OCT-C-4

THE MARINE CORPS MARATHON-28:

I AM ON MY WAY TOWARD BECOMING

ONE OF THE SENIOR CITIZEN VETERANS

OF THE LARGEST MARATHON IN THE WORLD

NOT TO BE OFFERING PRIZE MONEY

AND ALMOST A “GROUND POUNDER”

October 26, 2003

Another one is history, now, two decades from the time of my doing my first along the same course. My Twentieth, was the twenty-eighth running of the MCM, and only five men have done all twenty eight. These veteran “Ground Pounders” are a venerable group, and I met two of them while running the course—and one of them pulled away to pass me after chatting. That is the kind of day it was!

It does not have to look pretty, but it did get done! This may go down in the annals as my longest ever marathon, and it started out as one of my faster ones—going too fast at the outset, so that as I approached the half way point, I realized that I was going at a Boston Qualifying pace—too fast to be sustained. It began too early for me, for reasons that are stupid, and laughable in retrospect.

I had a quiet day at home doing paperwork chores and carefully set the clocks an hour different. It turned out, that I set them the wrong direction! I got up and showered, and put all my carefully assembled gear together and drove down to GWU and parked the just washed and waxed Bronco in the parking garage. I stopped in my office and sent a one line email, and as it got to be six o’clock on my watch—the time the Metro opened especially for the Marathon crowds, I passed the guard desk and went to the Metro Foggy Bottom entrance. It was closed up solid. I walked back to the security desk and said “How come Metro is not open when they are supposed to be ready for business at 6:00 AM on Marathon weekend? The answer came back: “Well, it is only four AM!”

So, I went back in to my office and sat for a while, going down to the Metro at 6:00 AM. I sat next to a German fellow whose wife is an opera singer at the Kennedy Center, doing Wagner and he was interested in voice pedagogy. He was the only other person in the Metro who was not a runner. We talked for the half hour that it took for the train to arrive and he left for DCA to get a connection to go on to Japan. I joined the swirl of runners who were converging at the start area, and I checked into the Holiday Inn Hospitality Suite of the MCRRC. I looked around and saw---almost no one I know. All the people that were there are the large First-Timers Training Program. Only one fellow who came in recognized me and that was Leo, who has done one more than my twenty MCM’s and had done about one third as many marathons less than I had in total. We were the “old timers” and determined that we would run together, since he was not at all sure how many more of these races he had in him since he was suffering from Ulcerative Colitis, and figured he would like to hold it down to an eight and a half minute pace. I figured we could do that if only we could find our way around in the tightly boxed crowd, but lost him at the first water station about three miles in. I was feeling good, running with shorts and singlet with a light trash bag over the top for the first two miles, in a dense humid dark air which threatened to rain on us. It never did rain, but stayed muggy and unusually warm, dumping all that rain in the twenty four hours after the race. People were dropping out early, partly because of the heat and partly because most of the people around me were virgins, having never run this race before. I was surprised at the groups of runners and the charity teams all sticking close together as they had throughout training, and I was skirting around them, passing a lot of people in the first half of my run—whereas a lot of them had the chance to pass me in the second half of the run!

I kept looking through the crowd to see any familiar faces—and I have the proud distinction of having recognized no one throughout my run. The only people I might have known were a few fellow runners, and I caught up with one on the Rock Creek Park uphill section. He was one of the five surviving Ground Pounders, running in a singlet designating this elite group, each going at about a four hour marathon pace—not bad for seventy plus year olds! He was the one who had tested positive for Huntington’s Disease, and anted to keep going as long as he could—still hanging in there. When he heard about my twenty (a topic of much conversation since I had each of the three five year marathon patches on my back) he told me he would be meeting me at the fiftieth reunion.—I would be ninety, but I would give him greater odds on making it there!

I was looking at the split times and recognized I was going too fast. I had an aching in my legs from lactic acid buildup and I played little experiments on clearing it out. If I breathed in deep and fast, I could relieve some of the ache, or if I slowed down, particularly on any little uphills, I could feel an improvement. I needed to get refueled and was eager to see the energy gel stations at mile seventeen.

I remembered that I had put on my heart rate monitor but had not turned it on until about six miles into the race. When I did so I was startled. It was registering about 162 when I had first looked—about twenty beats up from my usual runs for distance. I pulled out into the heavy crowds of onlookers at around the start line which is doubled back at the seven mile point and I picked up the pace. I almost “buried the needle” which was showing heart rates in the 172 range. I have never gone so high in a run, so I determined that if this continued I might not finish, and tried to back off to about 160 pace. By the time I came around through Georgetown, I was on track for a half way point under two hours—about where I am at each Boston—but this run was not preceded by any long aerobic base training. And I consciously pulled back to a 150 heart rate and had people coming up and passing me—many of them congratulating me on my past MCM achievements proclaimed on the multiple patches on the singlet.

The course has changed. It has also gotten into areas that are hardly scenic. “Marathon of the Monuments” now has an industrial wasteland on the other side of the river after the Fourteenth street Bridge that is between the old rail yards and the airport where only junked cars and crushed road kill rats are seen. It also had a short burst of sun coming out which made it hot in addition to humid—with a breeze—as always up Haynes Point (forever in your face) and, of course, blistering in time for the fourteenth Street Bridge, my least favorite spot in the run. At this point I was almost down to a race walk pace, and although I never did walk, I was going slower than most walkers would go. AT this point I realized that I could keep ahead of the lactic acid buildup if I kept at that shuffling pace, and breathed deeply, and did so, with only one squat to stretch the quadriceps before plugging up “Mount Surabachi” the Iwo Jima Hill. I was surprised at how many runners were struggling along this late in the race and how excited the announcer, Bill Mayhugh sounded about what were certainly not record times—and I plugged along until I saw the 26 mile point. I knew I had 385 yards to go to cross the mat, so I kicked it in, and never even looked at the time.

I had accomplished my goal—I finished with no major damage done. I got the medal and had the finisher’s photo taken, then walked over to the “goody bag tent” with the flapping Mylar blanket over my ears. I was about to step out of the tent, when I went down. I had a painful left calf cramp that would not break. One of the men who escorts VIP’s came over and massaged it, saying he had once driven back four hours after a race in Texas and the same cramp had pushed the accelerator pedal to the floor and he could not move the foot. At least I was trying to walk rather than drive, but it was a few minutes before I could do either. I walked back to the hospitality Suite, and bought the $20 Sports Massage by Cliff, who figures he has done this for me each of the last dozen years—which turn out to be the only massages I have ever had professionally and they are always after a long run. Following a gently sports massage, though, the muscles do not stiffen, and I felt good getting back on metro and going to GW to pick up my car. As I approached, I saw that there was a “Block Party” in progress. A few folk spotted me wearing the medal and the warm-up clothes and asked what I had been doing, and I replied “Oh, I just stopped over after coming down for some exercise.”

So, today, I will do a few of the things postponed, and recover further—considering that my little tour of the town yesterday was a training run for the MITP in ten days. In the interval, I will go to Texas to be in San Antonio with Michael Judy and the twins for a long weekend, and then I come back to toe the line in the next of the Fall Marathons, adding a few more long miles to the overall totals, in which I am drafting behind the juggernaut that will carry me to 100 marathons—all of this beginning at the MCM-8 two decades ago. The second Ground Ponder I had met on the far side of the Capital after rounding the Supreme Court noticed my patches from behind me before I noticed his “MCM veteran” singlet with the Ground Pounder's logo on the front. He has run in all 28 of these but has only done 34 marathons overall, so he said “My hat is off to you!” That was humbling. I told him he was a hero of mine, and took his picture—one of the few I had taken during the long run today—unlike last year when I was snapping photos of several runners who had fallen in with me, Senator Bill Frist among them. I told him the other Ground Pounder I had met on the course today had told me he was looking forward to the Fiftieth, and he said to me—“but I would be over ninety years old!”

I looked at him and realized we were about the same age. “Good luck, now!” he said, and pulled away getting lost in the crowd of others ahead of me.

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