WHEN ONCE IS GOOD ENOUGH
STORY BY Marion Winik ILLUSTRATION BY Paige Vickers
Do you have what it takes to run a marathon? Consider this. Mbarak Hussein of Kenya, who won the 2002 Honolulu Marathon, finished in two hours, 12 minutes. Marion Winik, then of Pennsylvania, came in 16,409th, just shy of four hours later. While the more competitive marathons would have shut down their courses before I ever crossed the finish
line, Honolulu and many others let you take as long as you want.
That is, if you want to do it at all. I know what you’re thinking. I, too, once had as much interest in long-distance running as I had in other ancient arts, such as washing clothes with stones in a river. So what happened? How did a perfectly sane food, wine and book lover turn into one of the nearly half-million people who finished a U.S. marathon that year?
I was closing in on 40 when I first started exercising: a little walking, a little running, a little weight lifting. Then a few years later, at a 5k race I ran right after I moved to Pennsylvania, I met a group of middle-aged women who were marathon runners.
Vicki, a Jewish mother and lawyer with a touch of asthma, ran her first marathon on her 50th birthday. Marsha, a gentle librarian from Kentucky, began training when her son was diagnosed with leukemia and she started to worry about her own health. Theresa, sociologist and recovered alcoholic, refocused her hard-core compulsive tendencies on the goal of doing a marathon in each of the 50 states. The group also included Nancy and Katherine and Paulette . . . as I heard their unlikely stories of athletic accomplishment, I was sure I would never become one of them.
Theresa, who became my regular running partner, knew just what to say to that. It’s like when you first hear about sex when you’re a little kid, she told me one day on the trail. You think, Ick! People actually do that? Not me! Never! Then the years go by, and you get more and more curious. Finally, you do it, and once you do, you’re never the same.
If you don’t want to run a marathon, make sure you don’t meet this woman. She breaks you down. I just thank God I met her when she was into exercise rather than booze and drugs.
Over the next few years, Theresa and her friends trained for the Steamtown Marathon in the Poconos, the Marine Corps Marathon in D.C., and the Disney in Florida, but I kept my distance. Run a good state and I’ll come with you, I said. What’s a good state? she asked. Hawaii, I told her.
Less than a year later, we were buying our tickets for the pre-race luau.
My four-month training program started in September and ran according to a schedule Theresa gave me: two runs each week ranging from four to eight miles, plus a weekend long run, increasing a mile every Sunday to a 20-miler a few weeks before the race. I trained on a beautiful, wooded 40-mile rail trail that runs from York, Pennsylvania down to Baltimore County. It passed a half-mile from the house I then lived in with my second husband and our blended family – five kids ranging in age from Jane, 1, to my Hayes and his Emma, both 14.
As it turned out, my longest training run was 21 miles, not 20, because it was so dark when I started out on my loop that freezing, rainy morning I couldn’t even see the white mileposts in the brush alongside the trail, and so ran too far before I turned around. I finished more than five hours later, hobbling, soaked, maniacally chanting car! car! car! car! as I caught sight of my vehicle in the parking lot in New Freedom, Pennsylvania.
I was sure the marathon could not be more of a challenge.
By the time Theresa and I showed up at 4:30 a.m., about 30,000 very wide awake people had gathered on the green at Honolulu’s Ala Moana Beach Park, where a predawn Pacific breeze rustled through the banyan trees and coconut palms and lightened the moist, tropical air. They fiddled with their watches, stretched their hamstrings, retied their shoes, then made their way to the starting chute.
Everything was great for about three miles; the feeling of being part of such a giant pack of people, stretching ahead and behind to the horizon was exhilarating.
But just as we passed the giant lit up Polynesian Santa Claus at Honolulu City Hall, at about mile three of the marathon, I got a very bad cramp in my right calf. I had experienced this cramp in the last few weeks of training, and when it showed up that morning in Honolulu, I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait it out or stretch it out — I would run the race with it, or I would not run.
So I kept going. After all, I hadn’t come all the way to Hawaii, leaving my husband with all five of our children in a midwinter snowstorm, to give up. I certainly couldn’t imagine telling the kids, who were both proud and dubious when I announced my plans, that I hadn’t done it. Didn’t Theresa say I was golden, trained to go the distance, sure to finish? As I fell farther and farther back in the pack, Theresa stayed with me, taking pictures of me every five miles so I had to smile.
Finally, at the finish line, I collapsed into her arms and had to spend just a few minutes recovering in the medical tent, crying and elated.
To be honest, I haven’t been a consistent exerciser in the intervening years. Aside from my knees, not great before I started and never the same after, I also let myself be thrown off by various distractions and excuses. While bad habits tend to lurk around forever, nipping at one’s heels like abandoned puppies, good habits are hard to create and easy to let go. The form of exercise I’ve managed to latch onto in this era of my life is hot yoga, which offers the intensity, the sweating, the improved sense of well-being I truly miss whenever I slip back into my lay about ways.
Twelve years later, I still wear my navy blue Honolulu Marathon finisher’s T-shirt with pride, and I will until it falls apart altogether. Theresa was right about the marathon: completing it permanently changed my self-concept. So many things could have stopped me – not just the leg cramp, but time and age and death and my own limiting voices, not to mention all the important and less self-centered things I had to do – but none of them did.
I did it just once, but once was good enough for me. *
