My alarm goes off at 4:00, but I've already woken up a few minutes before it. Half asleep, I'm jolted by the thought that my Imodium – without which, at that point, I imagined I couldn't run so much as a single XL – has probably been left behind in my sports bag in Bulgaria.
I don't have much time to look for it and I never do find it. Sasho is already banging on my door:
“We have to go if we want to take my car! They'll be closing the bridge for the marathon any minute.”
Sasho's car is where I spend my last cosy minutes, staring into the darkness outside. The wind seems to be howling less than last night. Reluctantly, I pour myself out of the warm car, whose owner is in a different wave from mine, and we part ways. I'm part of the World Masters Championship and we've been given a nice start position. We go off straight after the elite and ahead of wave A – people who, while not elite, run the marathon way under 3 hours.
Before the start, though, they'd herded us veterans into a separate stadium where we could warm up the way old folk do. All very nice, except for the fact that for all the veterans they'd locked up in that stadium to go round and round like lab rats, there were a grand total of 10 toilets. I went round every medical team asking for Imodium or something like it, and it turned out they didn't have any. Supposedly a well-run country, and they hadn't sorted out the most important thing. In a state of Imodium withdrawal, I joined the long queue for the toilet.
Being someone who loves inventing all sorts of imaginary dramas for herself, I was convinced that without said medicine I wouldn't make it through the run, or at least not in a decent state.
I couldn't have been more wrong. Maybe it was the unbearable cold and wind, but all my internal systems, the excretory one included, had frozen solid and stayed deep-frozen and out of order riiiiight up until after I'd crossed the finish line. The same goes for my cramps. During the run I didn't have a single cramp or a single urge to go to the loo. A warrior of a body.
After the finish I curled up on a bench, attacked simultaneously by vicious cramps in my left leg, a cramp in my stomach (until then I didn't know that was possible), and irresistible urges for every kind of toilet there is.
But in the part that mattered – during the marathon – my body behaved beautifully and didn't pester me with any distractions whatsoever. Is this the power of my mind/consciousness over my body? And if so – can I learn to control that power consciously, and how, so that it works in my favour, like this time, rather than against me, the way I usually do it?
Back from philosophical musings to the start. We veterans go off right after the Ethiopian elite runners, whose names I can't quote, but from memory they all gravitate around variations of “Gebrselassie”. It was very exciting – from my start position I could see them with the naked eye.
As we set off, everyone around me pulls off their long sleeves, jackets and gloves and chucks them to the side of the course, to be collected later and given to charity. I'm the only one who won't part with her windbreaker. Firstly, I'm not giving this beauty away to anyone (white with blue flowers, so gorgeous that I even had my nails done to match). Secondly – there's no force on this earth, not even Thomas Chekon served to me on a platter, that could make me take off anything at all. I can feel the icy wind in my bones.
Here's the course profile. Nasty as nasty gets. 343 metres of elevation according to my watch – more than the originally announced 317, though after a certain point who's even counting.
In principle, if I want to run a course smartly, I should start at a pace slower than my average target pace for the whole course and, once I've properly warmed into it, speed up after the 30th kilometre.
But on a course like the one in Sydney, where the first 4 km are a steep descent, it's silly to run them slowly. I have to take advantage of the downhill and make up for the many climbs that follow, where I'll slow down anyway. But it mustn't be too fast either, so I don't burn through my tank too early.
Honestly, balance – besides being the salt of life, not just of the marathon – is hard work.
I'd learnt this course map by heart in advance. And since I spent most of my youth in this city, I knew where the climbs were. That, it seems, played a nasty trick on me. According to the map, the biggest climb is on Oxford Street (15th–16th km). I took Oxford Street at 4:40 and decided the worst was over. Somehow I relaxed mentally.
Then comes Anzac Parade – I know that street very well, because in my student years it was my way home from work to where I lived back then. I know it's more or less flat. Sure, but that's exactly where I ran head-on into the headwind. It was battering me so hard it was flinging me into the barriers, and the sleeves and hood of my windbreaker were flapping like a ship's sails.
What kept me going mentally was the column of faster runners already heading back on the other side of the same street. Clearly there was a U-turn somewhere… Oh boy, once I reach that U-turn, I'll catch the tailwind and it'll just blow me straight to the finish.
Well, I reached the U-turn, flapping majestically in my windbreaker, and as soon as I turned, I discovered that the wind, ha ha, had stopped.
Actually no, the objective truth was that it hadn't stopped. It's just that once it's blowing at your back, you feel it less.
Turning around and harnessing the power of the wind in my favour didn't help me much. Looking at the pace on my watch, I could see I'd strung together so many kilometres at the unflattering 4:40 that I knew I was, so to speak, already out of the game.
“The game”, in my case, was to have a go at beating my personal best from Valencia, 3:13, even though the course there has 17 TIMES less elevation (20 m for Valencia versus 340 for Sydney). Yes, realistically, comparing the two runs is comparing apples with oranges. But then again, Militsa has got me into better shape since then.
You always set yourself some benchmarks for comparison in your head, and this was mine, in case things played out in the most favourable scenario for me.
So there I was, stringing kilometre after kilometre, fully aware that there'd be no PB here. I could feel my tank slowly, if steadily, emptying, and that if I pushed, I wouldn't have the legs for the hills still to come. And knowing the course, as well as the city, I knew there were more of those ahead.
And completely out of the blue, on a downhill at around the 38th kilometre, I suddenly – oh, wonder of wonders!!!! – drew level with the Age Group pacers for 3:10.
Part of me knew this was impossible. I've been running long enough to know that my average pace, which my watch was clocking every kilometre, was slower.
But, I started convincing myself, my watch might have got confused – we went through a tunnel, the signal gets lost there. We ran quite a few kilometres between the tall buildings in the centre, it gets lost there too. After all, these are pacers, they know what they're doing.
So you don't think I'd hallucinated the pacers (because hallucinations aren't out of the question on long runs either), I'm going to do the unthinkable for A-MILF-Who-Cares-About-Her-Image.
Namely, I'm going to show you a piece of compromising evidence about my appearance that no woman in her right mind would ever publish. Here it is:
I'm well aware that in this photo I can be split into two halves. In the top half I'm Stevie Wonder in a state of temporary insanity. In the bottom half I'm Granny Tsotsolana in her most cellulite-ridden period.
But I'm prepared to pay the price and show it to you. Because, people, it's proof of me passing the 3:10 pacers on the last kilometre, having run with them from the 38th kilometre onwards.
There they are, look, right there behind me, eating the dust of my MetaSpeed Edges!!
AG on their flag stands for Age Group – i.e. – my pacers.
No mistake, no lies, no tricks!
I hit the home straight.
Blue carpet.
The Opera House gleaming in the sun ahead of me.
My watch beeps – 42nd km in 4:09 – I glance at it with a smirk. Since passing the 3:10 pacers, I don't trust it any more. I must have run it in 4:01, beast that I am, and it's just got confused. This Garmin is more deluded than half our running community, I think, I'm going to have to replace it.
I've run this horrible course in 3:09 and something without even realising it…… “We Are the Champions” bursts triumphantly into my head, with the emphasis on the line “no time for losers”. With it I mentally salute those undercooked macaroni, the 3:10 pacers, left far, far behind me.
But every self-delusion ends at some point, however sweet it may be!
Mine ended with two shocks, one after the other.
The first was the huge electronic clock at the finish, which brazenly goggled at me after the bend. In big red digits it showed exactly the time I'd believed I was running before I met the pacers and they scrambled my sense of reality.
The digits read 3:14, and I still had some final metres to go!
Thank goodness there were so many photographers along the course, so every emotion has been captured. Here, at this moment, I've fixed my gaze on the bright future and the clock, expecting 3:09 and something, and I'm seeing the truth!
3:14, whether you're PI, or a radius, or a constant, or a diameter, or whatever you are, I don't know, because I'm not great at maths, but I don't like you nearly as much as 3:09.
While I'm taking in the truth, I'm still moving, and not just any kind of moving, but flat out. While accepting the fact that 3:09 is actually 3:14, I also had to accept the fact that in the final sprint I was battling it out with a little old lady of a much more mature age than my own.
Who didn't even know she was “battling” me. She'd clearly come out for a stroll, because she took out her phone and started taking a series of selfies. She was very demanding about her selfies, and as she crossed the finish line she was actually deleting one of them, which she clearly hadn't liked. I've already shown her to you, but for the sake of completeness of my blog – here she is again.
Now it's really the finish. Cramps, urges for the toilet and cold gripping my body now that it's stopped moving. A wave of emotions washes over me and I record a video at the finish. Considering the extremes of emotion I'd been thrashing between over the last few hours, I trust you'll forgive my wildly inconsistent behaviour in the video.
At least I'm convinced once again that I can rely on my Garmin and my gut feeling. I won't be replacing my good old watch.
I don't know what those 3:10 pacers were all about, but in my opinion they simply started at the very back of the veterans' wave. And it was a very big one. And I suppose that's why this discrepancy happened.
When I got to my phone, I couldn't believe how many of you had stayed up until 2:15 in the morning Bulgarian time to support me. All the people close to me, but also many not quite so close. Thank you from the bottom of my heart! I truly believe that positive, well-meaning thoughts help at least as much as a headwind holds you back, if not more.
Will I stop dreaming about Sydney after this marathon? Have I finished my unfinished business there? Only time will tell.
P.S. If you like reading travel stories, my book “Nothing to Be Afraid Of” has lots more, though not running-related. You can get it here:
