rolled up in a ball at the bottom of
a drawer full of old race shirts. I found my finisher ribbon in a box in the
spare room closet. I found a photo taken near the start on Staten Island.
In the background is the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. To the
right is a long line of portable toilets. In the foreground are four of us: Me,
Wendy, Pam, and another runner, a young woman with dark eyes and straight caramel
hair. Linda? Tammy? Her name escapes me now but it was when I saw her face that
I began to remember.
I ran my first marathon, the Boston Marathon, in 2001. My
second was Boston 2002. Both times, I ran with the American Liver Foundation’s
Run for Research charity team. The RFR is the second largest Boston Athletic
Association charity running team, and it was through that great organization
that I met Wendy, Pam and many other kind marathoners.
That second Boston was a pretty tough one. Time-wise, it was
one of my best runs. But there was a lot going on at home. For most of my
training, my grandmother was dying. She and I were very close.
“You are like my daughter,” she would say.
“You could be my mother,” I would say.
I became my daughters’ one and only parent when the girls
were quite young. My grandmother would babysit two or three nights a week while
I worked. I would take her grocery shopping once a week and bring her to her
doctor’s appointments. The three of us ate dinner at her house every Sunday.
She was seventy-five when my first child was born. She was
ninety-one when she died. One Saturday in January 2002, after a long run in
Boston, I went to her apartment and found she had collapsed. I called 911. She
went into the hospital that night, then to a rehab facility and then to a
nursing home. She never went back to her apartment.
During the next four
months, I trained for the Boston Marathon. I tried to be a good mom to my kids,
who were then in high school and middle school. I visited my grandmother as
often as I could.
During those months, I could not sit still. I could not
focus. I could not sleep. I slept with a notebook and a pen. I would wake up at
three in the morning and would write memories. I wrote poetry too. I am not a
poet. Among other things I found today, I found that notebook. It has a red
cover and a CVS logo. I’m glad I kept it and glad I wrote in it. The memories
make me smile. The poems make me cringe, then smile.
I ran Boston that April with “Nana” written in black magic
marker on the front of my orange RFR singlet. One guy on the running team read
it and said, “You’re supposed to put your name on the front and the name of the
person you’re running for on the back. “ I ignored him. I knew what I was
doing. I wanted to hear people call her
name while I ran.
They did. For 26.2 miles thousands of spectators screamed
“Go Nana!” It made me smile.
My grandmother kept
getting worse. She didn’t know us anymore. She stopped eating. Right after
Boston, I started training for my first triathlon. I was bouncy and fuzzy. I needed to be busy. My grandmother died five weeks after the marathon, on May
22. It was less sad than you’d think. She’d been leaving us for months. I was glad she wasn’t suffering any more. I
was able to sleep at night again.
In the weeks after my grandmother’s death, I signed up with
Wendy and Pam for the NYC marathon lottery and continued training for the
triathlon, which took place at the end of June. I found out I don’t care much
for triathlons. I like the running and the biking, but the open water swimming
stressed me out. Still, I got through my first one and signed up for a second
one in July. I thought maybe the second would be more fun. Plus, all three of
us had gotten accepted into the marathon. I needed to stay fit. Triathlon
training was a good way to establish a solid cardio base.
My second triathlon was on a Sunday in July. I did not love
that one either. The Wednesday after that, I was out on a brisk ten-mile run,
my head full of hopes of setting a new personal record at the NYC Marathon.
Seven miles into the run, pounding down a steep hill, I hurt my hamstring. I
had to cancel plans to run in the Falmouth Road Race that weekend. I rested a
bit and the weekend after that attempted to run the Beach to Beacon race in
Cape Elizabeth, Maine. I started limping three miles into that race, then
jogged and walked until I finished.
Many old ladies along the course urged me on: “Don’t give
up. You can do it!”
The first time I heard this, I stopped and tried to explain
to the woman that I knew I could do it, but I was taking it easy because I was
injured. But she wasn’t listening. She was already turned away from me,
cheering on someone else.
I met the caramel-haired young woman from the NYC start
-- Linda maybe? -- a few days later, at
the physical therapist’s office in Boston. The physical therapist was this
great guy I’d met the previous year, when I got injured while training for
Boston. He worked with all the injured RFR runners and helped out many other
charity runners too.
I learned that Linda was also running New York and was also
injured. I think she had a problem with her iliotibial band. For the next
twelve weeks, from August to the end of October, Linda and I would spend hours
talking while we subjected our injured bodies to e-stim, deep tissue massages,
and other physical therapy tortures.
The therapist told me that my chances of running New York were
iffy. Turns out I had a tear in my hamstring. On his advice, I did most of my
training on an elliptical and ran just once a week, indoors on a treadmill. Linda
and I would compare training notes every Friday night. We’d get to the
therapist’s office around seven or so, and leave around 10. I learned no one in
her family was athletic. Neither was she, she said. I learned they all thought
she was nuts. I learned she was Portuguese and that she grew up near Central
Park and her family still lived near there.
I haven’t thought about this stuff in years. I’m pretty shocked I
remember it all so well.
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