Extreme Efforts

Sometimes you can try too hard

“It’s amazing how quickly the pain dissipates after finishing a marathon. It just fades away like the end of a Nickelback song – the nightmare never happened.”

How often do runners say to themselves, “I wish I hadn’t run so fast”? It happened to me once. It was high school cross-country city finals. Back then I had the mentality that if I suffered enough, I could beat just about anyone. So I took off with the leaders from the gun and just hammered up and down the hills. The more it hurt, the more I pushed the pace. I was in second place and would do anything to keep it.

At a certain point, maybe three-quarters of the way in, I lost control of my bladder and peed into my little green shorts. The girls from my class still cheered for me and my pee stain as I chugged up the final hill and crossed the finish line, still in second. I immediately veered off to the side of the path and threw up. Yes, I was a distance runner trying to impress the girls in my football-dominated high school, covered in vomit and urine. Why did I run so fast?

It would be the last time I ever asked myself that question after finishing a race. After that it was always the opposite.

My first Boston Marathon I hit the wall right on cue at 32k and stepped into a dark world of pain. I coped by using a series of positive self-talk goals. It started with “You can do it – just run to the next block ” and eventually shortened it to “You can do it – just lift up your leg and put your foot forward.” Yet when I finished the race, a voice in my head still said, “You could have gone faster. You could have suffered more.” I heard this voice often.

It’s amazing how quickly the pain dissipates after finishing a marathon. It just fades away like the end of a Nickelback song – the nightmare never happened. And that’s when your mind starts replaying the race, finding retroactive gaps in effort. You’ll ask yourself why you didn’t keep in with the group of runners you were with at 25k, and scold yourself for falling off the pace.

But if you’ve put in your best effort, your during-themarathon mind will fire back, “Shut up, you idiot. That was as fast as I could go and you know it. And anyways, do you want a pee stain in your finish photo?” From joggling to racing with a baby stroller, Michal Kapral’s column in each issue covers every kind of running.