4/12–13
It’s time to shake off the rust. After a five month hiatus from racing that last saw me hit the asphalt for the New York City Marathon back in November I will once again be hitting the streets. And what better way to do so than a trip to Europe?
Over the next ten days I will be tackling Paris and London, racing two world-class marathons in seven days.
Getting to Paris proved less than exciting, however. My travel day began in Bloomington, sending me to Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport via Atlanta and everything began smoothly. Bloomington to Atlanta went off without a hitch. The international terminal in Atlanta is quite nice, and I had just enough time there to eat a couple of uninspired pork tacos and buy a copy of The New Yorker before I had to hop on my Air France flight across the ocean. I even managed to fall asleep on the plane before we took off.
And then I woke up, 30 minutes later, to find that the plane was very much not in the air, but on the ground, still at the gate. After a series of announcements in French they finally let one loose in English relaying that something was wrong and they had to do a series of tests while at the gate. It will take 30 minutes, they said.
Two hours later, just as I was browsing through the Delta app on my phone and contemplating trying to get a standby spot on the 11 p.m. flight from Atlanta to Paris, the plane I was sitting on finally pulled out of the gate, to go and sit on the runway, waiting another 20 minutes for our turn to take off.
I honestly didn’t mind the waiting. I had a good book, and once we were up in the air I had a decent selection of movies to entertain me (Descendants followed by Sherlock Holmes 2, which I only made it through half, and capped off by Groundhog Day). The only downside of the flight was how little I managed to sleep.
There was really minimal excitement … until I got to Paris.
I had finally made it through customs and to baggage claim after waiting for numerous airport employees to make endless phone calls discussing how a person in a wheelchair was to get through the airport (they don’t have much faith in the abilities of wheelchair users in Paris). I finally blew off the last person that was assigned to assist me and helped myself through to baggage claim.
After rounding up my bag and my racing chair I turned to leave the airport just in time to see a security guard roping off the only exit. Perplexed, I went to ask if there was another exit I should use.
“The exit is closed,” the guard calmly explained, crossing his arms to form an “x.”
I had never heard of exits closing before, but I was too tired to bother and decided it was better to let everyone else in the baggage area complain instead of me. I couldn’t leave the airport without my friend and teammate that I was meeting there anyway, and after waiting for about 40 minutes I saw my friend’s bag begin the slow cycle of another baggage carousel.
The plan all along was for me to meet Amanda McGrory, international marathoning superstar and another product of the vaunted University of Illinois wheelchair racing program, in Paris where the race had organized transportation for the two of us to get to our hotel.
Though she also lives in Champaign, Amanda had been in New York doing promotional work for her new sponsor, Citibank, and had had some travel issues of her own, causing her to miss her original flight and rebook on the redeye.
After finally figuring out why the exits were closed I went to hunt down Amanda and explain the situation.
“The exits are closed.”
“Why?”
“Somebody left a bag outside and after repeated requests to have the owner of the bag come claim it, it is still there. Security is freaking out.”
“Bomb scare, eh?”
“Yup.”
Alas, some time later we finally made it out of the airport and into a van, which promptly got stuck in traffic allowing us to nap on the way to the hotel.
After landing at 9 a.m. that morning, I got to my hotel at 2 p.m. The rest of the day was spent with a leisurely lunch (some amazing couscous and chicken) and a short walk around our hotel on the western edge of Paris.
The travel is over and the fun is about to begin.
4/14
I always used to hate the day before a race. I would spend the whole day wasting energy trying to convince everyone that it was just another normal day, and that the next day’s race was just another race, while beneath my paper-thin facade I was a tangled web of nerves.
This only ever happened before road races, never before track meets. The track presents a homogenous environment. Sure the surface of every track is different and the wind is always a factor, but it is flat and the distances raced on a track are short.
The road is a different beast, especially when you are talking marathons. The road surfaces and the topography of the course are huge factors. Is the course flat or hilly? Where are the hills in the course? Are there killer downhills where the heavy guys will get away from me? All of these are major issues even before you get down to the basic lingering questions that kill athletes when they begin to ponder them, such as have I been doing the right training? Can I hold a fast enough pace for 26 fucking miles (even trained marathoners think 26 miles is long, grueling, and uncomfortable)? And the worst of the bunch: I wonder how everyone else is pushing? These questions are the death of athletes and they are the questions that used to haunt my thoughts the day before the race like ghastly faces in candlelit portraits.
Now, however, I’m about to head off to bed with a marathon looming at day break and I feel fine, care-free, and tired. It is amazing how much different you feel when you’ve tamed the fear of failing. That is what those dreadful pre-race thoughts of yesteryear add up to: a fear of failing.
Well shit, after bombing enough races, that fear goes right out the window. Once you run enough “worst race of your life” races and wake up the next morning and the sun is still shining and there are no TV reporters relaying panicked references about giant meteors heading directly for earth, you begin to realize that all of your fears, worries, and nerves are worthless. And a funny thing happens once you realize the futility of worrying about outcomes; your outcomes begin improving. Fancy that, eh?
Thus, I had a wonderful day today. After working hard and gutting out workout after workout for the past five months, I got to take it easy today. I went on a beautiful training run in a massive park on the western side of Paris. An eight-mile jaunt in which the main focus was to loosen tight muscles, get the blood flowing and not go too fast. I was repeatedly passed by packs of cyclists in whose drafts I long to accelerate and hop in and cruise with, but I restrained myself (a draft is the slipstream that a person causes in the air when s/he is moving in front of you). Neither did I worry about how fast any of my competitors, who were out there with me, were going. I couldn’t care less. It was a warm pleasant morning in Paris and my main goal was to focus on how good it felt to be alive and moving.
That attitude did not change throughout the rest of the day. I enjoyed a leisurely lunch, an afternoon nap, and a pasta dinner. I have fresh tires on my wheels, I’ve tightened everything on my chair, put on my race numbers and mixed the fluids I will suck down during the race. If tomorrow I find myself sitting at this computer pounding the keys and spitting fire, it will not be because of what I did today. Up to this point I have done everything that I have needed to do.
I am excited for tomorrow to come.
4/15
One day I will quit being a marathoner and take up music festivals. There was more than one moment during the race today that I thought to myself, “My, I wish I was wasted at Coachella,” but alas, I was huffing and puffing through the streets of Paris.
Let me back up. Out of context that last paragraph sounds bad. I had a rough race today, however. After a measly three hours of sleep last night and a freezing cold 30 minute wait to use a self-cleaning toilet on the sidewalk, I hopped into my racing chair with high hopes for a terrific race. That was before the Champs Elysees quickly chewed me up and spat me out.
The race began on the most famous of Parisian Avenues, a sea of cobblestones to our front and the the powerful figure of the Arc de Triumph at our back. The adrenaline coursed through my veins as the MC for the morning counted down to the start.
“Dix, neuf, huit, sept, six, sanc, quatre, trois, deu, un…. Allez! Allez! Allez!”
The cobblestones were jarring right from the beginning, especially when a camera man 50 meters from the start line refused to step out of the way causing me and the racer next to me, a Swiss stud named Heinz Frei, to quickly slow down and dart to our right to avoid hitting this nuisance. And so began my problems.
After having to make that early adjustment, I decided to hop in Heinz’s draft, cruise around the slow pokes we were stuck behind and hop in behind the leaders. They weren’t moving very fast, and riding a sea of adrenaline, it was easy for me to put in a short burst to make up the short gap. Unfortunately, however, as soon as I pulled to the outside and began my acceleration I started hearing the one sound that causes the air to flee my lungs, the blood to drain from my limbs, and a numbness to encompass my body, “hissssssssssssssssssss!”
Air rapidly escaping my left tire. As quickly as my day began, it ended. The wonderful road that serves champagne to victorious cyclists, Lance’s sacred stomping ground, chewed me up and spat me out a mere 400m (.25 miles) from the start of a 26.2 mile race.
With frozen fingers and shaking hands I desperately ripped my spare tire and CO2 off my chair, clawed the deflated tire off my rim and began trying to wrench on my spare. It is never easy to change a tire in the middle of a race. When it happens late in a race you are trying to eek out fine actions out of tired limbs that have been suddenly halted for the repeated circular motion you had been putting them through for endless miles. Early in a race you battle the adrenaline surge that accompanies the beginning of any tough endeavor. Your hands are as useless as a surgeon who just slammed a quadruple espresso at the end of an eight-hour shift (scary, eh?).
Wrestling to get a fresh tire on my rim, I kept ripping it up and over the rim (as opposed to landing it in the well or the rim where it belongs), immensely slowing things down. It took me approximately five minutes to finally get things in order, straightening and inflating a new tire, accidentally ripping off my Garmin bike computer, and tossing my now useless computer and empty CO2 to my wonderful cyclist companion Philipe (at most marathons, the wheelchair field is assigned a crew of cyclists to ride along with them, darting ahead to make sure roads of clear of spectators who are unaware of the speeds with which the wheelchair athletes are moving through the streets).
My race was forced to begin again. My adrenaline was sapped after having watched every racer in the field pass me as I lay dying in the center of the road. Slowly I began the long journey to the finish, careful not to take off too hard and seizing up my now ice-cold muscles. My cyclist Philipe and me, all by ourselves.
Surprisingly my psyche was still in good form. With years of experience in the equipment failure business I have learned that the only way to effectively handle such misfortune, and have anything positive to take from the race, is to quickly change your mindset from winning, to getting a solid, race-pace training run in.
With that I settled into a nice hard pace, blocking out all discouraging thoughts about how the race should have been going and focusing on what I needed to do to go fast. I quickly began picking off the slower racers in the field, surpassing them as if they were standing still.
I caught the women’s pack, led by my teammate and friend Amanda McGrory about six miles into the race. Picked off another pack of racers a couple miles after that. Gradually I picked off the majority of the field, pushing around small packs of racers, letting them tuck into my draft for as long as they could hold on, and then moving on to the next pack. It was a long and lonely journey, aided immensely by Philipe, occasionally shouting in heavily accented English to tell me how fast I was going and how far behind the next pack of racers I was.
Unfortunately, I was only able to pick my way up to seventh place. The lead pack, a group of five of the top racers in the world working together, was impossible for me to reel in on my own, and the one straggler, the sixth place racer from Spain, wasn’t about to give up the immense head start I gave him.
I also began to get tired. By mile 16 I was no longer able to ignore the pain in my arms. The iconic image of the Eiffel Tower, leering down on me from the opposite bank of the Seine was only enough to briefly distract me before the prodding of my muscles begging my brain for sanctuary sucked me back to reality.
Philipe shouted words of encouragement, but I could do little more than smile. The final ten miles were either into a headwind or up slight, but annoying, inclines. After a lonely trek, with nary a soul to draft, I could do little more than drum a rhythm in my head and force my arms to keep the beat.
After the race I slurped down watery hot chocolate as I forced myself to smile through conversations with the racers in front, the ones who I felt I should have been battling with at the finish line.
On the bright side, Amanda defended her 2011 Paris Marathon title by repeating as champion, edging out wonderful Swiss racer Sandra Graf in a hard-fought sprint finish. Just another day for the fastest female marathoner in the world.
Que serra, serra. As Heinz’s girlfriend consolingly told me, “At least you got a good training in before London (Marathon). And what better place to train than the streets of Paris?”
She is right. Next Sunday is a new race and a new chance.
The remainder of the day, however, was an orgy of food and slumber. After a leisurely lunch, we tucked into a giant Kinder Surprise egg that Amanda and I had excitedly found yesterday. Kinder Surprise are creamy milk chocolate Kinder eggs (Kinder is part of the Italian Ferrero company), lined with white chocolate. Inside each egg is a little toy. Yesterday, however, we found giant 150 gram Kinder eggs left over from Easter, and nothing makes up for a bad race more than a giant chocolate egg (or beer, but one I had in my room and the other was way too much of a pain to go out for).
After the egg and a lengthy slumber I felt like a new man. Tomorrow is a day out of the racing chair during which I will spend wandering the streets of downtown Paris, and then it is off to London.