Our first stop was in Houston for a visit with my great aunt Thelma who just celebrated her 104th birthday. That's one hundred and four! Years! Here she is with her favorite little nephew, Max.
For someone born in 1905 in Indian territory that would eventually become the state of Oklahoma, Thelma is doing extremely well. Her hearing may be shot but she remembers all. She is sharp as a tack, funny as hell, and flat out amazing.
Next, it was on to Lake Jackson where we took care of the requisite nostalgic moment with the rediscovery of my 8th grade shop class welding project.
Soon to be refurbished back to its Bicentennial-era glory. Thanks, Mom!
Dad stayed busy with the murder of crows in the backyard. That's called "wordplay".
(Please note, no actual crows were harmed during the firing of this pellet gun.)
(Please note, no actual crows were harmed during the firing of this pellet gun.)
Ok, time to get down to the business at hand. On the eve of the race I began my intricate pre-marathon preparations. After a few hours of practice and with my father's expert help, I affixed my timing chip to my laces...
...and my bib to my shirt.
RACE DAY! Awake early, I unsuccessfully tried to convince my digestive tract that it was not 1:30am in Los Angeles. Damn you, willful digestive tract! We headed to Houston at an unholy predawn hour. Here I am walking up to the convention center. I was excited and a little nervous.
Entering the convention center was a mind-blower. Here in one gargantuan space were tens of thousands of runners milling around in a pre-race frenzy. It looked like a freshly disturbed antbed in there. I dropped off my bag of stuff and went and found the end of one of the many porta-potty lines. As I looked around my jaw slowly slacked open in wonder - I have never seen so many porta-potties in one place, not even in my most ambitious recurring bizarre-bathroom-themed dream. I was standing in line with hundreds, perhaps thousands of other people. Like a giant flock of birds we all had one thought in mind: drop the ballast before taking flight. Sadly, no pics of the vast porta-pottie array stretching to the horizon. Use your imagination.
I lingered in the infinite porta-potty fields a bit long so I hustled over to the starting line and jockied for position near the starting line - not too presumptuously close and not so far as to be shuffling along for ten minutes before actually starting to run. The sky was still pitch black as various minor celebrities said various encouragement-based things and we all sang the national anthem and readied for the gun... BOOM! or, rather, the cannon. Wedged into our starting chute, we all began creeping toward the starting line, slowly, then a little quicker, then finally this thick river of people was running.
I was off!
Prior to this day I'd run in 4 organized races: a 4 mile race on July 4, 1979 with my dad (thanks for doing such a fine job of checking me in that day, Dina!), and three 5K races in February, March, and April of 2008. Dad had encouraged me to run the 5Ks to get accustomed to the general race-day excitement and hoopla and I think they helped. But, as I crested a freeway overpass about a half mile into the race, nothing could have prepared me for the incredible sight of eighteen thousand running people in front of and behind me in a flowing phalanx stretching as far as the eye could see, all bobbing along together, with like mind and purpose, in the early morning luminescence.
Meanwhile, my family jumped into the car and began their grueling 4 hour odyssey around Houston, gamely dealing with closed roads, snarled traffic, and frayed nerves just to see me for about 10 seconds at various points and stages of decay along the 26 miles. Mile 4 was a bust but they got me at mile 8. I was running about an 8:30 pace at this point and felt great.
Such exuberance!
The Houston Marathon gets high marks for enthusiastic crowd participation and now I know why. Almost the entire length of the race was lined with cheering people, clapping, yelling, shouting out my name (it was on my bib), offering encouragement. It was just plain fantastic! There were many bands set up in parking lots or the median cranking out the tunes ( I heard Whiter Shade of Pale twice - go figure), an Elvis guy croaking out Hound Dog, a Blues Brothers tribute band, even a high school band doing their thing. And this was at about 7:00am on a Sunday!
Mile 12. Still feeling fantastic, still all smiles and high fives. I would soon hit the 13.1 mile halfway mark at 1:54:19. Right on target for a 3:50:00 finish!
Mile 16 and still feeling peppy. Houston was starting to warm up, though.
It was shortly after the above picture was taken, about mile 18 or so, that my wheels started to fall off. The cold I had predicted six months before and then of course caught about a week before the race started to catch up to me and I began to struggle. I needed to cough but couldn't really muster up the abdominal/lung strength to do so. My legs started hurting in the general groinal region, an unpleasantness I hadn't ever felt before. I wasn't hitting The Wall in the traditional sense because I was carrying a large supply of energy gels with me in my hydration belt, plus I was loading up on all the bananas and orange slices the nice rich people who live near the Galleria were handing out. No, this was the cold virus saying, "You've had your fun, now I'm going to kick your ass." I soldiered on but things deteriorated rapidly.
Mile 22. Full-on agony. I've never needed a pep talk from my father more than at that exact moment and in this picture that's pretty much what I'm telling him. I won't even try to describe what I was feeling. Let's just say it was pretty bad. I was trying to look casual, though.
By now the race had taken on a decidedly different flavor. Now it was solely about three things: pain management, the condition of the pavement immediately in front of me, and where the hell is the next goddamn mile marker?! All traces of celebration, fun, and levity were long gone. My addled brain was transforming the cheering crowd into a jeering crowd, like it couldn't process their enthusiasm as a positive thing in light of the intense pain I was feeling. I was going to attempt to draw a parallel to that scene in The Last Temptation of Christ where JC is dragging that giant cross while everyone is screaming and beating the crap out of him but on second thought, uh, maybe not.
By now the race had taken on a decidedly different flavor. Now it was solely about three things: pain management, the condition of the pavement immediately in front of me, and where the hell is the next goddamn mile marker?! All traces of celebration, fun, and levity were long gone. My addled brain was transforming the cheering crowd into a jeering crowd, like it couldn't process their enthusiasm as a positive thing in light of the intense pain I was feeling. I was going to attempt to draw a parallel to that scene in The Last Temptation of Christ where JC is dragging that giant cross while everyone is screaming and beating the crap out of him but on second thought, uh, maybe not.The race course layout sadists included a couple of underpasses at about mile 24 and here is where my resolve not to resort to my traditional cursing rants crumbled. After 24 miles, running on anything that isn't perfectly flat is just torture and I'm sure that anyone within earshot understood my displeasure. I came out of the underpasses into the winds whipping through the highrises of downtown, swearing when I could summon the strength and literally creeping along. By this point aunt Thelma could have walked backwards faster than I was running.
I made the final right turn onto Rusk and thank god could see the convention center and the finish line in the distance about a quarter mile away. The crowds were thick along this last stretch and I could hear the music and the guy on the loudspeaker shouting his exhortations at us weary runners in these final moments. "C'mon, man!" I thought, "Don't let all these people see you running slower than your 104 year old great aunt can walk backwards! Pick it up! GO!!" So, I sucked it up and shoved the pain to the side and started running - fast (or so I thought) - passing people left and right, not caring that I wasn't going to break four hours, just happy to be finishing, proud to have finally achieved my goal. I hit the finish line, waved my SE RACING cap in the air (in honor of Ol' Blue and so you could pick me out in the video), then finally - after running for four hours, two minutes, and fifty-four seconds - I stopped.
Plenty is said about what goes on during a marathon but nobody talks much about what happens immediately after. I was surprised at how much of a stupefied daze I was in. I felt totally drugged but not with painkiller-type drugs, that's for sure. I staggered over to the post-finish photo area where I tried to smile but ended up making the kind of face you'd expect from someone in incredible pain and trying not to show it. Once inside the convention center I thought I'd be faced with a huge selection of post-race food and drink but instead found myself just wandering slowly around the mostly empty hall, befuddled and unable to decide what to do. Should I go and get the free meal? Should I go explore those booths way over yonder? Everything looked about a half mile away in there and as I dawdled my legs began to tighten up to the point that I was afraid they'd eventually stop working. I staggered about, finally just slowly sinking to the floor where I tried, unsuccessfully, to stretch. My legs felt like they didn't belong to me or, rather, that I had been involved in a leg transplant operation with a meth-addled surgeon.
So, I'd done it. I felt happy and satisfied and proud and a bunch of other things. You might think that crossing the finish line was the moment I had been waiting for but really it was here, beneath the giant R in the area where runners were supposed to meet their families, that I finally got to enjoy that moment.
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