This morning James scored a rare victory in our daily race to the coffee maker. I didn’t mind, in this instance, because the competition wasn’t even close, and by the time I came downstairs James and Heather were seated at the breakfast bar, steaming mugs and bowls before them, eyes glued to James’s laptop, and the Keurig was free.
“How are they doing?” I asked.
NAZ Elite had two representatives—Futsum and Martin Hehir (NAZ Elite’s lone remote member)—in today’s USA 10 Mile Championships, which were being hosted in Minneapolis and streamed live on usatf.tv.
“Just started,” James said.
Emerging from his bedroom, Matt silently assessed the situation and transferred the live stream from James’s small computer screen to his own giant TV monitor. I prepared my breakfast and joined the others on the sectional. Martin ended up eighth and Futsum tenth. The top six finishers were naturalized American citizens born in Kenya.
At eight o’clock I left the house, once again intentionally overdressed, and drove to Woody Mountain Road to meet up with Brauny and Craig for my final long run before the Chicago Marathon. Arriving first, I killed time by opening the internet browser on my phone and visiting the Twin Cities Marathon website to see how Michael Crouch was doing. Having run 2:21 previously, Michael was chasing the U.S. Olympic Trials qualifying standard of 2:19 on the same streets Futsum and Martin had just chased the Kenyan expats down.
His result, posted just as my teammates were rolling in, caused me to wince in empathetic pain, as when a football player’s knee bends in the wrong direction. Running the second half of the race six minutes slower than the first, he finished in 2:28:21, a dream time for most runners, but Michael isn’t most runners. I’d hit the wall in enough marathons to know how he must be feeling right about now—not only stunned and disappointed but also humbled, dreading his return to Flagstaff, where he’ll hear the same commiserative clichés from everyone he knows.
Having survived eight miles with Aaron and Craig a few days ago, I had hopes of hanging on with them for fourteen miles today, but I was kidding myself. Their pace felt wrong from the start, and after a quarter mile I made the prudent but bitter-tasting decision to back off and run alone. A fierce headwind pestered me nonstop on the way out, inflating my early mile splits and stoking my bitterness. By Mile 4 I had reversed my prior opinion of Woody Mountain Road, losing all appreciation for its bosky serenity and charming fauna, seeing nothing now but its rutted, sandy surface, where you’re always looking for a good place to plant your foot and never finding it.
A silver Jeep Patriot appeared in the distance, creeping toward me at about the speed of a marathon press truck before stopping some twenty feet away. Through the windshield I spied Big Dog at the wheel, his fiancé, Angela Gavelli (a massage therapist who worked on me once when Monica was unavailable), at his side. Normally I hate to interrupt a long run for anyone at any time, but this time I was more than happy to pause at Angie’s open window.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked.
“Abdi’s crushing a long run,” Eric said, shooting a thumb in the direction they’d come from.
Abdi Abdirahman is a Flagstaff institution. Self-nicknamed the Black Cactus, he has represented the U.S. in four Olympics and has free-beer-for-life privileges at Mother Road Brewery, a dispensation he is reputed to make full use of. Now forty years old, he’s currently training for the New York City Marathon.
“That makes one of us,” I grumbled.
Big Dog drove off and I ran on. Soon a dusky stick figure came around a bend up the road, chugging along like James Brown’s rhythm section. The Black Cactus in the flesh. We exchanged comradely head nods as we passed each other, and in that moment some kind of mystical energy transfer occurred (or so it seemed). In an instant I felt less victimized by my environment, more aware of the crisp fall weather and the sweeping vistas off to my right—of the gift of just being here, now, doing this.
After turning around at seven miles I felt the wind at my back, in more ways than one. With each passing mile I grew stronger and more relaxed, and as my strength rose my split times fell: 7:14, 7:04, 6:45. And then, all of a sudden, I knew that I was going to break 2:40 in Chicago. Didn’t think it—knew it.
It’s hard to explain. Something’s just different this time. On the several past occasions when I toed a marathon start line hoping to break 2:40, I was doing just that: hoping to break 2:40. My confidence, though real, was grasping to some degree; there was a drop or two (or three) of trying to believe mixed in with the actual believing. But the confidence I have now feels received rather than reached for. I’m not as young as I used to be nor even as fast as I used to be, nor can I say that I am any fitter now than I have been a few times previously. Yet I’ve never felt this damn good, this sure, a week before a marathon.
On the homestretch, I spied Craig in the distance, leaning against the hood of his car, apparently waiting for me. I’d been wondering what the hell had happened to my teammates, whom I should have met head-on at some point. The moment I stopped, Craig began to apologize for disappearing on me, explaining that he and Aaron had gotten fed up with the dust that was being kicked up by passing vehicles (another annoyance) and broken away from the road, turning what had begun as an out-and-back into a loop, and that’s why I hadn’t seen them.
“So, how’d it go for you?” he asked.
A superstitious instinct tried to muzzle me, reminding me that the real pros let their running do the talking—and for good reason. What happened to Michael Crouch today can happen to anyone. Why risk making a potential bad day on the race course even worse by talking big beforehand?
“Dude,” I said, “I’m so ready!”
After failing to cross paths with man-about-town Abdi Abdirahman even once during my first twelve weeks in Flagstaff, I’ve now seen him two days in a row. This time we met properly, his friend Diane Nukuri—a Burundian pro I’d encountered a couple of times previously when she dropped in on team runs—introducing us shortly after the two of them arrived together in Abdi’s black BMW M3 with tinted windows to join the NAZ Elite crew for an easy run at Walnut Canyon. Also present were Craig, Kellyn, James, Rochelle, and Steph, all of us (for once) intending to run the same distance.
I spent the better part of those eight miles in conversation with Kellyn, who’d had a bad weekend, failing a fitness test she took as part of her application for a firefighting job in Flagstaff. Passing it would have required that she complete a series of tasks that included shouldering a fire hose up several flights of stairs and dragging a 165-pound dummy (Kellyn herself weighs 110 pounds) thirty feet in less than three minutes. She missed the cutoff by twelve seconds.
“It’s embarrassing,” she seethed. “I hate knowing that by failing I confirmed some people’s expectations for female firefighters.”
“I get it,” I said. “It’s one thing to fail, another thing to fail in front of an audience. Heck, I worry about that for myself in Chicago. If I fall on my face, a lot of folks are going to know.”
When we finished, Kellyn, true to form, cleared out immediately, leaving the rest of us to waste a little time chitchatting before we got on with our respective days.
“I’m retired,” I heard Abdi say from his seat on the hood of his Beamer.
“What!” I said. “Are you serious?”
“He said ‘tired,’ not ‘retired,’ ” Diane clarified.
“I hate being tired when I run,” Abdi added tiredly.
“I hate being tired in general,” Rochelle said.
“Actually, I kind of like being tired at bedtime,” I chimed in.
“Me, too!” Rochelle amended, erupting in a childlike grin. “I like being tired at bedtime. Or when I have nothing to do.”
“Like a cat,” I said.
“Cats have the best life,” Diane said dreamily.
We all fell silent, thinking about how great it would be to be a cat.
In the afternoon, back at Matt’s place, a fog came over me, the same one that, eight days ago, overpowered my efforts at resistance (and caffeine) and all but forced me to experience the pro runner ritual of the afternoon nap. This time, though, I didn’t even try to fight it.
All ten Flagstaff-based members of NAZ Elite (and one middle-aged tagalong) met at Brauny’s house this morning for an easy run. Conscious of the approaching end of my fake pro runner experience, I took advantage of the opportunity by asking Jen Rosario to snap a group photo. Ben Bruce thought it would be funny if everyone flanked me at an awkward distance instead of crowding around with a couple of arms thrown chummily over my shoulders in the customary manner, but I insisted on playing it straight. Later, though, I kicked myself, realizing too late that there was no reason Jen couldn’t have captured both poses, serious and goofy.
“That was a book cover, by the way,” I said as we broke formation, eliciting a chorus of groans. “Hope your hair looked good.”
We set off toward the Urban Trail, the initial sorting of bodies leaving me next to Futsum this time. Having not seen him since his race on Sunday, I asked how his legs were feeling.
“Pretty good,” he said. “Not too beat-up. How about you? It’s race week, man! I’m excited for you and Aaron.”
“I’m bouncing off the walls,” I said. “I’ve never been more geeked up for a race.”
“You’re running for your mother, right?”
Shortly after her diagnosis, I posted a tweet dedicating my race to her. I hadn’t known Futsum paid attention to that sort of thing.
“I am indeed,” I affirmed.
“That’s good. But there are twenty-six miles in a marathon. I think you should also run one mile for each of us.”
Futsum made a lassoing motion with his finger to indicate whom he meant by “us,” which was everyone.
“I will,” I said, my voice thickening. “I want to make you guys proud.”
Ben Bruce—running for the first time in five days—was the only runner besides me who’d been assigned just four miles this morning, so the two of us peeled away from the group at two miles and began to make our way back toward our starting point. Along the way, we came to a neighborhood park that had a couple of portable toilets. Ben made a sour face and told me to go on without him, as he might be a while.
“When it rains, it pours,” he said cryptically.
Back at Aaron’s house, neither Nataki nor the Fun Mobile was anywhere to be seen. Puzzled, I stood around uselessly until Ben approached.
“Nataki’s at the park,” he said before I could ask.
“Oh, good,” I said. “I was a little worried.”
Ben looked like he had more to say. I waited.
“She was in the port-o-potty,” he confessed. “The door was unlocked. I walked in on her. Saw her butt.”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“We must never again speak of this,” I said.
Nor did Nataki and I speak of it during the drive back to Matt’s place. But the moment we walked through the front door, Matt called out to us, and I feared that news of the embarrassing incident had leaked. I needn’t have worried.
“Check this out!” he said as we entered the kitchen. “This” was a plastic water bottle that looked to me like a space-age dildo—its shape a hybrid of torpedo and hourglass, the shaft bright blue, the head vibrant green.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s the bottle I was telling you about that I found online. UPS just brought it. I might use it in Frankfurt.”
“It looks, um, phallic,” I said.
James and Heather giggled from their seats at the breakfast bar. Matt turned crimson.
“Oh no!” I teased. “I’ve ruined it. You’ll never be able to bring yourself to drink out of that thing now.”
“Actually, it makes me more inclined to use it,” Matt countered.
The room exploded in laughter.
“It appears Matt Llano is drinking from a giant penis,” Matt said in the voice of a television commentator.
I doubled over, laughing till my ribs hurt, stopping only when I remembered that tomorrow is my last full day in Flagstaff. My last day like this day.
Nataki and I came downstairs this morning to find Rochelle sitting at the kitchen table spooning oatmeal from a bowl she’d fixed at home and brought with her to Matt’s place. Matt himself sat at the breakfast bar with his full attention on his phone.
“Good morning,” Nataki said to him.
Receiving no response, Nataki shook him playfully by the shoulders and repeated her greeting.
“I said ‘Good morning!’ ” he protested. “Why do people always think I ignore them? Aaron gets mad at me about it all the time, and I’m like, ‘You need to check your ears. I always say hi back when you say hi.”
Nataki and I exchanged a look. More than once we have discussed our host’s habit of ignoring our greetings, something Nataki takes personally and I dismiss as unintentional.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Probably outside,” Matt said, still sounding aggrieved. “For some reason no one ever wants to come in.”
“Probably because you ignore them,” I said.
Matt squinched his eyes at me and said nothing more.
I went to the front door and poked my head out. Sure enough, the whole crew was assembled on the sidewalk: Craig, Kellyn, Steph, Too Slow, and Coach Ben. Minutes later, we were back on the road to Camp Verde, Ben’s Pilot leading the way with the Fun Mobile following, though by now I knew the way blindfolded. Docking at the usual location, we emerged from the vehicles with the energy of birdwatchers and quietly set about our individual ready-making routines. The morning air was comfortably cool, but I went ahead and stripped down to shorts and a singlet, having checked the forecast, which called for an afternoon high of 92.
“I thought you were in heat training,” Craig said as I stuffed my sweat-clothes inside the back hatch.
“I am,” I said. “It’s going to be ninety-two today.”
When the last of the stretching mats had been stashed away, we trotted off, hogging the otherwise empty road like a pack of stray cattle. Sensing eyes on me, I glanced left and saw Steph looking me up and down.
“I thought you were in heat training,” she said, having evidently missed my earlier exchange with Craig.
“Anyone else have something to say about my clothes?” I grumbled.
Coach Ben’s go-to final pre-marathon tune-up consists of two times three miles at goal pace. Pretty basic. Brauny, who likes to stay close to home before races, elected to do the workout on his own in Flagstaff, and everyone else had speed work today, so it was just Coach Ben and I who made the short jaunt to the start of the three-mile loop I’d become familiar with on my first trip to Camp Verde.
“Okay, no more screwing around,” Ben said. “I want to see 6:05s straight through. This isn’t for my benefit—it’s for yours.”
I signaled my understanding with a mute nod and Ben sent me off. Recalling what 5:55 pace felt like last week, I tried to feel my way to a speed that was precisely 1.3 percent lower, something my real-pro teammates seem able to do with ease. Ben pulled up alongside me as I hit the first cone in ninety-one seconds.
“So far, so good!” he called out.
He was beside me again when I passed the second cone at 3:02.
“It’s a miracle!” Ben shouted.
Finding me still locked in at 1,200 meters, Ben zoomed away to check on the others. I saw him again, though, at the two-mile cone (which sat conveniently at the foot of the spur the others were running 400s on), where I cruised by at 12:10 flat, and once more at the finish, where I stopped the clock at 18:15.
“Dude!” Ben said, shaking his head in wonder.
Having gained my coach’s confidence, I was allowed to run the second loop unsupervised and managed not to get too carried away, cranking out back-to-back-to-back 6:03s. I cooled down with Craig, who’d run a bunch of solo 800s to sharpen up for the half marathon he’s racing on Sunday in San Jose, and then waited with him for the other members of my carpool to finish up their workout. Not until we were all about to leave did I realize I might be seeing some of my teammates for the last time.
“Well, I guess this is goodbye,” I said.
“You’re ready,” Kellyn said, offering me an awkward one-armed hug that was actually more than I’d expected from her.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t start too fast,” Steph said, giving me the same half embrace.
Rochelle followed suit with a sideways hug of her own, and then our paths diverged, for who knows how long.
Shit was getting real, and it got even realer three hours later, when I sat down with Coach Ben at his dining room table for a pre-race planning session, something he does with each of his runners before important races.
“One thing I think you need to be prepared for is the hype and energy of being in that elite corral,” he began. “It’s going to be a little different than anything you’ve experienced, and there’s probably going to be a lot of adrenaline pumping through you.”
“I can only imagine,” I said.
“Try to soak in that energy and bottle it up for later. When the race begins, do what you’re prepared to do. Try to hit a six-oh-five. If you don’t, try to hit a six-oh-five. If you don’t, try to hit a six-oh-five.”
I laughed. Ben didn’t.
“Seriously, though. Don’t start compensating and trying to do the math in your head. Just keep trying to hit a six-oh-five every single mile.”
“Well, perhaps not every mile,” I countered.
“True. It’s a matter of being patient, waiting until at least thirty K and then making a decision: ‘Okay, do I think I can squeeze it down a bit? And if I do squeeze it down, can I go all the way to the finish?’ If the answer is ‘No,’ or ‘I’m not sure,’ then you just keep waiting until you are sure. The only thing I’m even remotely worried about with you is that you’ll misjudge that piece.”
“I won’t let you down, Coach,” I said.
“It’s not just about being patient and smart, though,” Ben continued. “At a certain point, it becomes a matter of guts. Let’s be honest: To do the best you possibly can in a marathon, you’re going to have to hurt at some point.”
“Trust me,” I said. “If I get to that point and I know I still have a chance to break two forty, I won’t care how much it hurts.”
In the evening, I hosted a send-off party for myself at The Cottage, where Matt, James, and Heather joined Nataki and me at a candlelit table in a cozy nook. When our drinks arrived, I raised my glass of seltzer and saluted James on making it to age thirty-six (his birthday was last Sunday) and then thanked Matt for putting up with my endless questions for three months. James tried to add a toast to my success in Chicago, but I shushed him.
“Today’s not about me,” I said magnanimously. Pause. “Every other day is about me!”
Nataki has had to endure a lot of running talk this summer, and she graciously absorbed one more round as we tucked into our appetizers.
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” I said to Matt, who was seated across from me. “Consider it my final Question of the Day.”
“I’m all ears,” Matt said, his fork probing in an exploratory fashion at the sweetbreads he’d gamely ordered on a tag-team dare from James and me.
“Would you invest as much as you do in running if you were as slow as me?”
Matt chewed longer than seemed necessary, either giving the delicacy a chance or buying time.
“Well, obviously I wouldn’t be running professionally if that were the case,” he said carefully. “But I do still think I would put a lot of time and energy into it, because I love it. In fact, that’s kind of what I did. As you know, I wasn’t the greatest runner in high school or college. Most of my peers who were running at my level then didn’t even try to turn pro.”
“It bothers me that so many runners feel they somehow don’t deserve to take the sport all the way and find out how good they can be,” I said. “I wish more folks with average talent would just go for it.”
Heather raised her right arm overhead like a star pupil who knows the answer. We all looked at her.
“You just described me to a T,” she said. “For a long time I was stuck at three forty-five to three forty in the marathon, and the whole reason I was stuck there was that I didn’t think I was good enough to work with a coach or do foam rolling every day or eat better. But, of course, the whole reason I wasn’t good enough was that I wasn’t doing these things! I was caught in a self-limiting mindset.”
“What changed it?” I asked.
“It was this guy,” Heather said, putting an arm around James’s shoulder and drawing him in for a smooch.
“Who knows?” I said. “If I don’t blow it on Sunday, maybe I can be that guy for a lot of runners. Minus the kissy part.”
I was the very last passenger to board American Airlines Flight 3025, having badly misjudged how long it would take to get through security at tiny Flagstaff Pulliam Airport. Head bowed to avoid contact with the low ceiling of the Phoenix-bound puddle jumper, I made my way toward the rear of the cabin in search of seat 17A. When I got to Row 17 I discovered that the aisle seat (B) was occupied by a frizzy-haired young man whose attention was on his phone. Sensing my presence, he looked up, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t Feyisa Lilesa, a professional runner from Ethiopia who generated international headlines last year by making a gesture of political protest as he crossed the finish line of the Olympic Marathon in second place, earning himself a silver medal and permanent exile from his homeland in a single moment. He now lives in Flagstaff on asylum.
Not one to waste such an opportunity, I introduced myself as soon as we were both buckled in.
“Are you going to Chicago?” Feyisa asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you running the marathon?”
“Yes.”
“Do you live in Flagstaff?”
“No, I’m from California, but I’ve spent the summer in Flagstaff training with Northern Arizona Elite.”
The name clearly meant nothing to Feyisa.
“White people all look the same to me,” he offered cheerfully. “I go to the supermarket and somebody says, ‘Hi, Feyisa,’ and I think, ‘Who are you?’ ”
I laughed, making a mental note to share the remark with Nataki (a reluctant flyer, who’s staying behind for this one) when we Facetimed later.
“Who did you work with?” Feyisa asked.
By “work” he meant “train,” I assumed, so I reiterated that I had trained with NAZ Elite and got the same blank look of nonrecognition.
“I worked with Abdi,” Feyisa said. “When you come back to Flagstaff you should work with us and you will improve.”
“I did improve!” I protested, feeling defensive of my team.
“What is your strategy?” Feyisa asked.
“Well, I’m an old man, not a real professional,” I hedged. “My goal is to run two thirty-nine, maybe two thirty-seven if the weather improves.”
Feyisa has run 2:04:52. He showed no further interest in my running.
The plane took off and our conversation moved on to the topics of Ethiopian food, culture, and politics, steered in this direction by my mention of Futsum, whose Eritrean people share a kind of solidarity with Feyisa’s people, the Oromo, based on their respective histories of persecution at the hands of Ethiopia’s dominant powers.
“Ethiopians are very generous,” Feyisa told me. “We will give you our last piece of bread if you are hungry. But if I go back there, the government will kill me.”
More interested in Feyisa the runner than in Feyisa the activist, I asked him how many times he had run Chicago. He showed me three fingers.
“But this time, no pacers,” he said. “When I ran two-oh-four in 2012, we had pacers. This time I must sleep.” Feyisa made a pillow of his hands and rested a cheek against it. “Sleep for twenty K, thirty K, then race.”
I got it: His strategy was to be patient. I told Feyisa that I, too, intended to sleep through the early part of the race.
The flight from Flagstaff to Phoenix takes just twenty-three minutes. We were already descending when I pulled up the race-day Chicago weather forecast on my phone (sunny, high of 78) and showed it to Feyisa.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“For me it’s no problem,” he said, curling his lip like an Italian mobster. “It’s the same for everyone. You have to be prepared.” He put a finger to his temple to indicate that he meant mentally prepared.
“You told me white people all look the same to you,” I said to my new friend as we deplaned. “Will you know me if I see you on the start line Sunday?”
“I will know you,” he said.
The odds of this happening got better when Feyisa and I boarded the same flight from Phoenix to Chicago, again sitting in the same row, and they got better still when we both joined a small group of VIPs awaiting limo rides in the baggage claim area at O’Hare, a group that also included Brauny, Sarah and Michael Crouch, Diego Estrada, and Diego’s coach, the legendary Joe Vigil. An inveterate raconteur, eighty-seven-year-old Joe was ten minutes into a twenty-minute story about how he finagled his way to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City when he was interrupted by the approach of a man dressed in a Chicago Marathon jacket. Seeming to know everyone else, our greeter quickly focused his attention on me.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
I spoke my name and then watched with a sinking heart as the official studied a sheet of paper pinned to the clipboard he held.
“I’m afraid you’re not on the list.”
“That’s unfortunate,” I said.
“Wait a minute. What’s your name again?”
I repeated it, silently praying that what I thought was coming was.
“I’m a huge fan!” the official said. “I’ve read many of your books. Don’t worry, I’ll get you to your hotel. But you must put me in your next book.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Sebastian,” he said, flashing a lanyard slung around his neck.
“Consider it done.”
Feeling my companions’ eyes on me, I turned around just in time to catch Sarah smirking at me.
“Here, miss, take this for me,” I said, handing her my suitcase.
After a bagel breakfast (whole wheat, of course) at Einstein Bros., a four-mile run on Lakeshore Drive, a round of rehab exercises, a token stint of computer time, and a sandwich-and-salad lunch at Panera, I walked a mile and a half from the Hotel Chicago, where I’m lodging at my own expense, to the Hilton on Michigan Avenue, where most of the real pros are being put up for free, to check in for the race. According to the elite athlete welcome letter Josh Cox sent me a few days ago, the elite athlete registration area and hospitality suite were located on Floor T1, which turned out to be the twenty-fifth and top floor of the ninety-year-old high-rise. Josh had offered to meet me there to make sure everything went smoothly, but (true to form) I arrived early, so to kill time I wandered over to the hospitality suite, entering just as Steve Jones, winner of the 1985 Chicago Marathon and a former marathon world record holder, exited.
I passed through an anteroom dominated by a cloth-covered serving table laden with coffee, tea, water, Gatorade, snack bars, and cookies, and emerged into a larger space containing a massive formal dining table surrounded by eight wide chairs and three separate sitting areas, one of them arranged around a built-in media center with a television showing the film Bruce Almighty on mute. In the chair closest to the screen sat a lean, silver-haired man wearing the same Chicago Marathon polo shirt I’d seen on Sebastian at the airport.
“Hey, NAZ Elite!” he called out, noticing my own shirt. “Are you guys all in town?”
Acting on the assumption that my welcomer was an important individual who had a right to the information he’d just requested, I took a seat and informed him that Aaron Braun and I arrived yesterday, and Ben Rosario was on his way.
“And you are…?”
In as few words as possible, I explained the whole fake pro runner thing, whereupon the silver-haired man introduced himself as Chicago Marathon elite athlete coordinator Chris Mengel. Just then, Deena Kastor, winner of the 2005 Chicago Marathon, sauntered into the room and casually joined us, at which point Chris lost all interest in me and I became a mere spectator as he and Deena caught up. I was beginning to wonder if Deena even remembered me from our few past encounters when she abruptly addressed me.
“What brings you to Chicago?”
I started again to explain the whole fake pro runner thing, but the moment Deena understood I’d be racing with an elite bib on Sunday she leapt from the sofa and gave me a stinging high five.
“That is so cool!”
Encouraged by Deena’s enthusiasm, I shared a bit more about my experience with NAZ Elite, but she cut me off a second time.
“You know what you should do?”
“Tell me,” I said warily.
“You should run with Feyisa Lilesa as long as you can. That would make a hell of a story, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps,” I said. “But it would be a very short story.”
Alberto Salazar was the next household name in the running world to pass through, pausing for a brief, stilted conversation with Deena before moving on. I felt a little sorry for him. Always gracious in my journalistic interactions with him, Alberto has sullied his reputation in recent years by bending the rules of fair play in his role as coach of the Nike Oregon Project, whose star runner, Galen Rupp, is widely favored to win on Sunday, and in environments such as this one he must feel as though he’s sprouted horns and a tail.I
Noting the time, I wandered over to the registration room, where I took a chair at a long table opposite Laurie, a race staffer who handed me a number of forms to fill out, including one that let the event organizer know where to send my check in the event that I won prize money. I was already halfway through the process when Josh breezed in and sat down beside me. I showed him my race number, which was 33.
“Check it out,” I said. “Two digits!”
“That’s a great number,” Josh said. “Are you going to try to beat it?”
In marathons, “beating your number” means beating everyone with a higher bib number and at least one with a lower number. The thirty-second finisher in last year’s Chicago Marathon ran 2:24:07.
“I’ve got one number in my head, and that’s not it,” I said.
Laurie handed me a couple of Chicago Marathon-branded keepsakes: a backpack and a hooded sweatshirt. “That one’s a small,” she said in reference to the hoodie, “but you can have any size you like.”
Before I left Matt’s house yesterday I weighed in at 141.2 pounds, nine pounds down from my starting weight and the lightest I’ve been since I was in high school, which was the last time I wore a small anything. I tried on the sweatshirt. It fit.
“Do you have any questions?” Laurie asked.
Assuming that any real pro would have at least one question, I asked Laurie if music devices were permitted in the elite warm-up area. She said they were.
Josh and I pushed back our chairs and rose to leave.
“Oh, one more thing,” Laurie said. “We’re asking all of the elite runners to sign that commemorative poster on the table outside. Would you mind?”
Would I mind! Ha! I scrawled my name with gusto just below that of two-time marathon world champion Abel Kirui as Josh looked on, nodding approvingly.
“Thank you again for making this happen,” I said to him on our way toward the elevators.
He waved a hand at my words of gratitude. “The best way to thank me is by running the race of your life on Sunday.”
Josh jabbed the elevator call button and we turned to face each other.
“The marathon is such an opportunity,” he said. “It’s not merely twelve weeks of preparation. Your whole life goes into it. I know it’s a cliché, but it’s true: You run the first twenty miles with your head and the last six with your heart. You have to be smart in the first twenty. The less emotion you feel, the better. But when it gets hard and it’s time to grind, that’s when you pour everything you have into it—all your hopes and dreams, your failures and successes, your passion and fears, and all the sacrifices, big and small, you’ve made over the weeks and months and years to get to where you are right now, in the best and worst moment of an opportunity you won’t be able to live with yourself if you don’t seize.”
“Dang, man!” I said. “That was a hell of a pep talk!”
“Actually, it’s all written down on a postcard I was planning to give you later,” he confessed. “But I mean every word of it.”
A bell dinged and a pair of doors slid apart. Josh shook my hand and stepped in. Having completed my major tasks for the day, I returned to the hospitality suite to feel special. I was relaxing in a wingback chair with a cup of hot black coffee, trying not to think about the dishes of peanut M&M’s and Lara Bars (tomorrow—carb-loading day—will be another matter), when I received a text message, to which I replied immediately.
Coach Ben: Everything okay so far?
Me: Yes. But it’s possible I’m only dreaming all of this.
This morning I completed my final training run as a fake professional runner, a three-mile shakeout with James and Heather and a couple dozen clients of James’s online coaching business who are also racing tomorrow. Afterward, back in my room, I made a quick call to my parents, as any son might do on the eve of a momentous occasion in his life—the birth of a child, open-heart surgery, spaceflight—or, in this case, competing in a World Major Marathon as an undeserving yet official registrant in the elite division.
“Go get ’em, boy!” Dad said.
“Be safe, honey,” Mom told me.
Around noon, after completing the surprisingly tedious exercise of mixing up and labeling eight bottles of Maurten in two concentrations, I left the hotel again to do some things that only professional (and fake professional) runners have to do the day before a marathon, beginning with getting my uniform checked and dropping off my bottles at the Hilton. The elite athlete guide I picked up from Laurie during check-in yesterday directed me to the Mobley Room, one of those low-ceilinged all-purpose spaces with calculatedly ugly institutional carpeting. Inside I came to a folding table marked “Uniform Inspection,” behind which sat three laughing race staffers.
“You folks seem to be enjoying yourselves,” I said.
“Hey, if you have to do an asshole job, you might as well have fun with it,” said the bearded one, provoking more laughter from his colleagues.
I pulled my uniform out of my backpack and placed it on the table for inspection. A woman measured the logos on the singlet with a ruler.
“Congratulations, you passed!” she said.
All four walls of the Mobley Room were lined with additional folding tables staffed by volunteers. I was instructed by the merry uniform inspectors to make my way around counterclockwise, depositing one of my eight bottles at each table. The woman at the next table showed me a schematic diagram of the elite aid station layout. She ran an index finger along it until she found my name, then tapped twice.
“Your bottle will be at the very end of the first table at each station,” she said. “You’re welcome to take a photo with your phone.”
I would never have thought to do so, but supposing a real pro would, I did.
I had just dumped off my eighth and last bottle when Brauny entered. Things did not go quite as smoothly for him. The Hoka logo on his hat was larger than allowed, so the bearded guy covered it with thick white tape. Asked to produce his warm-ups for inspection, Aaron confessed he hadn’t brought them. He gave the inspectors a pleading look, but to no avail—he had to fetch the garments. I understood then what was meant by “asshole job.”
At half past three a technical meeting for elite athletes was held in the media center, which occupied the Continental Ballroom, an even larger showcase for ugly carpeting located on the basement level of the hotel. Spotting an open seat next to Sarah Crouch near the back, I took it.
“Thanks for the text,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re so nice to me.”
Earlier, while I was passing some more time in the elite athlete hospitality suite, I’d received the following message from Sarah:
You’re ready, Matt. The work is 99% done and all that’s left is for you to put your body on autopilot and just do what your training has prepared you for. See you on the other side tomorrow!
“I’m being nice to you now,” Sarah said, “because I’m going to take you to the woodshed tomorrow.”
The meeting began. Tracey Wilson, whom the elite athlete guide identified as the marathon’s “manager of elite athlete and participant programs,” took the stage and led the gathering through a slideshow-illustrated litany of dos and don’ts for tomorrow. A substantial portion of the material (such as Tracey’s request that whoever wins the race not stop their watch at the finish line, which would spoil the photo) was irrelevant to me, but I picked up some useful nuggets, including the existence of a blue tangent line marking the shortest distance from the start to the finish of the racecourse.
When the meeting broke up, Sarah and I remained seated, trading jockish banter while the crowd began to file out. As Feyisa passed, our eyes met, and he smiled in recognition. I smiled back.
Just outside the room another clipboard-armed race official stood sentry-like, scanning the throng for elite athlete lanyards and detaining their wearers one by one. When my turn came, the official explained that she was checking names against a list of runners selected for random drug testing. I found myself hoping (uniquely, I’m sure) my name would be on the list—for the experience—but alas, it was not.
Coach Ben, Brauny, and I had agreed to meet up for the elite athlete pasta dinner at five o’clock in the room next to the one we’d just left. I spent the intervening half hour in a quiet lounge area with Cindy Kuzma, a Chicago-based running journalist and friend who wanted to interview me about my recent adventures for asweatlife.com.
“What’s been the most surprising thing so far?” she asked.
“How much I’ve improved,” I said readily. “I don’t know if it was the altitude, or the coaching, or the team environment, or the diet tweaks, or the physical therapy, or whatever else. Probably all these things made a difference. In any case, no matter how things turn out tomorrow, what I’ve experienced in Flagstaff has already redefined my notion of what’s possible—not just for me, but for any runner willing to take it all the way.”
“Wow, that’s pretty profound,” Cindy said. “But how do you share this message so that it has the same kind of impact on runners who haven’t experienced what you have?”
“Simple,” I said. “I’m just going to tell the story.”
My primary alarm (cell phone) went off at 4:15 A.M., my secondary alarm (clock radio) a minute later. I didn’t need either of them, having woken at 4:08 with a full bladder and gone straight from the bathroom to the coffee maker to begin a well-practiced pre-race routine of heating water for instant oatmeal, scarfing a banana and a bottle of Ensure, slipping into my race uniform and warm-ups, visiting the bathroom again, and triple-checking that my backpack contained everything else I needed (racing flats, extra socks, caffeine pills, beet juice shot, iPod and earbuds, fun size bag of M&M’s for the start line, elite athlete schedule).
I left the room at 4:48, the click of the door latch behind me triggering an involuntary shudder, an endocrine-level recognition of the intense living I would do, for better or worse, before I passed through the same door again. Seven floors down, the hotel’s revolving entry spun me out into predawn air that wasn’t quite as cool as I would have liked. Moving at a semibrisk pace that compromised between my eagerness to get where I was going and the need to conserve energy, I traced a previously rehearsed route to Palmer House, where I had been instructed to catch a bus that would transport elite athletes who were not lodging at the Hilton to the host hotel for transfer to other buses bound for the start area. I felt a small release of tension, like when you see your suitcase finally emerge from the chute at baggage claim, on arriving at the hotel’s Monroe Street entrance, mentally checking off another item in the morning’s complex logistics, grateful to soon be joining the throng of nervous athletes inside.
But there was no throng of nervous athletes inside, only a marble-floored foyer as still and hushed as a museum at midnight. Tamping down a reflexive upsurge of alarm, I took a seat on an antique bench, willing others to appear, becoming more certain by the second that I was not where I was supposed to be.
Then I remembered the schedule. I fished it out of the backpack and learned what I should have known already—that elite athletes were requested to present themselves on the Wabash Street side of Palmer House. After a quick glance at my watch, I burst outside and rounded the corner of Monroe and Wabash at a non-energy-conserving run, eyes fixed on the glorious image of a school bus idling at the curb. Bounding aboard, I plopped down directly behind the driver, melting in relief.
We reached the Hilton at 5:30, right on schedule. I exited first, leading an orderly file of elites and VIPs through a gauntlet of grave-faced race officials who directed us to an area where the rest of the pros—those who’d slept at the Hilton—were congregated, a ritual that in its tight choreography and sober pomp conjured images of prizefighters making their way to the ring for a title match. The first familiar faces I saw belonged to Sarah and Michael Crouch.
“You know how we agreed we needed to work on our trash talk?” Sarah said.
I told her to go ahead and get it over with.
“I’m here to chew gum and kick your ass. And I’m all out of gum.”
“That one’s older than I am,” I said. “And anyway, you do have gum. You’re chewing it now.”
“Good point,” Sarah conceded.
Josh Cox and Coach Ben appeared and greeted me in the gently upbeat tone that people use with loved ones in hospital beds. We were soon interrupted by orders to move outside and take our pick of a pair of chartered coaches. When the last passenger was seated, the door hinged, a hydraulic sigh was heard, and we began to roll toward Grant Park, a phalanx of four police motorcycles leading the slow procession, lights flashing. Nose to the window, I stared into a darkness teeming with runners and race volunteers all walking in one direction along the sidewalk under the stark light of streetlamps, many staring back at us with a curiosity bordering on awe. I was almost (but not quite) embarrassed by the thrill I felt at being mixed up with the true objects of their veneration.
The trip took all of five minutes, or about a minute longer than it would have taken on foot. The doors swung open and again we were trooped out and ushered forth with military efficiency, this time to a large tent filled with folding chairs arranged in rows. Brauny took a seat up front and I sat two chairs over, close but not too close. Coach Ben joined us a couple of minutes later and gave us the lowdown.
“It’s six o’clock now,” he said. “They’re going to call you to the line at ten past seven. I suggest you start your warm-up at six forty-five. Aaron, you’ll want to get your old-man exercises done before then. They have a stretching area in the back. Fitz, do whatever you normally do.”
My instinct was to fill the gap by chatting with my teammate, but for all I knew he preferred to be left alone in such moments. I decided to feel him out.
“Do you choose any kind of power word or mantra for your marathons?” I asked.
“Not really,” Aaron said. “I do pick songs to play in my head. For this race I picked Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Humble’ for the first twenty miles and The Killers’ ‘I’m the Man’ for the last ten K.”
“I do mantras,” I said. “Today’s is just one word: ‘Execute.’ ”
Gripped by sudden bowel pressure, I fled the tent and ducked inside one of several portable toilets (nearly all of them unoccupied) that stood in a row within the protected confines of the VIP zone—the greatest perk yet of the pro runner experience. When I got back to my seat, Brauny was gone, having moved to the stretching area to loosen up. I passed a quiet few minutes debating whether to ask 5000-meter world record holder Tirunesh Dibaba for a selfie (ultimately deciding against it) and then lowered myself to the ground and “did what I normally do,” beginning with the strap-assisted hip flexor stretch Matt showed me on my first day with the team. At 6:44, Aaron returned and solemnly stripped down to his uniform, and I did the same.
We exited the tent on the far side, emerging into a grassy area limned by a concrete path around which runners were striding in lawless confusion, with no apparent agreement on which direction to go or which side to stay on. Choosing the counterclockwise-moving stream, we slipped in and tried our best to find a smooth rhythm despite the surrounding chaos. Sensing a runner crowding us from behind, I swiveled my head around and recognized the tailgater as Jordan Hasay, America’s top hope for a victory on the women’s side. Aaron and I moved aside to let her pass.
We circled in silence, our lack of interaction turning my attention inward, where I made the happy discovery that my legs had been secretly replaced during the night with those of a younger, fitter, faster runner.
“My legs feel really go-od!” I sang out in a boyish falsetto.
Brauny laughed appreciatively, and I knew then for certain that he was not unhappy for my company.
After three or four more circuits, a race official announced it was time to head over to the start line. Back inside the tent, I changed into my Tracers, stuffed everything I didn’t need into my number-marked backpack for the organizers to look after, and joined the promenade of elite runners walking toward the racecourse. To our left were the corrals, now packed like cattle pens with amateur runners who studied us with a mixture of reverence and envy as we passed. There were approximately 40,000 of them, exactly 48 of us, and I thought, This is fucking surreal.
Between the corrals and the start line, a short stretch of pavement had been cordoned off for our exclusive use. Following the others’ lead, I found a bit of open real estate and did my drills—the same sequence Coach Ben had hazed me with back in July. I was just about to show off my much-improved B skips when a runner stretching his thigh to my immediate right lost his balance and tumbled into me. It was Feyisa. He began to apologize but, recognizing me again, he grinned instead and shook my hand.
“Good luck,” I said.
“You, too,” he said.
The push-rim racers were sent off at 7:15. When they were safely out of sight, our group was let loose to run strides. Among the last to take advantage of the opportunity, I narrowly avoided colliding head-on with Abel Kirui as I accelerated down Michigan Avenue and he came in hot from the other direction.
Ordered back behind the line, we stood twitching and shaking like victims of a mass Ritalin overdose while the national anthem was belted out by an operatic soprano. With her satiny final A note still echoing in our ears, we were called forward and the first corral was opened, allowing the top-seeded amateurs to rush in from our rear. I positioned myself with due deference in the back row of elites, some ten feet from the timing mat. Third from the left in row one was Brauny. Feeling my eyes on him, he turned in search of me and mirrored my two-finger salute. He seemed unafraid.
“Two minutes,” said the emcee.
Suddenly remembering my M&M’s, I removed the tiny packet from the tiny pocket in my tiny shorts and gobbled its contents, my wandering gaze eventually landing on a television camera on the far side of the line. It was looking right back at me, like a rifle scope sighting a discovered imposter.
The gun sounded and we surged forward. Six steps into the race, I realized with brutal suddenness that my pro runner fantasy was essentially over. Although I still had the elite aid stations to look forward to, the real elites, male and female, were already galloping away from me as I was engulfed by a tide of my fellow hobbyists. Among them was Alex Harrison, who positioned himself on my right shoulder. He said something that I didn’t quite catch, and I made no reply, letting my erstwhile long-run companion know that I was all business today.
After a quarter mile we entered a tunnel, the warmth inside it a foretaste of what the open air would feel like in an hour or so. James had warned me that GPS data is unreliable in Chicago even outside the city’s satellite-blocking underpasses, so I ignored the Current Pace reading on my watch and looked ahead to the first official distance marker for a chance to gauge my pace.
It soon appeared: a white sign marked 1K. Having worked out the math beforehand, I knew the number I wanted to see on my watch when I got there—3:46—the metric equivalent of 6:05 per mile. The number I did see was 3:47. I chuckled under my breath, remembering something Josh Cox said to me on the top floor of the Hilton two days ago: Dude, it’s going to feel like you’re jogging. It did.
A stranger pulled up next to me on the side opposite Alex.
“Are you Matt?” he asked.
“I am,” I said.
“I followed your blog,” he said. “Good luck.”
“Same to you,” I said.
I hit the one-mile mark at 6:02, and it was Coach Ben’s words I now recalled. Try to hit a 6:05. If you don’t, try to hit a 6:05. If you don’t, try to hit a 6:05.
This counsel was still echoing in my head when an older, bald-headed runner sidled up beside me.
“I don’t mean to bother you, Matt,” he said in an Australian accent, “but I just wanted to say how inspired I am by what you’re doing. Good luck today.”
“Same to you,” I said, beginning to wish myself invisible.
Just then Matthew Centrowitz glided by on my left. A monosyllabic bark of amused surprise—“Ha!”—shot out of my mouth. Alex and two or three others, also recognizing him, took off after the reigning Olympic champion at 1500 meters (who was clearly having a lark, not actually competing) to clap him on the back and trade fist bumps. My wish had been granted: as long as Centro remained nearby, I was indeed invisible.
By two miles (12:10), the initial crush of bodies had loosened up considerably. No longer worried about accidental collisions, I lowered my eyes to the road, tracking the blue tangent line I learned about in yesterday’s technical meeting. When we came upon the first drink station, my fellow 6:05-per-milers scrambled to the margins of the street for cups while I continued to hew to the blue line, knowing the first elite fluid station was coming up at 5K. So absorbed was my attention in the ground in front of me that I failed to notice James’s presence at three miles (18:16) until his familiar baritone boomed over the shrill chorus of spectators surrounding him.
“Let’s go, Matt!” he bellowed through cupped hands. “Looking smooth.”
Ahead, in the dead center of the road, I spied the promised arrangement of folding tables, its display of plastic drink containers picked over like a grocery store canned goods aisle the day before a hurricane, making my blue Hoka bottle that much easier to find, just as I’d hoped. I snatched it up and took my time drinking the 8.5 ounces it contained, even unscrewing the lid to get the last swallow that, I knew from practice, would not come out by squeezing. When the bottle was empty, I tossed it to the side of the road.
Our northward march continued, through Near North, Old Town Triangle, Lincoln Park. I saw nothing but a blue line in any of these diverse neighborhoods. Dance music, pulsing through powerful outdoor speakers, registered briefly at a deep layer of my consciousness, but within twenty seconds of the sound’s fading behind me I couldn’t have said which song it was. My surroundings simply did not exist for me except as a source of mission-critical information, such as wind direction. Whenever the many-turned racecourse directed me into the breeze, I quickly tucked in behind another runner.
At the 10K elite aid station I discovered that some other runner had made off with my second drink bottle, one of my greatest fears coming into the race.
“Fuck!” I cussed, drawing a sidelong glance from Alex, who had come back to me after his freak-out over Centro.
Knowing I could not afford to go another 5K without fluid or calories, I grabbed two cups of Gatorade from the next regular aid station, swallowing about one cup’s worth and feeling the rest soak through my shirtfront.
Stay positive, I told myself. It could be worse.
And then it was. Approaching eight miles (48:35), I felt a sudden tug on the left side of my groin—a sickening harbinger of impending doom, like a 2:00 A.M. phone call. Forget the missing drink bottle: This was my greatest fear, the one thing that could ruin everything. Outwardly, nothing changed; my body kept moving southward at a steady 9.9 miles per hour. But inside, my emotional state was like the interior of a mine-struck submarine, sirens wailing, drowning men screaming, water level rising. With eighteen miles of hard running left ahead of me, there was only one way this thing could go, and no amount of positive thinking could change it.
Sure enough, over the next mile the tug became a pull, the pull a yank. I felt my entire body tensing, bracing for the now-inevitable nail-gun shot. Seeing his chance, my inner wimp seized control of my thoughts, and I began to halfway welcome the coming showstopper, the sudden blast of pain that would send me lurching to the curb. At least it would spare me the agony of falling short without excuse.
When the pain leveled off—at least for the moment—during Mile 9, I was almost disappointed. My inner wimp went hunting for other ways to let me off the hook. What if I backed off just a little and sort of coasted to a time in the low-2:41 range? I would still come away with a personal record! My fake pro runner experiment would still be a success! Other runners would still be inspired!
Try as I might, I couldn’t convince myself that any of this was true. Two thirty-nine was the number in my heart and had been for fifteen years. The only thing that had changed was that I now felt the full weight of the pressure I had placed on myself to claim that yearned-for figure at long last, in what was surely my very last chance.
I came to the 15K elite fluid station. The first table—my table—was not only completely cleared of bottles but being packed away by a couple of race staffers, one at each end. Sensing my approach, the guy facing me looked up, his eyes widening at the sight of my red (elite) number bib. I spread my arms, palms upturned, miming the question etched on my slack-jawed face: Dude, what the hell? He replied with a nonapologetic shrug whose meaning was equally plain: Tough luck, old-timer.
Shadowed by Alex, I passed ten miles at 1:00:50, still on pace, right down to the tenth of a second. But I saw the glass half empty, interpreting this number not as an indicator of perfect execution but as a warning that I had no margin to slip.
A pair of twenty-something runners, obviously buddies, one tattooed, the other bearded, caught us from behind, their approach heralded by snatches of conversation between them. Great, I thought. More chatterboxes.
“What time are you shooting for?” the bearded one asked us.
Shut up and leave me alone.
“Under two forty,” Alex said.
My stomach clenched. The goal that I had coveted for so long and been so confident of achieving as recently as two hours ago now seemed an onerous outside imposition, an impossible demand forced upon me by a person I no longer was.
On the road ahead a strip of rubber with the look of an ineffectually low speed bump appeared—a timing mat marking the halfway point of the race. All four of us dipped our heads toward our wrists as we passed over it, my watch reading 1:19:41.
“We’re doing it!” said the tattooed guy.
This time Alex, too, kept his peace, and a runner’s sixth sense told me he was beginning to struggle. For some reason this made me feel better, as though Alex’s loss were my gain. My pace lifted ever so slightly, and before I knew it my unwanted companions were behind me. I caught and passed another runner and then found myself blessedly alone again, the nearest competitor a full block in front of me on ruler-straight Adams Street. At fourteen miles, I stole another glance at my wrist and discovered I’d completed the preceding mile in 5:58, my fastest of the race. It was then I realized I wasn’t the least bit tired, something my groin crisis and my missed bottles had kept me from noticing before. Seizing the opportunity, my inner hero shoved aside my inner wimp and regained control of my thoughts.
You can do this.
I ran the next mile in 6:04 (finding my 25K drink bottle right where it belonged) and the next in six minutes flat. With the pain in my hurt tendon still holding steady and fatigue encroaching as slowly as summer shadows lengthen, I went back to plan A and began to think about “squeezing down,” as Coach Ben called it. His instruction had been to hang fire until at least 30K and then assess my capacity to attack. At the 30K elite aid station (1:53:14), I grabbed the special bottle in which I’d dissolved a caffeine tablet in my drink, gulped it down, tossed the empty, and increased my speed by the smallest perceivable increment.
My groin seized instantly, like a stone-weighted rope snapping taut. I backed off and the twinge subsided. Now what? My split time for Mile 19, a comfortable 6:01, decided the question. I gave it another go, but the tendon grabbed again, a final warning.
This was torture. Never had I felt so strong so late in a marathon. I knew I could go faster, except I couldn’t, all thanks to a single mutinous worm of connective tissue. I felt a mad urge to punish it somehow, but that was impossible—and mad—so I dug my fingernails into my palms instead.
Out of nowhere, one of my earliest memories came to me, one I hadn’t thought about in years, and hardly the first I would have expected to pop into my head at such a moment. I was three years old, maybe four, and I had recently developed a fear of going to bed. Night after night I begged my mom not to leave me alone, and she would sit at the edge of my twin mattress with the Looney Tunes sheets and gently enquire into the source of my fear, but I wouldn’t reveal it, not wanting to be judged silly or babyish. Eventually, though, Mom’s patience coaxed me into confessing I was afraid the moon would fall on my head, a notion I’d picked up from the illustrations in my favorite book, Goodnight Moon. Mom assured me the moon wasn’t like the balls I played with; it had hung in the sky for a very long time and would never fall. I believed her, and my fear vanished.
I’ve been a striver all my life, driven by an achievement complex that grew out of my relationship with my father, who, in my formative years, took such obvious delight in my successes in our shared passions of running and writing that I came to crave success insatiably. Why have I wanted so badly for so long to complete a marathon in less than two hours and forty minutes? For many reasons, none of them bad, but the reason behind all the reasons is to make daddy proud. His love for me is unconditional, I know, but it is my mother more than any other person whose love has made me feel okay just as I am: afraid sometimes, imperfect always, an out-and-out failure oftentimes.
And now, suddenly, this was okay—completing the Chicago Marathon a little bit slower than I felt I ought to because of one faulty piece of me. At twenty miles (2:01:43) I did some mental math and determined that I needed to run the closing 10K at 6:09 per mile or better to achieve my goal, and I couldn’t imagine failing to do so given how the rest of me felt, so I decided then to let the remaining miles be a celebration. Who says the last part of the best marathon you’ve ever run can’t be a cakewalk? You’ve earned this, I told myself. Enjoy it.
A female runner overtook me, looking even better than I felt. My competitive instincts rose up, but I tamped them down and let her go. Sooner than seemed possible, the 23-mile sign was behind me. Having covered the preceding 5K in 19:03, I now had 19 minutes and 14 seconds, a goddamn eternity, to complete the next and last 5K. I could practically walk from here, it seemed. My confidence was absolute.
“Let’s go, Fitz!” shrieked a familiar voice from my left. “One more mile! You’ve got this!”
It was Jen Rosario—just one of the many Flagstaff friends who had invested in my dream in ways and to a degree that exceeded my highest hopes. Run one mile for each of us, Futsum had enjoined. Only now did I fully appreciate what my teammate had meant by these words, how much I owed to him and the others.
Turning my attention back to the road, I spied a lone figure striding far ahead on Michigan Avenue, at the very horizon of my field of vision. Even at this distance I knew the wide-elbowed arm swing, the trailing brown mane. Sarah Crouch, my quasi-rival, clearly hurting. I knew I wouldn’t catch her—the math was against it—nor did I really want to. If she finished even a minute ahead of me, she’d have had a poor race by her standards, and racing is her meal ticket, not mine. Sarah had believed in me more than I myself had, more than anyone outside of Nataki, who in her innocence thought I could beat Feyisa Lilesa; I could live with whatever gloating she might subject me to later.
I passed under a banner marking 800 meters to the finish line and did another calculation. Three minutes left in a running experience I would never equal. I wanted these three minutes to last forever, willed my senses to savor them into permanence, to not just hear the thickening crowd’s roar but to record it, to not just feel the triumph of fitness over fatigue in my legs but to brand this feeling onto my brain’s memory banks.
Right on Roosevelt. Left on Columbus. The finish line. Crossing it, I raised my arms in victory, as Galen Rupp had done precisely half an hour before when he broke the tape. I had completed the 2017 Chicago Marathon in 144th place, fourth among runners my age and older, dead last in the men’s pro division, in an official time of 2:39:30. My average pace over the full distance was 6:05.005 per mile. I felt a single emotion: relief.
Noting my red bib, a race official directed me to an usher, a local high-school kid, whose job was to guide pro finishers to the VIP recovery tent. The very first person I saw when I got there was Aaron Braun, seated in a folding chair in a grassy area outside the tent and talking to Annika, who stood on the other side of a security fence.
“How did you do?” he called out to me.
I spoke the number, and that’s when it became real. A gush of purest, first-kiss ecstasy washed away my mere relief. Too good to be true, yet true! How many moments of this description does any human being get to experience in seven to nine decades of mortal existence? Here and now for me was one.
“Damn! You beat me!”
At dinner yesterday Aaron and I had made a friendly wager: drinks on him if he finished less than twenty-eight minutes ahead of me, drinks on me if he matched or exceeded this handicap. I passed through the tent and took a seat beside my teammate (former teammate?), who had passed a most interesting morning, I now learned, leading the race through almost the entire first half and in the process earning himself the moniker “the Flagstaff Flash” on the television broadcast. When the race broke open at fourteen miles, Brauny fell back, suffering mightily over the final twelve miles, yet he hung on to finish twelfth with a time of 2:13:41. He’d placed third among American runners and beaten a number of big names, including Diego Estrada and Feyisa Lilesa. For his pains, he’d earned $16,500.
Coach Ben joined us just as Aaron was wrapping up his narrative, having walked over from the 40K point of the racecourse.
“You did it!” he said, raising a palm for a high five. I left him hanging and wrapped my coach (former coach?) in a sweaty embrace.
Josh Cox appeared next and led us over to a waiting golf cart, another perk of the pro experience. In no time we were back at the Hilton, where yet another clipboard-bearing race staffer checked Aaron’s and my names off a list, freeing us to attack a buffet that had been set up in the same room we ate dinner in yesterday—the final perk. While we ate, we made plans to eat again after Brauny and I got cleaned up. Having a lot more ground to cover than the others did, I rose first and departed, trying to decide on the best way to get to the Hotel Chicago. Realizing my legs felt pretty decent, I decided to run.
Outside, on a sidewalk choked with supporters of runners still out on the course, I eased into a cautious trot, assessing my aches and pains. At nine minutes per mile, they were minimal, so I continued, placing a call to my parents as I weaved between human obstacles.
“I saw you on TV!” my dad said.
Mom had forgotten I was running a marathon today but was pleased that I was pleased. My time meant nothing to her.
In my room, I stripped off my uniform and was just about to step into the shower when I caught a glimpse of my body in the bathroom mirror. Sorrow hit me like a rogue wave as I regarded my veiny, whippet-like physique—not a beautiful body, perhaps, but a body more beautifully adapted to the challenge of long-distance running than it had ever been before or would ever be again. Tomorrow I would look a little less like this reflected image, the next day a little less.
Within an hour, as if determined to hasten this degenerative process, I was gobbling french fries and throwing back beers with the NAZ Elite crew at First Draft, Josh Cox in full Jerry Maguire mode, negotiating with the manager for better seating, paying for everything. Aaron was in high spirits and already tipsy, showing a side of himself I hadn’t so much as glimpsed previously. At two o’clock, Ben, Jen, and Addison left to catch a flight. Josh settled the tab and split as well. Out on the sidewalk, Brauny fixed me with a beseeching look.
“What do you want to do now?” he said.
“I figured I’d head back to my hotel,” I said. “I need to make some phone calls and catch up on social media.”
Congratulations had been pouring in. Matt, Big Dog, Monica, AJ, Shannon, Too Slow, Rochelle—pretty much everyone I knew in Flagstaff had patted my back in one electronic form or another.
“I want to keep drinking!” Brauny implored.
We agreed to meet up for dinner with his parents. I had no intention of flaking, but after talking to Nataki and my brothers and responding to all the texts and tweets and Facebook comments, I felt myself beginning to fade, so I texted Brauny to request a rain check. His reply came so swiftly that I half wondered if he hadn’t typed it out in advance and only needed to hit SEND.
Ah man, coming off of that high? I still need to buy you a drink! Or three!
Guilt and exhaustion waged a pitched battle inside my mind. Exhaustion won, and I began to script a polite, yet firm final refusal, but before I could get it off, Brauny texted again.
Rally Buddy! Try to rally!
The inner battle was renewed, but this time guilt had an ally in the form of the thought that I might never have another opportunity like this. I mean, how often does a top professional athlete in your favorite sport beg you to get drunk with him?
Me: Aw, screw it. I’m coming.
Aaron: YES!!!
Fifteen minutes later, I joined Aaron and Annika, their daughters, Aaron’s parents, and Sarah Cotton at Cantina Laredo. Having already eaten all my stomach could hold, I drank a margarita while the others dug into enchiladas and quesadillas. When the bill was paid, the grandparents took Mackenzie and Myla back to their hotel and the rest of us set out in search of more alcohol, bar hopping until well past midnight, parting with a round of boozy embraces at the corner of Grand and Lasalle. I had rallied all right, to the point where I hadn’t wanted the night to end any more than Brauny, though not entirely for the same reasons. At thirty, he was celebrating a new beginning, eyes on the future, whereas I was marking a completion, looking back one last time before closing the door.
During the short walk to my hotel, I caught a glimpse of a gibbous moon floating above the rooftops.
“Goodnight, moon,” I said.
I. Note that this encounter occurred before Alberto Salazar was banned from coaching for four years by the U.S. Anti-Doping Authority for doping violations and before accusations of psychological abuse were levied against him by some of his former athletes.