Race Recap: Dante Pilkinton at the Boston Marathon 2022
"Are you excited?" My girlfriend asked as we drove through the Boston suburbs on a startlingly sunny April morning.
"No. Waiting to run a marathon is a lot like waiting in a dentist's office. I am dreading an inevitably painful experience."
I was also dreading a dirge to the start line. My only data point being the 1 mile-an-hour bus ride from St. George's ferry terminal to the Verrazzano.
But, Boston came through with the one thing they're really known for: brisk bussing practices. Whisked to the Athlete's Village with ninety minutes to spare, I sat on a sandbag and warmed myself in the sun.
The Athletes Village filled up around me. I had a brief chat with an instagram-influencer-marathoner that has wandered across my instagram search function time and time again. The instagram algorithm favors the verbose over the erudite. I gobble up reels of his terrible advice and grandiose pronouncements about his middling athletic prowess with lusty schadenfreude, "Yes! Yes! Tell your followers to run 9 minute mile pace in next%s! Only You have the secret to running a 3:35 marathon! No days off! Fit fam for life!"
But who am I to cast aspersions? Out of the five marathons I've run, I've blown up in three of them.
I guzzled 1.5 liters of water in the two hours before the race. I knew a cloudless sky and leafless trees meant I was going to burn. I found a sunscreen dispenser and rubbed enough on my face to star in a drag version of "Sunset Boulevard." Alright Mr. Demille, I'm ready for my marathon.
The sunny day also meant I needed to play a refueling game. Fitness means oogatz if my muscles are low on electrolytes and water. And I need a lot of electrolytes and water. Clocking in at 5'10" and 164 the night before the race, I hulked like Mike Tyson next to the flyweights in my corral.
The water chugging, though prudent, was not an airtight plan. I stopped for 26 seconds in a port-a-potty at mile one.
After the second mile I settled into a 6:20 pace. The aerobic fitness was there. I could feel the gears in my body shift into a pace that felt relaxed without pushing. I practiced for a 6:16 pace. But there was still 18 miles between me and the top of the Heartbreak Hill. And during those 18 miles, the hills kept rolling. Constant, long, undulating hills. I should have done all my long runs exclusively on the Manhattan Bridge. My legs, only used to the flats along the East and Hudson Rivers and the sharp inland hills of Prospect Park and Greenwood, started, ever so slightly, to fatigue. Too soon. Much too soon. 10 miles too soon. I upped my fueling strategy. Water at every mile. And kept the electrolyte and salt pills in my fanny pack flowing.
Yes. I run marathons with a fanny pack. Running is a lame sport. And marathons are the lamest distance. Embracing the nerdiness of a fanny pack just feels like par for the course.
I hit the half a little slow. 1:24:And:Change. But the legs were moving and the upper half of my body still felt nice and relaxed. 6:20s still felt mindless.
Running a major marathon is the closest I will ever get to experiencing pre-modern warfare. I charged out of Hopkinton that day with 24,000 other souls. And I watched so many of them drop all around me as we went once more into the breach of each Brookline hill. My racing mantra is, "don't be a hero." 400 meter runners can be heroes. Marathon runners are survivors. I chugged up each hill. Head down. 6:33. 6:40. I hurt. But on each downhill, my body loosened up again and I felt ready when the hill sloped upward once more.
And then, there it was, the top of Heartbreak. There is a saying among Poker Players in Vegas, when they intuitively know they have the best hand at the table; they "Got the Nuts." At the top of Heartbreak Hill that day, I looked up into the true blue sky and felt a lump in my throat. Only 5.7 miles to Copley Square and I Had the Nuts.
It was hard to pull back into the 6:20s. The fatigue was getting the better of me and I let a 6:44 slip out trying to pull myself together around Fenway. The last couple miles of a marathon, when all my lizard brain wants to do is lie on my back and eat slices of pizza without chewing, I have to remind myself, if I don't run now like an absolute psychopath, then I will replay these next few moments, again and again, for months and months, and I will feel the ice cold feeling of regret slide down my spine. I laid it all on the line. I trucked as much as I could truck, dropping down to about a 6 flat.
I bowed my head to receive my medal. The tears fell, too tired to trickle down my face.
2:49:02. 4:20 PR. Marathon number six is in the books.
Epilogue:
On the Amtrak back that afternoon, as I made my way through 24 modelos, I told a fellow runner I had stopped to pee during the race.
He frowned and, in all seriousness, said, "You should have pissed your pants."
This man had not had a beer in sixth months. He was as lanky as a twelve year old. And had run a fierce 2:38... But was it worth it? 26 seconds to run a course with urine soaked pants? No beer for six months just to run a 6:03 paced marathon? Doubling? Running 100 miles weeks?
Maybe I am just content in my ability to step out on a quiet early spring morning, to whisk around Greenwood Cemetery. Running shorts blissfully free of urine as I eye the blossoming willows and think of Whitman, "I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine."
