The date approached quickly, and when I woke up at 4:50 am, I was glad it wasn’t raining. I slept like crap because the dog was scratching his collar all night. After the alarm went off I put on the clothes I laid out and drove to the Whole Foods parking lot to catch a shuttle bus to the start of the California International Marathon.
When the bus arrived, there were a hundred more in front. The bus idled, and someone came on to tell us, we could stay on the heated bus or get off, but don’t leave any of our crap. I ate two nature valley granola bars, so really four granola bars, and drank water before I decided to walk toward the start line. Along the way men were pissing off the side of the walking path into a small stream, and even with this siphoning of exhibitionists, the lines for the endless chain of port-a-potties were enormous. Not sure if I had to pee, or if I was nervous, I decided to wait in line, knowing by the time I reached the front, I’d have to go.
I took my place in the ten minute mile group. Even though I didn’t train, I felt fine because I run four days a week, granted it’s with a dog that stops to pee on every bush, and in the end I get about four miles done in an hour, but I figured the height of my psychical fitness lied within me, waiting to be awakened.
The race started, and I took it one mile at a time. Two people gave me advice, my friend Jane, who said it would be fine, as long as I drank the water at every water station, and my older sister, Lacey, who said, “Anyone can run a marathon, you just can’t stop.” Lacey ran a marathon in Disney World ten years earlier with my little sister, who said Lacey spent the last five miles crying to an embarrassing degree but was too absorbed in her emotions to notice the looks she was getting.
I did great the first two-thirds of the race. In fact, at the end of the race I was annoyed by my chipper self at the beginning, taking notes in my phone so I’d remember things to write in my blog, waving to the sidelines cheering crowds, and thinking about everything I was grateful for.
I stopped journaling a few months back because I burnt out on it. When I started gratitude journalling in June, it turned into a painful exercise where I felt like I was lacking genuine feeling, rather on task for the promised rewards of an endless depth of riches.
The new-age “organized religion” of well-to-do white people claiming their exceptional good fortune comes from their undeniable connection to the universe rather than a social caste system is irritating. I imagine the conferences for these mindfulness gurus are 95% Lululemon models, and they’re too idiotic to realize the confounding factors of their good fortune.
Around mile 20 my joy shrunk down to nothing, and I had to push through unfamiliar pain. I started being passed by waves of people I remembered flying by much earlier.
There is not a physical limitation to running a marathon, aside from having legs. Women with a hundred pounds on me, we're jogging past. Old people, that looked like they just came from a Chiquita Banana commercial, trotted past, head down, forward momentum from their curved back pushing them through each step. At one point a women passed me pushing an adult man in a reclining wheel chair. She smiled at me, and I smiled back, giving her a pained thumbs up.
The only people I passed over the last five miles were the injured, sitting on the side of the road, fighting back tears, stretching out whatever atrocity happened to their body. These people actually looked like Fleet Feet sponsored athletes, lean and muscular, dressed in the most appropriate attire, which made it more sad.
The race started in Folsom and ended at the state capitol building in Sacramento. Midway through the race, when I still had space in my mind to think, I ran through my old neighborhood, Carmichael, the neighborhood I associate with my married years. We ran passed my old grocery store, library and cross streets. I remembered seven years earlier, when I had the kids in a jogging stroller and I ran into this marathon. Someone on the sidelines congratulated me, and I had to admit, I didn’t push my kids in this stroller the 15 miles prior, I just came from around the corner. The neighborhood looked beat up, and there were more homeless tents, but maybe it always looked like that.
I passed the office of a psychic I once visited. She ate McDonalds and drank a red bull while she told me nothing exciting, and I left there feeling like I wasted money. Maybe she knew I would try to change things if she said what laid in store for me.
Like all psychics, she closed up the session by telling me coins I find on the ground are from my dead relatives saying hello. I passed a penny laying on the ground five times over the entire marathon. I usually pick up this minimal monetary treasure, for luck, but I couldn’t stop on the run for fear I’d end up stuck in the bent over position. Someone once told me, “Never pass a coin in the street, it tells the universe you don’t want money.” I figured in this case I was telling the universe I value my health over money, and they’d appreciate that.
It was the beginning of December, and I didn’t start Christmas shopping. My kids’ ridiculous list of Christmas wants were laughable, and I did everything to curb their expectations of getting iPhones and computers. I planned on buying them a PC, but when my son was sent home a letter from his teacher reprimanding him for not listening to her, I said there would be no computer and he lost TV.
That night I walked to G’s room. Kiki and him were laying in bed, and before I was at the door, I heard her say, “She was never a good mother to you.”
I came around the corner shouting, “Kingsley!”
She whipped her head towards me, and a smile came across her face. “I am trying to comfort him… because he lost TV,” she said.
“Don’t tell him stuff like that! It’s psychotic.”
Later that week, at bedtime, she started crying, too absorbed in her emotions to see how ridiculous she sounded, “You aren’t going to buy me a laptop! That is all I want for Christmas.”
I was brushing her hair, and her emotions were impenetrable, so I jokingly said, “What do you need a computer for? You plan on writing a manifesto.”
It went unnoticed, aside from my boyfriend, who chuckled in the other room.
I was expecting a divine moment when I was running the marathon, maybe a vision from God. It didn’t happen. In front of the last Del taco I’d run past, my boyfriend texted, “How are you doing?”
I could be on the side of the road, with a flat tire, and a broken arm, and I’d write back, “Doing great!” But this time, all I could say was, “I’m doing OK.” Which meant, “Tell my children I love them, and not to fight over the $1,200 I have in my savings account… it has to go to my credit card.”
The closest I got to an out of body experience was when my hands started to tingle at the start of the last mile. I decided to walk in case I pass out. Entering Midtown Sac, the streets were lined with poster board waving crowds, my favorite board read “Run Bitch!!” I alleviated the stress with humor, and let all the spectators know, this is the only marathon I’d ever run.
A finisher passed me, and said, “You say that now!”
I jogged across the finish line, and was handed a much deserved medal. Someone handed me a ticket for a free beer, and I asked if I could get a Marlboro Light instead. With no one there to celebrate with I hobbled over to the shuttle busses heading back the the Folsom Whole Foods. I chatted with other finishers, and when they saw me descend from the bus like a woman who was taking her first steps in a decade, one man said, “You need to have a glass of wine and get in a hot bath.”
I didn’t tell him my bathtub is really only good for toddlers, and any full grown adult, has to sit with her tits out in the freezing cold. It’s the opposite of relaxing. I just said, “Oh, I’m an alcoholic, I’ll just take some ibuprofen.” He apologized for some reason.
I hobbled around Whole Foods to buy dinner, and drove home. I took a shower before my kids came back, and the moles on my stomach were circled with blood from my t-shirt rubbing them for five hours. They begged to put up the Christmas tree, and my immobility forced us to have to wait till the next day.
Christmas came, along with record breaking snowfall in the mountains, which equates to never ending rain in Sacramento. My boyfriend pulled back the curtains in our bedroom this morning, and said, “It looks like an ad for seasonal depression out there.”
The weekend before Christmas, my kids went to their dad’s, and we wrapped presents. The kids called and said, “Were driving to the snow.” They said “the snow” some some soft-pawed, city-slickers, and I imagined them parked along side the summit with a slew of other underused SUVs, wearing pristine snow suits, and riding a saucer down a carved out hill, with a million other people..
I took the kids to Tahoe the week before, and when I picked up Indian food from the liquor store at the end of the street, the cashier said, “I took off your twenty percent local’s discount.” I haven’t lived in Tahoe in over twenty years, but I still got the essence of someone who can drink twelve Coor’s Lights while shoveling snow in a t-shirt. We went sledding that week, with my sister and her kids. We hiked out into the middle of nowhere, and after finding a slope steep enough Becky would send them down what ended up looking like a Plinko board of decent, and my job was to fetch the sleds the kids would drop, flying a hundred feet away, while they were trudging up the hill. The outing ended the way it should, someone getting injured, and everyone suffering from extreme cold and snow in their boots.
I was nervous Christmas morning, my kids would be unsatisfied by their loot, and then let me know it. My strategy for any rudeness was to watch Manchester By The Sea as a family, and afterward, while we’re all recovering from sobbing hysterically, I tell them, “This Christmas I gave you the gift of gratitude.” I’d put on Lululemon leggings before. I didn’t have to worry about it because their dad bought them computers, so everything I gave them was a cherry on top.
I woke up the day after Christmas with the craziest pain in my left wrist, that I diagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome brought on from a lifetime of going to bed like a Precious Moments ceramic figurine, curled up on my side, with prayer heads under my cheek, but it also could be that my resting position is a limp-wrist, hunched-over, George Burns. I bought a brace on Amazon, the last of my Christmas shopping.
That night I dreamed I had a baby, and it was Jesus. My message from God came. Of typical fashion, it was a month late, and I have no idea what it means. With the marathon off my bucket list, I have other resolutions to foster, some seem harder than running twenty-six miles. It might be worth gratitude journalling again, and if I’m feeling misdirected in my intention, I’ll watch Manchester By The Sea. Everything is like a marathon, really; the long game, a push through, a reliance on hope. Sometimes a penny on the ground is worth more than one cent, and if I'm going to have depression, than seasonal depression is the best kind. So if you ask me how I am, I'm back to saying, "I'm Great!"
Happy New Years everyone!
