The tale of a city, a 26.2 mile race, and how I learned to stop worrying and love the Lebanese army...
Our story begins at the obscenely early hour of 5:45 AM on Sunday morning, when L and I straggled out of our hotel, into a taxi, and onto a shuttle bus to the starting line. Cold, tired, and nervous, we were of course thrilled to discover that the bus was full of Lebanese men, Russian men, Polish men, potentially Ukrainian men, indiscriminately Slavic men, and maybe even a Kazakh (man) or two. Yup - ambassadors of culture and gender, that's us!
When we finally arrived at the course, I had to rub my eyes in disbelief when I looked at the street signs and realized that we were starting the race from smack dab in the middle of Sabra and Shatila. For those of you that did not spend your senior year of university stalking Lebanon for an ill-fated thesis, and/or are too lazy to visit Wikipedia, I will tell you: Sabra and Shatila are the pair of crazy-ass Palestinian refugee camps where several hundred innocent civilians were murdered under the watch of Ariel Sharon during the 1982 war in Lebanon. It’s kind of like starting your marathon from… I don’t know, Columbine or Ground Zero or the Oberoi Hotel. Inauspicious, you might say. Don't get me wrong, I always feel like crying at the beginning of a marathon, but not usually because I’m in a globally renowned locus of unfettered evil and human suffering.
(Haha, although now that I think about it, I did feel extra weepy at the starting line for Dubai last year…)
At any rate. The sun rose, we stretched, we ate our bananas, and we saw some other Westerners, which greatly assuaged our worries about where the hell we were and what the hell we were doing. We even met a cool (if crazy) 50something American woman who was running her 40th (!!!) marathon and had spent the past two years making a documentary about the race in Beirut and how it’s a metaphor for the resilience of the human spirit. Hmmm.
Before we knew it it was 7 AM, and the starting gun went off at 7:10 AM (Arab Standard Time). What follows is a blow-by-blow of things I remember, as they unfolded (with the caveat that when the body depletes its glycogen stores, mental reasoning is one of the first skills to go… look for that around 25K).
1-3 K: Oh hai marathoning! We feel great! Yay! A charming Lebanese DJ plays “What A Feeling” from Flashdance by the side of the road and it seems – for the time being – to be a great, fun, motivational song. A few hundred meters in, I get passed by a white guy of indiscernable provenance who yells out “HEY! I know you! You were in the Ras Al Khaimah half marathon last year!” Um… okay, crazy. I mean, I was, but wow. We’re 1,300 miles away and that was 10 months ago and you just recognized me from my ass/calves/trademark hair bun. This is the first of three krazy-rando brushes with coincidence for the day.
3-6 K: Second krazy-rando brush with coincidence. We pack in with a tall, cute, all-American guy from California and start chatting him up, only to find out he lives in Kabul, at which point L and I both exclaim with glee “Ooh, we have to play Kabul Name Game with you!” (Ed. note: in what context, other than my life, would that be an actual game people play?!) Turns out he knows like five of my friends from Kabul and is even in a poker group with one of them. I don’t know what kind of shady circles I run in (literally and figuratively) that I would happen upon someone running a marathon in Lebanon who knows my friends in Afghanistan, but I kind of even sketch myself out. Anyhow, at this point we realize we’re running down some kind of “Avenue of the Martyrs” in south Beirut which features posters of different Hezbollah suicide bomber about every 100 meters… tempered by a Lebanese military guard brandishing an automatic weapon about every 50 meters, so the ratio worked out in our favor.
6-12 K: Settle into our stride, leave All-American Kabul Dude in our wake. Look for a bathroom around 10 K, to no avail. Around 11 K a nice race organizer pedals past us on his bike. We ask where the toilets are and he responds, “oh… they were back at the start." WTF?! This prompts a kilometer-long tirade from me, denouncing the Lebanese for not being “solutions-oriented” and failing to adhere to “best practice” of having a toilet every 3-5 K, at which point L asks me to please stop talking like a consultant during the race or else she will yak. Around 12 K, we find an abandoned underground parking garage in which we just barely manage to pop a squat before a soldier kicks us out. Mission accomplished.
15 K: We pack in with Serge, a very cute Lebanese 18 year-old in basketball shoes who is running his first marathon on a whim. He fills me with a little rage because he alternates between sprinting ahead of us and lagging behind, but still wants to chat with us the whole time (total breach of marathon etiquette). I try to convince L that we should leave him, but she makes the valid point that it might come in handy to have an Arabic speaker near us in the field, which it soon does when L needs another toilet break and Serge is able to convince some petrol station owners to let her use their loo. (Tell me, what did I pay a $50 entry fee for if not for toilets on the course? Was I subsidizing the Hezbollah posters?!)
18 K: Some Poles pass us. L speaks to them in Russian. They do not understand her, however Teenage Lebanese Serge does, because apparently his father was a diplomat and he was born in Moscow. He asks her why she speaks Russian and she gets to whip out the all-time best-ever marathon line, the nonchalant "eh, I used to work in nuclear security." We hear "What A Feeling" for the third or fourth time. WHO TOLD THE LEBANESE THIS WAS A RUNNING SONG?
20 K: We pass through Beirut's Armenian quarter, identifiable by the fact that every shop is called something along the lines of "Setrakian's Laundry" or "Dr. Garabedian's Happy Teeth Dental Clinic." That, and the group of festive Lebanese-Armenian police officers who do a little clapping dance for us as we run by.
21K: HALF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We sprint the end of the 21st kilometer to finish the first half right at 2:00 (which, had it not been for Toilet Tourism, would have easily been 1:55). Teenage Lebanese Serge falls off the pace. Very soon thereafter, we enter The Dark Place.
22-31 K: The Dark Place. You could say it was our own fault for failing to manage expectations, but based on a cursory glance at the course map, we had thought this part of the race would be along the Mediterranean... which it kind of was, if you interpret "along the Mediterranean" to mean "wedged between a busy highway full of lecherous Lebanese men honking at us from vintage 1970s-era Peugeots and a dank row of old crappy buildings which were only about 50 meters away from the Mediterranean, but obscured any possible pleasant view." Add this to NO spectators, extremely sporadic water stations, and the blazing Mediterranean sun, and you get... well, The Dark Place. I had forgotten how overwhelmingly sad I get during marathons, especially about 13-18 miles in, when you've come too far to quit but you're not close enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's a terrible feeling - like being stuck smack dab in the middle of the grieving process, when you're past the denial phase but you can't yet imagine how you're ever going to get through it.
32 K: 20 miles! I had planned to do my Gu here, but of course there was no water station, so I swallow my tears instead and carry on.
33 K: Water. Gu. Walking, for a bit. We pass a Lebanese woman who I had mowed down with mental judgement at the starting line (okay, she was wearing makeup and fake blue contact lenses and long fake-blonde hair and she was Lebanese - I was right to be incredulous). We cheer her on and I have one of those Great Moments of Marathon Equanimity where I got all "how dare I judge people, it's great that she's breaking stereotypes, everyone should run marathons and then we would all impress each other all the time, LA LA LA" in my head. And then two seconds later I was like "thank God we passed her, I would be so embarassed to get beaten by a Lebanese chick." Glycogen depletion. Sigh.
34 K: Third krazy-rando brush with coincidence - L has an old Italian (?) guy charge her, yelling "S... A... I... S! S... A... I... S?!" at which point we are both like dude WTF is going on and then we realize he's pronouncing the individual letters of the acronym for her grad school, as opposed to just calling it "SAIS" like, oh you know, normal people do. Anyhow, we shuffle along talking to him for a bit and apparently he is the tennis partner of someone she knew in grad school in DC and he picked her out of the crowd. All I have to say is, "Team G-Unit: Attracting Stalkers to a Marathon Near You!"
35-37 K: At a certain point L stops to walk and I stop as well, prompting her to be like "NO GO ON WITHOUT ME!" So I had to be like "NO I'VE WANTED TO WALK FOR THE PAST 5 K" and we kind of have a little mini head-butt about who is slowing whom down, if indeed that is the case, and then we hug and make up and proceed to be like "mmmmmm... walking!" for the next two minutes. When we start running again, I immediately go to The Very Dark Place (not to be confused with The Dark Place) which is actually quite entertaining because it involves thinking pseudo-deep glycogen-deprived thoughts about life and love and struggle and triumph and how somehow every challenge you've ever faced (or are facing, or will face) in your life relates back to finishing this marathon. I imagine The Very Dark Place is kind of like being on psychotropic drugs in terms of the beautiful crystalline false-clarity of the revelations you have while under their influence.
38-40 K: Of course, the organizers pick this point in the race to shoot everyone out onto an open highway that has one lane blocked off (kind of) for runners. Just what you want when you're so exhausted you can barely move in a straight line: a 2-inch margin of error for getting hit by a speeding car!
41-42 K: HOME STRETCH!!!!! L is disturbingly quiet except for occasionally yelling out "Shit! I have nothing left!" to no one in particular, so I start giving breathless speeches about inertia and how by this point we cannot be stopped. Having never run a marathon "with" someone (the two marathons I ran with Lar involved him finishing 10-20 minutes ahead of me), I have to say that it was immensely comforting to have someone next to me in those lonely silent terrible last few kilometers - there is definitely something to the idea that you draw on each other's strength.
42.195 K: Before we knew it, it was over in 4:16:09 - 27 minutes slower than my best time, but 22 minutes faster than Dubai last year, the "reemergence" of my marathoning career.
Postlude: medals, blisters, Starbucks, pastries, showers, Christmas music, 2 bottles of champagne, TGI Friday's (yes, in downtown Beirut), 3-hour flight home.
Next stop: Dubai Marathon, 16 January 2009. A triumphant return to sub-4-hour marathoning, you heard it hear first!
