Walking the walk…all 26.2 miles of it (part 2)

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(this is a continuation of a prior entry – click here to read part 1)

Mile 12 – Mile 21

We stopped at a nutrition station that I had erroneously thought was a halfway marker (turns out it was more like mile 12). Stretching ensued, along with changing of socks and munching on the peanut butter sandwiches that I’d made for us before we left in the morning. I felt refreshed, and I hoped that things would improve. At this point, I strapped on my headphones, hoping that the sounds coming from my freshly loaded iPod would distract me from any further discomfort and get me walking on a rhythm. By the time we made it to the lunch area setup somewhere in mile 14, I was hobbling. The pain in my left leg was astonishing and nearly crippling. I limped my way to the medical tent, but they told me that they couldn’t dispense any medication. Fortunately, an angel of a walker overheard my plight and offered me as many as I would like from her bag of ibuprofen. I took three from her, thanking her profusely, and moved slowly and carefully up the hill through the lunch tent to grab a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

By now, my spirits were considerably lower. I was focusing on using my breathing to get me through, because the walking was so painful. About 45min to an hour after we left the lunch tent, the ibuprofen had kicked in and nearly completely removed the pain in my hip. The pain in my knee remained, but it was dulled slightly. I could walk, but I didn’t have much of a head of steam anymore.

Oddly, Heartbreak Hill and the other hills of Newton, MA, were no particular trouble; I think the change in gait that was needed to propel me up the hills was enough to give my hips and knees a rest from the repetitive stress of doing the same movement over and over again on the flat distances.

When we made it to the end of mile 21, we were astride Boston College, a former stomping ground of mine from my Masters degree days. And this is where I hit the wall.

Mile 21 through the finish

I sat down to stretch at the next-to-last nutrition station, on the side of the campus, and I realized that getting up was going to be a lot more difficult than I thought. DH was ready to continue walking, although by this time he was tired and not feeling 100% either. I paused for a moment. I could either stop right there, giving in to the fact that I didn’t think I could take another step, or I could ignore that feeling, will my feet to move and see what happens. I chose the latter option.

Once I started walking again, I realized that I was getting small blisters on my feet. They were nothing compared to what I’d endured in those bad sneakers during my training, but they were adding more annoyance to the journey. Add to this the fact that the ibuprofen was wearing off prematurely, and I was moving only based on sheer will. Since this is a walk that’s done on sidewalks (no roads are closed for the walk), we were required to stop at every red light that we came across. Early on, this was no big deal, but when you have only minor momentum and you’re five miles from the finish, every little stop is a small attempt at defeat, chipping away at your resolve and your ability to keep the head of steam going.

Every mile marker was an inspiration, begging us to keep moving. By the time we were coming into Kenmore Square, a mile away from the finish, we were both moving slowly…but still moving. Coming down Boylston Street didn’t give me nearly the victorious feeling I expected, until we were crossing Dartmouth Street from the Boston Public Library into the chute to the finish line. It was amazing. It was impossible. We had finished.

After the race, we sat on the grass and stretched for a while. Then, hoping we had enough left in us to get there, we limped our way back up Boylston Street for the block it took to get to Marathon Sports, where I bought the two of us “26.2” stickers for our cars. I so badly wanted to earn that sticker, ever since I first learned about the walk, and I was going to use whatever energy I had to get it.

We then gingerly made our way back to the car (parked in a garage a couple of blocks away), and I drove us home. We hadn’t really considered whether or not either of us would be able to drive after the race, and I was truly grateful that my LEFT leg was the one that was tweaked and that I drive an automatic transmission car. If I had a manual transmission, getting home would’ve been one tricky proposition.

We drove home, tired, incredibly sore, and very happy to have finished it. And that’s where we got to the part we hadn’t bargained on, the hill we hadn’t anticipated climbing: what happens AFTER you do a marathon.
Next up: Recovering from the marathon

Walking the walk…all 26.2 miles of it (part 1)

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The day started early: the rolling start for the marathon walkers opened at 5:30am and went through 7:30am. I set my alarm for 4:00am and we were out of the house a little after 4:30am, on our way up to Boston. The nice folks at the Jimmy Fund Walk had set up buses to run from Copley Square (where the walk would finish) out to Hopkinton, MA, where our walk would start. It was a little chilly, but I didn’t bother wearing my jacket once we parked the car; I figured I’d be warm soon enough.

The ride out to Hopkinton was noisier than I expected; people were awake, and jazzed, and many of them were talkative. I was more in a contemplative mood – sitting in this loud school bus while the run rose, heading many miles out of town just so that I could walk them back in. I was also a little misty-eyed as we sped out the Mass Pike towards I-495; my walk had already raised $250, before I even took the first step, and I thought of the kids that we were helping as we trekked back into town. We crossed the starting line just before 6:30am.

I can easily divide the walk into three parts: 1) starting through mile 11; 2) mile 12 – mile 21, and 3) mile 21 through the finish. Due to the length of the post as I wrote it all out, I’ve had to divide this up into two posts. Sorry, but there’s a lot to tell. I’m not even telling the full story – it’s hard to remember everything – but I’m telling as much as I think I can realistically convey without getting too repetitive.

Please Note: this is MY experience of walking my first marathon. Someone else, with different preparation and a different physique, might experience their first marathon completely differently. No matter what, I caution anyone interested in attempting exercise this vigorous to consult their primary care physician first.

Starting through mile 11

The first 10 miles were the easiest. In fact, they were a smooth ride, as it were. I was walking roads I’d never traveled, surrounded by people I’d never met, winding my way through the western suburbs of Boston to the center of the city. There was nothing difficult about those first 10 miles. But things started to shift around mile 11. By that time, my left hip and knee were starting to get a little twingy, a little achy. I hadn’t been in much of a mood to stop for any length of time, but once I started to be in some discomfort, a stop sounded like a good idea. We stopped at all but the very first nutrition station (spaced every few miles or so), picking up Gatorade, Lara Bars, bananas, and peanut butter crackers.

Markers were placed along the route every 1/4-1/2mi to give you information about how your walk was helping the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and mile markers showed the smiling faces of the kids who are being treated at Dana Farber. Each mile marker had a picture, the child’s name and age, what they like, and what they want to be when they grow up. Mile marker 4 was particularly poignant, since the child pictured on the marker was there – with his family – and the Jimmy Fund people had decked him out in a walk shirt with “HERO” emblazoned on the front. The markers with the little girls who just wanted to grow up to be mommies hit me particularly hard, as did the one of an 11 year-old girl who shares the same name as my dd. Each marker was there to spur you on, and we came to look forward to each child’s face as a way to tell that we were making progress. Just as the Jimmy Fund people had kindly informed us, we touched each mile marker as we passed it – a tradition among walkers.

This was the portion of the walk that was most pleasant, from a physical perspective. From here, everything changes.

Next up: Mile 12…through the finish.

 

Getting in gear to walk a marathon

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If there’s one thing I learned pretty quickly as I started to ramp up on training for the marathon, it’s that I had nothing in the way of proper gear. The Marathon Walking site (and pretty much everywhere else I looked) said that you want to be wearing only wicking materials, and socks are a key part of that equation. Unfortunately, with the exception of a few ill-fitting items, everything I had was cotton. Not wicking. Anti-wicking, as a matter of fact.

I knew that socks were the first and most important part of the equation, so I picked up some (supposedly) wicking socks at Kohl’s. They were a cotton blend that was supposed to wick, and they seemed comfy enough for the training walks I would take late in the day at the office fitness center. Still, once I took them out on to the open road, so to speak, they failed me miserably. I wore them with a new pair of shoes (exactly the same size, style, etc. as a pair I had been wearing for ages) and did a relatively short training walk – around 6mi. When I got home, I felt okay, although I remember having felt some sharp pain in my toes pretty early on. As I took off my right shoe, DH turned to me and asked me if I realized my foot was bleeding. Really?

Turns out, I’d punctured the side of one toe with the toenail of the adjacent toe. (Sigh.) Furthermore, I had built up a small blister on the bottom of my right foot, atop the balls of the foot, and that blister would grow from the size of half a dime to about the size of two half-dollars. NOT FUN. I realized that the problem was two-fold: 1) The socks were giving insufficient cushioning on the bottom of my foot, and 2) the new pair wasn’t accommodating the width of my (admittedly wide) foot. So, new socks AND new shoes were in order. Grand. And I still needed wicking CLOTHING, too!

I tried looking at Kohl’s for workout gear, but everything I found somehow didn’t work right or just turned me off completely. I decided to head to the local outlet mall instead, armed with coupons and my AAA discount. Turns out the Reebok store was having a big ole sale, and I had a coupon for 30% off regular priced-items. I grabbed a few armfuls of clothes, found several items that worked well (mostly sale or clearance) and used the coupon on two pair of regular-priced capris. My new workout outfit would be some combination of jog bra, tank-top and capris – all in wicking materials that would help me cope with all the sweating I was about to do.

The socks and shoes were still an open issue, and nothing at the Reebok store looked any different from what I already had. So, when I went to Eastern Mountain Sports to get a Camelbak backpack to tote water and stuff around in on walk-day, I got some wicking socks there. These were miles better than the others I’d bought, although they were still coming up to just about the ankle and not really going much beyond the top of the back of the sneakers. The ultimate solution came from some ankle-high wicking socks found at REI when DH went there to get some for himself two weeks before the walk. These went up by at least another inch over the other socks, providing an added amount of protection.

Shoes are a tougher problem for me, seeing as how I have a wide foot. I tried going to a local running store near my office, but they didn’t have anything that fit me just right, and they never called to tell me when/if the other wides they were ordering for me to try on came in. Le sigh. By that time, I had made plans to be up in Cambridge for dinner and a movie, and I ventured over to Marathon Sports – a local chain of running stores for people who are serious about getting the right footwear. The nice gent who helped me observed my gait, noted the width of my foot, and came back with two boxes. The first box contained the pair I would walk out wearing: Brooks Addiction. He brought me mens shoes, which was a brilliant stroke on his part. The extra width from the mens shoe was fantastic, and they were a size up from my regular size, to accommodate the swelling that naturally accompanies strenuous events like marathons.

I tried to train as often as I could, but walking on the weekends was really tough. During the week, we upended our schedule, flip-flopping who does the daycare drop-off and pickup so that I could do training walks in the afternoons most days. I only ever got two training walks in on the weekend; it was just too hard to make it happen. Typically, I would walk about 3.5-4mi a day at the fitness center, on the days when I could go, and the two weekend walks I did were in the 4.5-6.5mi range. Both the Jimmy Fund Walk web site and the Marathon Walking site had training schedules; I just couldn’t follow them to the letter because my schedule wouldn’t always permit it.

Still, I was hoping that my prep would pay off: I would be able to go the full 26.2 because I was determined to do so. The gear puzzle was solved. I was trying to train as much as I felt I could. Now, it was just a matter of whether or not I could do it. Mind you, I’m not built like the average marathoner; I’m far more golden retriever than greyhound, and athletics have never been my strong suit. In some ways, this was a completely crazy thing to do, but decked out in my wicking garb and having put in training walks several times a week, I simply had to cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Next up: walking the walk.