This week I am featuring my awesome friend, Eric. His post isn’t quite the same as the others in that it doesn’t answer the specific questions I tossed out to be answered. However, his story is truly amazing. Dedication, training, perseverance, and pure determination. Nothing will hold this guy back. I hope you enjoy his story as much as I do. And shame on Mother Nature this winter!
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The Almost Marathoner
by Eric Francis
The first Sunday in March was going to be a banner day for me, the day I finally lived up to an eight-year-old promise to myself that I would do a marathon.
Oh, yeah – I’ve been putting this off for eight years. Procrastination is my friend.
The whole thing started in 2006 when two factors combined to get me moving: A relentlessly expanding waistline and an unhappy marriage. I found that sticking my feet in running shoes and putting some miles under them helped me deal with both, and when my best friend proposed we do the Little Rock Marathon the next spring, I found myself agreeing. Mind you, at that point I hadn’t walked more than 3 or 4 miles in a row since I was a teenager. But it seemed doable, so we started mapping out training routes and talking about how we wouldn’t just finish, but finish in less than five hours!
Ah, those naïve days of my late 30s! How I miss them.
We didn’t do the marathon, of course. We didn’t really know how to train and suffered all the usual rookie mistakes and injuries. We each managed the half, though, and became “next year people” – sure that we’d be ready the next time spring rolled around.
We never were. We’d try, really we would, but something always took us off track, whether it was nagging foot problems or the uncanny misery of Arkansas summers. Few things can do more to discourage you from running than stepping outside at 6 a.m. and finding it’s already 80 degrees and wet-blanket humid. I’d manage the occasional 5K or 10K, but when marathon time came around I was never ready for anything longer than the half – and not always ready for that, really. But, hey, runners always have excuses, right?
Still, the full was always a goal. In 2013 I finally got got serious about training, winding up with about 750 miles and shedding 40 pounds. I stuck with the Little Rock Marathon’s time-tested program and gradually upped my mileage until it was no longer a big deal to go double-digits on a Saturday. When my foot started hurting, instead of laying off I went to a physical therapist, and took his advice on a new kind of shoe that made the pain go away. When the polar vortex arrived, I scoffed at it and went out for an 18-miler on a day when the temperature was 13 degrees (though in the interest of not doing myself in, I walked the whole thing). I found a training partner in a friend who does ultramarathons – she’s persistent but she’s slow, both good things for me, and she taught me pace management. I made sure I saw every mile of the marathon route at some point, so I knew what I was up against. Crucially, I resolved that my only goal was to finish, time be damned.
Come Sunday morning, it all looked like it was going to work out. The weather forecast, which had been dire just a few days before (freezing rain! sleet!), wound up just about perfect: Cloudy and in the ‘50s at the outset, dropping to the ‘40s by noon with maybe some light rain. I took the early start option and headed out at 6 a.m. with a college friend who had convinced me that 30-second run/walk intervals were the way to go, and by cracky they really worked for us. We crossed the halfway point after barely more than three hours, feeling strong. We watched the elite contenders, who started two hours later than we did, sail past us at mile 14. When it got chilly and misty we pulled on our jackets and forged ahead. As we turned onto the longest, flattest stretch of the race at mile 17, we were sore and getting tired but optimistic.
And then the weather turned on us. The mist morphed to drizzle after mile 20, and as we reached mile 22 a cop was announcing that thunderstorms were expected in an hour. Less than two miles after that, another officer lowered the boom: The front was arriving imminently, the race was being called, and there would be no traffic control between there and the finish. Our options were to continue on trails and sidewalks and see if we could beat the storm, or climb onto a bus to be shuttled back to the finish line.
Discretion being the better part of valor, my running buddy and I opted for the nice, warm bus. As she put it, “It’s better than being hit by lightning.” We were deposited downtown and wandered the finish area where they retrieved our timing chips and gave us a space blanket.
They also gave all us non-finishers our medals. That’s pretty cool, because the Little Rock race has the bragging rights for the biggest, gaudiest finisher’s medals anywhere – this year it was almost 9 inches across and weighed more than two pounds. And don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to have it. But I’m also sure I could’ve gone another two-point-whatever miles and finished this race. And even though many friends have applauded my effort and said I was deserving of that medal, I still feel like I fell short of my long-ago promise – I haven’t actually finished a marathon, which means I’m going to have to sign up for another one of these suckers.
In the meantime, though, I am going to accept that it’s still a big damn deal to go as far as I did on foot in a single day. So, does anyone know where I can get a window sticker that says 24?
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Have you ever experienced a race being called due to weather?
How did you deal with the news?
