Today is a sad day for me. It marks the end of a year of completely guilt-free laziness. For the past year, I've eaten pretty much whatever I wanted, only exercised when it was fun and had no qualms about doing things like going to the Friendly's in West Lebanon for dinner and then stopping at the Wendy's for a frosty on my way home.
How could anyone do this stuff guilt-free? Well a year ago today, I ran the Boston Marathon. I've been in post-marathon celebration mode ever since.
To help explain what I mean, here's an example of a conversation I've had plenty of times.
"Dolan, you got EBAs again? When's the last time you've been to the gym?"
"Dude, I ran 26.2 miles like eight months ago, leave me alone."
However misconstrued that thinking was, my conscience was satisfied with it, which was good enough for the rest of me.
So, since the 2010 Boston Marathon is going on today, my year of guilt-free laziness is up, I feel like today is my last chance to milk anything out of this.
In honor of that, for anyone curious about what running it was like, here's a list of some of the big things I remember.
1) At the 1-mile marker I remember thinking, "I'm already tired, I have absolutely no shot of finishing this."
2) Around mile 13, the course goes past the all-girls Wellesley College. Here, hundreds of girls line the side of the road and you can hear their cheering long before you actually pass them. The most memorable part though, many of them are holding huge signs that say "kiss me."
As best I can remember, this is pretty much the exact thoughts that went through my head:
"Are these girls holding kiss me signs? Yup, they definitely are Alright, I'm gonna regret it if I don't pick one and go for it. Time to find a cute one Meh Meh Meh Shit, I'm basically past the college, I should of just settled Oh wait perfect, she's the one Wait, does her sign say Girls Only at the bottom? Shaft, that was my last chance."
Yup, so I pretty much totally blew that one. The only saving grace was that I talked to my brother, who along with my parents also ran the marathon, and he said pretty much all the signs had "Girls Only" on them. Thinking about it now, that kind of makes sense.
3) There are people lining both sides of the road for pretty much the entire race. This is actually really helpful, as I wrote my name on my jersey, so pretty much the entire time someone was cheering my name. Although towards the end this got a little annoying. I distinctly remember one girl who had a beer in one hand and a sandwich in the other, but still found it necessary to shriek at me "Tim, go faster." Um, eff off.
A ton of people are drinking heavily too. I think I got offered more beer that day than I ever have in my life. It was like, "Oh, so this is what it's like being a cute girl in a frat basement, minus the sexual intentions."
4) At one point I heard that the top runners had finished and I hadn't even made it halfway yet.
5) Starting at mile 16, there are three hills known as the "Heartbreak Hills." These were definitely the hardest part of the run and after finishing them I couldn't believe I had 6 miles to go.
Luckily, one of my high school friends who goes to school in Boston was waiting at the top of the hill. He ran with me for about a mile but was clearly really drunk, so eventually he had to pull over and throw up. That was great for my overall morale.
6) After I finished and the excitement faded, I thought I was going to die. Remember the Greek story about the guy dying after he ran from Marathon to Athens and his last word was "Nike," which means "victory" in Greek? Well I did, and look how famous the word "Nike" is today. So for about 10 minutes after finishing I was very careful about my word choice. I did not want to go out using a sentence like "Yea the hardest part was the nipple chafing." "Chafing" doesn't have quite the ring the same ring as "Nike."
