26.2 Miles Equals 42 Kilometers (& Other Lessons from Marathoning Abroad)

All I have to say is, khallas ("it's finished").

It wasn't pretty, but I finished 26.2 in in 4:38 - 59 minutes slower than my best time, but 82 minutes faster than the cutoff limit. In the end, I'm proud to be living, breathing, limping proof that you can run a marathon without "training" in the conventional sense - although I'd like to think that I get some residual fitness benefits through the intense workouts I give my liver and heart rate (recommended exercises: boozing, rage) by living in Dubai.

At 6 AM I walked to the starting line alone, save a few laborers and prostitutes along the way, and much to my great awe and amazement was able to see Haile Gebrselassie and the #2, 3, and 4 men's seeds doing their warm-up strides only a few feet away from me. One of the benefits of doing a race with a very small field but a very rich prize purse? You get to be within tripping distance of the best marathoner in history! After a 15-minute delay, the starting gun went off at 7:15 (that's AST - Arab Standard Time) and, choking back tears (as is my custom), I set out on my merry way.

I burned through the first 13.1 miles in 1:58 thanks to the pacesetting of Wolfi and Marcus, a pair of gregarious Austrians I packed in with upon learning they were planning to run sub-4. Our fleeting race-friendship ended soon after the halfway mark, when I realized that OH MY GOD I HAD BEEN SMOKING CRACK IF I HAD THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO RUN AN UNTRAINED-FOR MARATHON IN UNDER 4 HOURS and proceeded to die (no but really - die die die die die), running the second half in 2:40... for those of you who are not runners, a 42-minute difference in the amount of time it takes you to run your first and second halves is a very good example of How Not To Run A Race.

So yeah. First half = good times with jovial Austrians. Second half = Dante's 9th Circle of Hell.

When they left me at the half, Wolfi and Marcus gave me a Tropical Fruit PowerGel as a parting gift, and from the 20K mark to the 3oK mark I fantasized about how, at 30K (18 miles), I would allow myself to eat the gel and it would be the most delicious, restorative, succulent food on earth. Which it was, actually, but not even that was enough to dull the pain of 20+ miles on legs that hadn't undertaken more than 6 in almost a year.

30K to 40K was really just unbearably and inconceivably painful. I think the only things that allowed me to survive were Paul, a oldish Lebanese man who would come up from behind and give me a gentle shove when I started to run sideways instead of straight, and the series of weird mantras I kept repeating over and over in my head that seemed very profound at the time but now just sound crazy (the only one I can remember is "there is a place inside me which knows no tears" - LOL!).

Somewhere right after 40K, I almost killed an Indian woman who was walking along the course, disinterestedly shouting "Faster, faster, faster!" But then a group of nice South African girls gave me a handful of Gummi Bears - a welcome blood sugar spike for the last stretch - and I decided there were better uses for my remaining energy than murder. Right before the 41K mark, Old Lebanese Paul and I found each other again and - in one of those moments of intense camaraderie between strangers that I truly believe are unique to marathons and crashing planes - we looked at each other and said "yallah, we will sprint the last kilometer together."

And so we did, and I finished, and R and Jojo&M were there to collect me, and I got my medal, and a few hours later I was at brunch eating 4 meals and all was right with the world.

So voila, after a 5-year hiatus my marathoning career has resumed. There were a lot of things that were different about running a marathon abroad - like the fact that the whole course was delineated in kilometers (I mean, why not furlongs? or hectares?), and the conspicuous absence of both obnoxious Team in Training groupies and runners wearing Hebrews 11-2 ("Let us run with perseverance the race set out before us...") t-shirts. It was also weird to run a race without hearing the national anthem at the start (although that usually just exacerbates my pre-marathon weepiness, haha), and to see 2 girls in hijab, long-sleeved tunic shirts, and leggings queuing up with the rest of us... no word on whether they finished, but it was a hot day to be a female Muslim runner.

And with that, dear readers, I will leave you to try and stand up, and perhaps even straighten my legs. Wish me luck!