Marathon Day Recap

I wrote a prayer for the marathon a few days before and read it out loud with Anna the night before the race. It’s pretty special to read it again now and see how so many of these prayers were answered.

O Lord and giver of life and strength,
Thank you for this gift!
Help me to connect deeply with this place and with my people as I go run this race.
I pray for health and strength and daily bread for the miles ahead. 
May I pay attention and notice the life all around me and see the surprises of grace along the way.
May I hear God’s invitational whispers in each mile.
May I revel in the gift of my health and of this race and of this one wild and precious life.
Please give me stamina and agency in my body as I run my happy pace.
May spaciousness fill my heart, soul, and mind, and may my hands be open to give and receive the abundance this race offers.
May I recognize the face of God in my fellow runners and in those who cheer me on.
May I bring some joy to those I meet and greet along the way- through the sparkles on my running shoes and my silly costume and my smiles. 
May my running be a true expression of worship as I remember I am beloved and as I remember and celebrate that this has been a thread woven through my life deepening my connection with God. 
May I find companionship with those I’ve named as my mile markers, and may I hear how the Spirit is inviting me to pray for their journeys.
May I also find companionship with myself, emerging stronger, more joyful, more truly me.
May God be in every step, may I feel God’s delight in each stride, and may I finish strong. 
Amen and amen.

(adapted from the prayers from Samuel T. Lloyd III, from Lisa Scandrette’s pilgrimage prayer, from Every Moment Holy, and from emails of encouragement for the race sent to me from friends)

Just getting to the start line took longer than it took me to run the whole marathon. I was up by 4 am to catch a 4:30 am bus to Staten Island arriving by 6:15 and waited there until 9:45 for Wave 2 to start. I met some wonderful people and enjoyed hearing a few stories of where folks were from and what brought them to this place.

Out of the people there (there were over 74,000 registered participants!), I saw a guy dressed as Spiderman and some French guys with red, white, and blue wigs, and I heard that there was a hot dog outfit and a chicken costume somewhere in the crowd.  Other than that, there was me dressed as the Statue of Liberty. I knew that no matter what happened, I might just be one of the participants who could claim to having the most fun with her running attire that day! For the record, I don’t dress up for every race, but I will say that it’s been so much fun to embrace the silliness of it all when I have done this. My friend J.J. Kissinger said, “The best memories are made while wearing a silly costume,” and I heard Kate Bowler interviewed one time who said, “Isn’t it so fun just to be ridiculous and decorative and to do things for nothing…and things that make us feel special?” 

 

I embraced the Statue of Liberty theme because I was supposed to run this race in 2020 but it was postponed because of Covid, and the race that year would have been on November 1 that year (the day after Halloween). It seemed only appropriate to celebrate New York with the most iconic symbol of this city around.  On top of that, I came across a children’s book last year by Dave Eggers called Her Right Foot that made it all the more meaningful. This book points out that the Statue of Liberty’s right foot shows her mid stride in motion: “If the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of freedom, if the Statue of Liberty welcomed millions of immigrants to the US, then how can she stand still? Liberty and freedom from oppression are not things you get or grant by standing around like some kind of statue. No! These are things that require action. Courage. An unwillingness to rest…. This is why she’s moving. This is why she’s striding.”  What a powerful image of our calling to keep moving towards justice and freedom in a world of such brokenness.

I started off the race a bit faster than my target pace and was feeling great for about the first 5 miles, but then I started to feel my quads tighten and I knew I was going to be in for a long (read:  painful) race. Cramps in my quads along with some painful charley horses in the last 10K made me nervous that my body was going to call it a day. 

Though I had put in months of training and had also felt great with a 23-mile run in October, I had to accept that this is what my body could give me yesterday. One article I’d read for marathon prep said to not chase- or expect- the perfect race. There is such wisdom in the words in that article for running and for life: “There’s no such thing as perfect preparation: only excellent adaptation.” So, I just kept adjusting my expectations for my time goals for the race and just focused on soaking up the whole experience. I kept thinking how grateful I was that she (my body) was giving me the ability to be here along with the resilience and tenacity to push through for so many miles especially after the last couple of years with some health setbacks—with my strange spike in blood pressure for 5 months in 2020 and my stress fracture that took months to recover from in 2021. Sometimes success looks different than we imagine, and the deep gratitude I experienced despite how I was feeling in the last few hours of the race was truly the marker for me of redefining success for this race.

One thought I had along the way when I was just wanting to be done was the idea from Anne Lamott that there are only two prayers that we need to know: “Help me” and “Thank you”…. So I’d pray “Help me” with a few strides as my legs were locking up, and then I’d pray “Thank you” for making it that far. And then, I’d do it all over again (and again and again). As a friend said to me in a text, “That’s so life… just the next step.”

This is my 11^th marathon, and I must say that there really is nothing like this one!  I am still in awe of how it seemed like the whole city was out cheering and helping all of us runners get to the finish. There’s nothing like a standing ovation and hearing my name shouted out with cheers from complete strangers (and my amazing family who came to cheer at 3 different spots along the course) for 26.2 miles just for showing up and putting one foot in front of the other. I was not setting any records here, but the cheers were as spirited as if I were an Olympic athlete about to win a gold medal.  It reminded me of this quote from R,J. Palacio from Wonder: “I think there should be a rule that everyone in the world should get a standing ovation at least once in their lives.” Thank you, New York, for giving that to me as I ran as Lady Liberty through your city!

What sheer delight and gratitude I had in the gift of being a part of this crazy race and to relish this one wild and absolutely precious life.