I will belong.

Around a year ago today, Carolyn, my half marathon coach asked me a few times: “Mike, do you think you’ll sign up to run a full marathon sometime?” and every time my answer was the same: “No way, that’s crazy far! I’ll never run a marathon.”

The AT&T Marathon is one week away. I keep telling people that I talk to that I’ve been training for this marathon since September. But really, that’s not true. Last year, I ran the half marathon, while many people I know ran the full. I was ecstatic with my results in the half. I wanted a sub 1hr 45, and ran a sub 1hr 38. I was a happy as can be. You couldn’t take the smile from my face.

That is, until I went to the finish line of the full. Personally, I had accomplished something great. I had only been running for 6 months, and I had run a sub 7min 30 sec per mile pace for a ½ marathon! But it felt like it was weak. People around me had just finished a journey while I had just been on a brief 'jog around the lake'. Later on that evening, I went to the Tap Room, to the post marathon party. I hoped some of my fellow ‘halfers’ would be there, but not a single one.

I remember clearly how I would ask people how they did, and I would hear incredible tales of strength, pain and suffering, cramps, demons in their heads, terrible cold weather conditions etc. And then, each and everyone would say, "How’d you do?" And I’d say: "Oh, I just ran the half”. I could have easily jumped out of my chair and told my incredible feat, but it felt out of place; I simply didn’t belong.

That evening, was a turning point for me. Before we even left the bar, I had decided that I would run the full the following year. I signed up for a 5K / 10K speed work program, then took a month off to rest, then joined up with Sisson’s Performance Project group for 3 months over the summer. I went religiously and ran hard at all the speed workouts, and ran the long runs on the weekend, knowing I wanted to build a good base and feel strong coming into September, when I would join the Marathon program.

Over the last 12 months, I’ve had this goal, and now it’s 1 week away. I’m scared. I won’t deny it. Panther, my coach, sent me an email in early October asking me for my Marathon Goal Time and Goal Pace. I said 3hr 27. Really, because I wanted to run a tad faster than an 8 minute mile. We went back and forth on email that afternoon, and he said he thought I could do better. Fine, I moved down to a 3hr 22, partly because my friend Ostrich was running that, and because, well, it was another 5 minutes to appease him.
He then asked me: What’s your Boston Qualifier?
I looked it up, and shot back: 3:15:59.
He replied: Go for that.

Later that week, we Sat down in his office at Aussies with a Sunshine Wheat and a Sierra Nevada respectively, and talked about it some more. He convinced me to train towards a 3:15, and scale back later if it felt too fast. So I did.

I’m scared, and I’m really nervous, and every time I’ve put on my running shoes since about, oh, early December, I think of Feb 18. Will I be able to hold 7:26pace for 3 hours and 15 minutes? I've hit the numbers I'm supposed to hit so far, so who the hell knows.

Provided I don’t have a physical set back over the next 6 days, I’m going for it. I can deal with adversity. I can handle pain. I can run through bad demon spells. I’m told I’m good at holding on for dear life when I have to, during the latter stages of the 6 distance races we’ve done leading up to the marathon.

On a personal level I've had quite a year these last 12 months, and I guess it's made me tougher. Sunday, I run for no one but myself. There’s not much that will stop me. I will have to physically collapse to fail. I’ll run through my Plantars Fasciitis issues, and I’ll embrace cramps if they challenge me like at the ARA20 miler. I may sound selfish, but I think I have to be selfish for this. I have one thing to prove to myself and only myself, and that’s that I am good enough to buy a ticket to Boston.

And if I don’t, well, I’ll have a shiny medal, and a personal record. And I know one thing’s for sure, I’ll have a race story to share at the Tap Room come Sunday at 7pm, and that night regardless how it all went, I will belong.