I’m on with London Comedy Improv tonight, and for the first time in months, I’m brimming with energy; I might even be funny. With just over two weeks to the NYC marathon, I’m now in that luxurious phase known as the “taper”. I’m hardly running at all! I’m getting some days off! When I do run, it’s only 5 miles, with the longest run left to do a paltry 12!! Ahahahahahaha!!! Am I hysterical? Yes. Slap me. Thanks.
I’d heard that once you finish your first marathon, and the goal and the training and the pain are behind you, you’re in danger of suffering from post-marathon depression. “Hah!” I thought. “Not me.” I’ve cleverly (I thought) chosen to do my first marathon in New York. Once I’m done, where’s the anti-climax? I’ll be in Manhattan. Everyone dances in the streets and eats bagels and wears fancy clothes and sings all the time there. I’ve bought a stationary bike so that, once home, I can spin out the stiff muscles without leaving the house. It’ll soon be Christmas and I have a wedding to plan. Sorted.
Or so I thought. Already the taper is hard. The easiness is hard. I’d gotten used to feeling like a kind of (slow, shoddy) athlete. I may have been plodding through the longs runs, limping the last bits, but I still had the theme from Rocky in my head. Scary as it is to psych yourself up to a 20-mile training run on your own, with no-one cheering or clapping apart from the loony cider drinker on the Parklands Walk, it’s exhilerating too. Even the bits where you’re having to simply pick up one foot and plop the other down, hoping that that cycle will repeat. Even the bits where you talk about yourself in the 3rd person: “She’s slowing. She’s not going to be able to finish, I knew it! Oh, she heard us, she’s speeding up. She always was contrary.” (Aloud.) Even the falling in home, nauseous and blistered and shaky, with knees you’re not quite sure will ever work the way they’re supposed to again. Exhilerating.
For the next two weeks, my job is to make sure that all of that is behind me. No more long runs. No more pain – everything has to be healed and ready to go by marathon day. No more…looking forward to the marathon.
The time is upon me, and thanks to people’s astonishing generosity, I’ve reached 50% of my £5,000 fundraising target for the Alzheimer’s Society. You can sponsor me here if you’d like to support an amazing cause and inch me closer to that magic number. Even 50p would help. And if you know anyone suffering from dementia or caring for someone who is, please let them know about my page and spread the word. Please. You’d make a tired, stiff runner who’s soon to be suffering from withdrawal very happy.
