Three weeks from Sunday is the 50th New York City Marathon. As you may have heard, I am running it this year as part of a team whose efforts benefit a simply terrific Monmouth County, New Jersey-based not-for-profit Stomp the Monster. Stomp the Monster provides critically-needed financial assistance and emotional support to cancer patients and their families. They are great people doing great work. Me? I am a decidedly mediocre person doing an indisputably small thing in support of their effort. If you are able to help me help them and are inclined to help, then please go here to do so.
I was unaware until just this week that Samuel Beckett is apparently my marathon spirit animal.
No six words more succinctly capture my experience as a marathon runner. My stated goal for this - my final New York City Marathon - is to run it in five hours or less. This training cycle has produced decidedly inconsistent results for me on my long runs. Three Saturdays ago, I felt so good and ran so well that I almost broke my own rule and ran a longer-than-scheduled long run. Perhaps I should have. Two Sundays ago I ran terribly. It was a knife fight from start to finish and by run's end, I seriously was questioning just why the hell I thought I could do this one last time. Then, last Saturday, I slogged my way through my longest training run to date. While it was far from effortless, over the course of eighteen miles I was approximately one minute per mile faster than I shall need to be on race day to hit my goal.
Will I attain it? Truthfully, I have no idea. I know simply that while I cannot predict the result, I can control the effort.
As long as I control the effort, then I shall fail as well as I am capable of failing.
That shall be enough. It shall have to be.
-AK
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