This article is featured in the 2025 Commencement & Reunions special issue.
During my freshman year, I received a Garmin running watch for Christmas. I had never worn one before, and its weight felt oddly foreign on my wrist. Yet, many of the friends I made that fall were runners who swore by their watches, so I took their advice and added one to my Christmas list. Three and a half years later, it now feels strange to be without my watch. Even as I sleep, it remains strapped to my wrist, and I think of my faint watch tan line as a badge of honor.
I’m decidedly not an elite runner. I’m nowhere near the fastest in the senior class or even in my friend group. However, I’ve struggled for days to condense my college experience into a single reflection, and the only narrative that keeps coming to mind is how my love for long distance running has grown over these four years. In particular, this journey is exemplified by my last two terms, in which I trained for and raced the Vermont City Marathon in Burlington, Vt. As a washed-up Mirror editor, it probably won’t surprise anyone that I am mining this race for content. Yet, in many ways, the lessons of marathon training are applicable to my time at Dartmouth.
First, as the saying goes, patience is a virtue. I began training for this marathon in mid-January. After running a half marathon last spring, I felt fairly confident I could finish the full race, so I estimated a time goal for myself. In the end, I crossed the finish line forty minutes ahead of this benchmark. If I had tried to run that pace at the start of my training cycle, I likely would have ended up gasping for air by mile five. Perhaps more importantly, if you had told sixteen-year-old me — who once ran eight miles and felt proud for days at covering that distance — that I would someday refer to a fifteen mile long run as comparatively “short,” I would have been stunned, and impressed.
In both marathon training and college, I’ve come to realize that time often brings solutions, no matter how dire a situation feels at the time. During many of my lowest moments at Dartmouth, it felt like the sky was falling and that my “college experience” was permanently ruined. I remember lying on the floor of my room crying to one of my roommates about sorority rush sophomore year, or feeling like I would never be employed when I was rejected freshman year for an internship that many of my friends received. Now, on the cusp of graduation, I look back on these experiences that felt devastating at the time and laugh at how everything, inevitably, worked out. In the end, I was no less happy at Dartmouth than I would’ve been had I gotten what I so desperately wanted.
Second, marathon training frequently seemed to eat all of my free time, forcing me to accept that it is possible to balance many things, but not everything. One Friday in February, I wanted to attend the Dartmouth-Yale basketball game that night, but I hadn’t had time to run earlier in the day. Instead of sitting in the stands, I dragged myself to a different part of the gym, parked myself on the treadmill and listened, from a distance, to the cheers of the crowd. I made this sacrifice willingly — I didn’t have a coach watching me to ensure I followed my training plan, and skipping one six-mile run wouldn’t render me incapable of completing the marathon. Yet, running a marathon had been on my bucket list for years, while the Dartmouth-Yale game was not. And I knew that the run would fill me with a level of satisfaction that outweighed any happiness I might get from attending the game.
In the same vein, I spent many days at Dartmouth feeling like a juggler, trying to balance a schedule that demanded being in six places at once. I have a bad habit of saving Listserv emails in the hopes that this will be the term I finally create a radio show, see every movie that plays at the Hop or attend Lodge dinner every weekend. When I’m faced with what feels like an endless list of potential activities, I’m left to make choices. Both marathon training and my time at Dartmouth have pushed me to prioritize, often ruthlessly. As much as I might complain about being busy, this juggling has taught me to be honest about what matters most and intentional about carving out time for it.
Third, what I tried and failed to comprehend during this training cycle is that you cannot run fast without running slow. During the last two weeks before the race, I spent every waking minute thinking about my left hip flexor, which radiated dull waves of pain down my leg, my right hip, which ached when I climbed stairs and the bottom of my right foot, which had a knot in it that no amount of rolling could soothe. These aches and pains are in part the product of my lack of focus on recovery, my desire to run faster on long runs and my insistence on running just “one more mile” every day for weeks.
In academics, too, I often fail to “run slow.” There were far too many nights this winter when I cracked open a Celsius at 9 p.m. to study for an exam, or crawled into bed long after midnight only to wake up hours later to fine-tune an essay. Though I finished the marathon, and caught up on sleep over breaks and weekends, I’m almost certain I would have experienced less burnout at the end of every term — and fewer minor injuries — if I had chosen to slow down.
Finally, the night before the marathon, my mom asked me what I thought about on my long runs. When I wasn’t choking down a Clif bar or mouthing the words to whatever song was on shuffle, I was often thinking about the Upper Valley. My longest training run was 22 miles, 11 along the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River and 11 along the Vermont side. Fog floated across the mountains, rain dripped from fat clouds and cows gnawed on green grass.
Maybe it was the exhaustion of running for hours or the nostalgia that seeps into every crevice of senior spring, but toward the end of the run I was filled with a level of gratitude that almost brought me to tears. In part, I ran the marathon this year for this feeling, for the chance to spend more hours than ever outside in a place that has shaped the past four years of my life. No matter how many more marathons I run — and I’ve already made a list of possible fall marathons — I’ll always be thankful for the hours I spent crawling up the hills of New Hampshire, flying down River Road in Vermont and running countless laps around Occom Pond.
In the days leading up to the race, I was gripped with panic, convinced I wouldn’t finish the marathon. That same dread now sits in my stomach as the number of days until graduation dwindles and I wonder what life after college looks like. Eventually, of course, I crossed the finish line, just as I’ll soon walk across the Commencement stage.
If the 800 miles I’ve run this year have taught me anything, it’s that no amount of training makes you feel completely ready when the starting gun goes off. No number of hours spent on the Green or walks around campus will make me feel ready to leave when I collect my diploma. But the race started, and there was nowhere to go but forward. Graduation will happen, with nowhere to go but onward.
When I lace up my running shoes for the final time as a student, I’ll think of my first run in Hanover, back in September 2021, when I made it half a mile before getting lost. Now, I’ll go farther, carrying with me all the miles and every version of myself that ran them, as I start my watch here one last time.
Gretchen Bauman is a former Mirror editor of The Dartmouth and a member of the Class of 2025.
