The Wall

In 2007 I trained for and finished a marathon. At the start of that year I'd never run more than 5km and on Sunday 7th October I crossed the 42.195km finish line on the MCG turf with the broadest smile I was physically capable of.

It felt incredible, the most powerful demonstration of how rewarding effort and commitment can be. But the training was a complicated journey of many feelings: pride, frustration, dread and incredible satisfaction.

I learned how to break down a daunting goal into achievable goals and I celebrated each of them. I also tried not to punish myself when, because of illness or injury or occasionally just utter disinterest, I missed a run. 

About four weeks before The Day I experienced something that until then had been an athletes' concept I'd heard of but more like an urban myth, like an evil woman in a fable that is present as a threat in a story but not actually real.

The Wall is real.

I did my long runs on Sunday mornings. As they got longer I started earlier, often in the dark. I included parts of the actual route on my training runs so that there wouldn't be any major surprises on The Day. I wanted familiarity to cultivate calm and settle me in to The Zone, another very real state.

The longest run in my program was 30km and I did this two weeks in a row. The first time was surprisingly comfortable and I hit the home straight, the track beside the Yarra from Swanston St to Chapel St, smiling at the rowers and the cyclists, trying to keep a lid on the fact that I was actually going to make it. The next week was a physical and mental hell. When I turned on to St Kilda Road, a stretch I'd enjoyed the week before, I was overwhelmed by its straight, relentless monotony.

None of my techniques worked. I couldn't tell myself that I was a gazelle or that I loved to run; I couldn't care less about what I'd achieved so far and my most powerful mantra, spoken to the rhythm of so many of my footfalls - big, strong, wo, man - seemed utterly ridiculous.

At an intersection I ate my last three jelly beans and sucked in desperation on each of my four empty Powerade grenade bottles. I thought that people in their cars were looking at me, laughing at me. A marathoner? Don't be absurd. Go enjoy a comfortable Sunday and leave the training for tall, lean women. Real runners. 

The pedestrian light turned green and my brain tried to tell my legs to move, but they refused. I was locked, rooted to the ground like a terrified woman faced with a psychopath in a horror movie. I was incredulous and furious. How could my body let me down like this? The green man started flashing red. The cars may as well have been revving their engines and lining me up like a target because I felt them as a terrible pressure that I had to escape.

I cupped my hands underneath my right knee, lifted it and dropped my right foot a pace forward. I did the same thing with my left leg, again with my right, again my left. When I made it across the street I had enough confidence to try to take some unsupported steps. I tried to slow down the thoughts, fears and anger, anything that was going to threaten my only objective: make it home.

I don't know how long it took but I did it. The two flights of stairs to my flat were agony. My cat lifted her head when I came in, looked at me and then closed her eyes again. My legs and arms shook as I looked in the fridge for a cold drink. I was exhausted, but I'd done it. 

The next day I couldn't get to work. Instructed by my massage therapist I went to the service station for four bags of ice and prepared an ice bath. For the first time in months, against so much of what I'd read, I poured a glass of wine. I thought I could trick my body into thinking I was going to enjoy one of the long, hot soaks I often take. Maybe I lasted 10 minutes but I doubt it. 

That week I missed two of the four runs, but a few weeks later I finished The Marathon. 

It's a long story but every detail of that experience came to me during a restless night last week as a parallel to what I've been defeated by for months. 

Of course I've heard of Writers' Block but I've only recently understood it, or at least my version of it.

For months I've barely written. Anything. I've tried writing about what I'm not writing about; tried writing a journal, just to write something; jotted notes about people in cafes, sat in libraries trying to read, written out passages from books that I liked, but nothing got me back on course. Every paragraph, sentence, note, email, everything that I produced, I loathed. I read so many great works and then despaired of my own attempts even more.

Finally I've set my life up to give me time to dedicate to the only job I've ever wanted and I can't make any progress.

But remembering my running experience has helped me to feel that I may be able to work through it. Unlike a marathon I can't set a major writing goal. I've always written short fiction based on a person I've seen or a comment I've overheard. It's a painful construction on a flimsy foundation, but I've always wanted to have the imagination, the creativity to write something that is separate to my own stories.

Lately, however, I've been thinking about Lee Kofman's answer when I asked her what inspires her writing. She said it's an exploration of something she's been thinking about. She knows that when questions around a theme or an issue occupy her a few times, then something will come out of researching and working with it.

I've been starting to write notes on things I'm interested in and would usually try to incorporate into a short story, into fiction. Now I'm looking at them a bit differently and writing down what I think. It looks a lot like mind mapping but it's helping to re-establish the writing habit.

For a long time after the marathon I found running very difficult, almost futile. Do a half marathon? I'd done plenty of them in training. I lost interest. I got lazy. Then I didn't like my body and what it could no longer do. But after a while I missed running too much and so I got back on the track. I blended in yoga and swimming with runs that I could enjoy. I joined a running group and for the first time felt part of that community.

I'm trying to see that it's the same with writing. I'm not someone with a novel I'm trying to complete, but I need to apply the same diligence. I'm very lucky with the friends I've made in Melbourne's writing community but instead of thinking of them as the real writers, I need to be more involved. I don't know if I can "make it" because I don't know what "it" is, but I know how rewarding it is when I'm writing, when I'm balancing it with other responsibilities but making sure it does get the time it deserves.

My marathon day was actually just one part of what had become a project, a habit with lots of commitment and lots of rewards. To remind myself to just enjoy the run I wrote, in black texta, on my hands: 'proud' on the left, 'happy' on the right. Maybe as writers taking up our positions for dedicated writing time, maybe we should have those words on our hands to acknowledge just turning up and trying, having a little faith and helping us to settle in to the zone, enjoying whatever it is that we achieve.

In the pink - the start of the 2007 Melbourne marathon

Time Out Track - no one said it would be easy

Inspired by my fortunate success in the Write To Run challenge (Uh Oh, below, where embarrassment paid off), I was thinking of posting a clip to a song I used as motivation for running.

But I don't listen to music when I run.

Apart from a delirious "home straight" the first time we ran over 15km, when my training partner and I jogged through a local high street on a Sunday morning belting out the Rocky theme song, there is only one song I can recall coming in to my head while running.

I was using a marathon training programme in which the longest run was 30km, two weeks in a row. I'd nailed the first week pretty comfortably, and went out far too confident the following week.

Dragging myself along the track beside the Yarra River by rowers with coxes yelling at them, looping over and over in my head was Sheryl Crow.

'No one said it would be easy, but no one said it'd be this hard. No one said it would be easy, but no one thought we'd come this far.' I mustn't say what I wanted to do to her for those last few kms.

Unfortunately, now that I've mentioned it, she's looping again with me while I wrestle the writing targets for my manuscript.

But let's take her on! So here's a time out track that gets me fired up to take on anything that looks daunting...like going back to swimming training tomorrow night after a considerable time out.

It also made me quite a 'cool Auntie' when I played it loud in the car for my nephew.

Uh oh...

Mel and I had a list of things to do before we turned 40. We probably started it when we were teenagers and it was more like things to do before you’re 25. Maybe it was just after we went to our first Neil Diamond concert.

Anyway, at some stage, along with climbing the highest peaks in every state in Australia (Mel), being rich enough to not have to choose which book to buy when you see three you like (me), running a marathon was added. I can’t remember the so many others on the list. I mean really, seeing Neil Diamond live had been a long awaited dream.

When we were in our 30s, after Mel had her first daughter, she rang me one day and asked if I would do it. This year.

I was probably hungover and guessed I’d missed some essential part of the conversation while I was trying to make a coffee or get the cure of blue Powerade into me. Maybe I was even having a cigarette to finish the pack I’d bought as a social smoker the night before.

‘Sorry,’ I asked her, ‘do what this year?’

‘Do it.’

I didn’t want to say but I wasn’t any more enlightened.

‘Run the marathon,’ she said, sounding a little incredulous that I hadn’t been waiting for this call, so helpfully she spelled it out, ‘Run the Melbourne marathon this year.’

'Oh. Okay.'

At school Mel and I were lapped running the 800 metres. We had some stuff to learn. We bought the training book her sister had used a couple of years before. We bought new sneakers. I’d never run more than 3km before.

One of the best pieces of advice I was given early - and of course I was given loads of ‘useful’ information, right up until the morning of the race, because for 4 months the training and recovery and food and sleep was all I talked about – was to decide that my only target was to finish the race and not have any time goal.

AIM = FINISH.

Which went well. Mostly. Except it was hard not to check your watch in the dark of a winter morning when everyone’s asleep and it’s drizzling and you have to make sure that it is actually 6am not 3.30am.

And then there’re all those clocks as you run around. Time’s everywhere but I tried not to look. Because quickly, as the distances started stepping up, there was something else more private and significant to worry about.

That uncomfortable sensation that starts in your lower belly and recedes when you do your mind games and visualise yourself smiling and striding out with gazelle-like ease. But then it strikes again and you think that if you don’t stop running there’s going to be an incident of the sort you haven’t had since you wore nappies.

I couldn’t really understand how all of the information I’d read and been told didn’t cover: YOU WILL NEED TO GO TO THE TOILET.

And just to be clear, I don’t mean the likes of if only I was a man and I could just pull over quickly, cause I’d be happy to stop and have a quick wee behind a tree myself, but I’m not talking about that sort of need.

And then while you’re thinking about it and running for a little bit it goes away. Because you’re focused on thinking about it instead of actually feeling it, you can get into a more philosophical rumination about things that become necessary at the most inappropriate times, and so for a little while you can think about those and the need recedes so you can keep running.

And that leads again to the question: why is it that this topic isn’t addressed openly? Anyone who’s travelled in third world countries and spoken with other travellers at any length usually gets onto bowel movements at some stage. Why hadn’t other runners warned me?

I’d read about nutrition, which tiptoed around the issue under the guise of digestion times. I’d been warned about losing toe nails and nipple chafing. I mean having someone I worked with but didn’t know very well caution me about my nipples felt pretty personal. Could he not have hinted that I’d want to work out my toilet needs as I was experimenting with whether to and what to eat before a long run?

I hate to think how I looked, pulling up sharp as though I’d done a hamstring, clenching my buttocks and holding it in for a bit. I needed to go to the toilet!

So I slowly jogged, pulled up, stopped still, walked, breathed yoga breaths and did my mantra: I am a marathoner, I am a marathoner, I’m proud of the training I am doing, I love hills, I am a marathoner. 

Finally I made it home and as I was going up the second flight of stairs to my apartment I had to double over and force a last hold – that final hurdle is always lethal. 

You don’t need any more details. Let’s just say I made it.

From then on I checked for public facilities when I plotted my training runs and I added some loo paper beside my jelly beans in my running belt. 

And recently, training with friends for the Berlin marathon, I was very quick to discuss the toilet issue with them.

* * * * *

Written as submission for the Write To Run Retreat competition - comments welcome!