Readysetgo

Narrator: Tyler, you are by far the most interesting single-serving friend I've ever met... see I have this thing: everything on a plane is single-serving...
Tyler Durden: Oh I get it, it's very clever.
Narrator: Thank you.
Tyler Durden: How's that working out for you?
Narrator: What?
Tyler Durden: Being clever.
Narrator: Great.
Tyler Durden: Keep it up then... Right up.
[Gets up to leave]

One last pre-race post, but zero more deep thoughts. As I mentioned previously, I usually go into races without a plan, or a plan that's so conservative that I throw it out the window after the first half mile. So I'm going the other way this time. The target is 3 hrs. That's 6:52/mi.

(Stealing a gimmick from Simmons here...)

What I'll tell myself if I make it? That half marathon back in February was a good leading indicator. I trained strong, and I was injury free. Weather was a tad warm, but otherwise perfect. I ran pretty close to that pace for 20 miles just three weeks ago, with no taper. The crowd totally carried me the last six (or 26) miles. Racing flats rule.

What I'll tell myself if I don't make it? It was crazy to think that I could run 3 hrs my first marathon, especially Boston. I knew it was going to be crowded at the start, but not that crowded. I knew those hills were going to eat back a few precious minutes. Everyone warned me about those last six miles. People joke that it's the last 0.2 that gets you, but in this case it was true.

Anyways, bib #29458. And I'm in the fourth wave, so I don't start until 11:25am. You can sign up here if you want to follow along via email / text alerts. Nervous? Of course. But I will say this: When I started out back in December, I didn't even dream of coming close to raising $10k for Team Brookline. But the final total: $10,026. You guys did your part, now it's time to do mine.

Dirty Water

I'm from Cleveland. Born and raised. Specifically, Cleveland Heights, the first suburb east of Cleveland proper. But I also took the city bus across town for high school, and spent a fair amount of time downtown. We would collect canned goods outside Municipal stadium to get free standing room tickets for Browns games. We used to have "workouts" where we would run across the flats, duck into an empty, meaningless Tribe game for a few innings and then run back. And we never went to a single Cavs game, because honestly who was going to drive out to Richfield for that. This was long before The Jake, The Q, and FirstEnergy. We played basketball late into the night in Strongsville. We hung out at Record Revolution on Coventry. We had all the lights timed on Euclid Avenue. We were the opening credits of Major League.

But then in 1990 I went away to college, and my family moved to Virginia. The first couple of years I went back often. My brother lived there for a few summers, still met up with friends, extended family get togethers, holidays, etc. But over the years the visits got predictably less frequent. At the same time, the city itself kept changing, like all cities do. (Yes, even Cleveland.) Old steel mills were turned into nightclubs, the flats became a scene, new stadiums, downtown renaissance. And then the flats died, the Tribe was terrible again, housing crisis, ghost-town. I think the last time I went back was three years ago for my Grandmother's funeral? Stayed in a turn-of-the-century bank that had been converted to a Holiday Inn downtown. Had drinks at a hipster bar that used to be in a pretty shady neighborhood. Gray drizzle. The city was like a second cousin that you only see once every six or seven years. There's something strikingly familiar at the core, but there is so much context and backstory that fills in those gaps that they might as well be a total stranger. (Assuming that you aren't Facebook friends of course.) It's an amazingly disorienting form of nostalgia. Layers upon layers of recent history, almost like an archeological dig, all obscuring something that you lived and breathed for 18 years. Maybe you never really appreciate what it means to be from someplace until you leave it.

But in two years, I will have lived in Boston for as long as I lived in Cleveland. I’ve lived across from Fenway Park, the North End, East Cambridge, and most recently Brookline. (I'm not counting the three years in Worcester, because that never happened.) I’ve worked in Cambridge for 16 years. I've walked from one end of the city to the other in the wee hours of the morning, and I've run around the esplanade approximately 1,356,231 times. I’ve watched with a jealous eye the absolutely ridiculous stretch of sports teams that have graced this town. And of course my boys are from here. They've visited Cleveland multiple times. Cam's first baseball game was even at The Jake, even though he fell asleep on my shoulders the second we stepped foot in the park. But to them it’s just another place where they know some people, no different than DC, Chicago, NYC. Their memories will be of Fenway. Grant knows the names of all the bridges across the Charles. They know all the words to Dirty Water. I'm not from Boston, but I know Boston. It's weird being back in Cleveland for all the reasons I mentioned, but there's nothing weird about being here.

Which brings us to the marathon. I've watched a lot of Boston Marathons over the years, and always regarded it as a pretty cool tradition. Just not mine. (It doesn't help that I can't watch a race without feeling guilty that I'm not running.) After last year people were quick to rally around the city. Boston, even America, had been attacked. But personally, I was more outraged that somebody would target the finish line of a road race. This was about running. And then I got wrapped up in the training and fundraising challenge. Marking off a marathon from my bucket list. Plus being a part of the absolute spectacle / circus that this race promises to be. Not every day you can simply enter an event like this. But the undeniable Boston-ness of this whole thing is starting to take hold. It's hard to go to team meetings at the public library, the police station, the teen center, and not feel like a local. It's hard to raise money for a local charity, and not feel a sense of civic pride. And it's hard to train through the winter in this city and not start to bond with it. I dragged the boys out of bed at 6:30am last Saturday to go downtown to the finish line and be a part of the SI "Boston Strong" cover shoot, telling myself this will be a cool bit of history for them. But I'm not sure I would have bothered four months ago.

(You can't really see us in the main picture. Grant decided to jump off my shoulders at that particular moment. But here we are in the back.) 

Nothing will be different on Tuesday. Well, I'll be really sore, but you know what I mean. It's just a road race. And I still won't own a Red Sox hat. But at the same time, it's the Boston F'ing Marathon. I'm going to go down to Copley on Saturday to pickup my number and jacket, I'm going to get on a bus at the Commons on Monday morning, I'm going to get dropped off in Hopkinton, and I'm going to run home.

Brookline FC

I played a lot of soccer growing up, and I was just good enough to assume that I would continue playing in high school. So then I get to high school, and it turned out I wasn't that good. I was actually pretty terrible. I "made" the team, but only because they didn't cut anybody from freshman soccer. I'm not sure I saw more than 10 minutes of garbage time the entire season. Did I even have a jersey?

When spring rolled around, my dad suggested that maybe running track would help my chances of making soccer team in the fall. Better conditioning was basically my only hope. So I went out for the track team, and that was even more fun. Ever watch high-school freshmen "compete" in the 3200m? All of the distance scrubs, sitting around in the freezing rain waiting for the end of the meet when everybody else has already gone home, just to run 7 and a half laps at an absolute crawl, and then put on a really awkward, painful sprint to the finish that was equal parts meaningless and embarrassing to watch. The duel for "at least I wasn't last." This was me. While I don't remember trying to quit soccer, I definitely remember trying to quit track.

But it worked. I didn't get cut from JV soccer in the fall. And I kept running in the spring. But after three years, the bit flipped. By senior year, the track coach made a pretty convincing argument that cross-country in the fall was a prerequisite for states in the spring. And while the soccer coach, who would have been my fourth in four years, told me that I had a spot on the varsity back line, that was no longer enough. So I walked away from soccer to focus on running, and then four years of track in college.

But after I graduated, I had a Forest Gump moment and stopped running. And later that year, a few coworkers from my first job started to play pickup soccer after work. And then we started playing pickup with the folks at Bristol-Myers down the road (which led to a surreal weekend in Brussels to essentially play in their global corporate pickup game.) And then a buddy found a bruising league for us to play in eastern PA. Then I moved to Boston, and another friend hooked me up with Busy Bee FC team for their last couple of seasons in the BSSL. Then I jumped to a BSSC team (with Live Poultry, Fresh Killed jerseys!). And then a bunch of us went to play with Medfield's NEOTHSL (OTH = Over the Hill) team. And then a friend from the Medfield team started the Brookline FC team...

(You're probably wondering where this is going, and when it's going to get there.)

One version of this narrative is the "love of the game", or something like that. But looking back, this was all about the team. Running can obviously be a pretty solitary activity sometimes, but high school and college track were some of the best team experiences of my life. I didn't choose running over soccer in high school because of states. I chose it because of my buddies on the track team. But after college, I needed my fix, and I went back to soccer to get it. Every introduction to every pickup or organized team I've played on for the past 20 years has been through a good friend. I started thinking about this when I lost count of how many former track and soccer teammates, some of whom I haven't talked to in years, have donated to my marathon fundraising. My past few months training with Team Brookline also reminded me what a difference running with a team can make.

But this past Sunday was also the first game of the 2014 spring campaign for Brookline FC. And I sat it out. Plus I'm sitting out the next two games after that. I decided not to risk the marathon with what would essentially be a guaranteed Murphy's-Law-style injury. Funny how sometimes you can hear the faintest echoes from your past*. But it kills me to not be out there on Sundays.

(*A few years ago, during my last season with Medfield, the guy who organized the team pulled on a t-shirt after the game, and I had to do a triple-take. It was an Ohio High School Athletic Association, track & field, state finals t-shirt. From my senior year. He ran in that meet too. Ok, so maybe sometimes the echoes aren't so subtle.)