Due to a variety of factors, including time constraints and travel issues, I will not be participating in the ODDyssey Half Marathon on May 22.
While this saddens me, it also gives me more time to prepare for my next race, which I registered for this morning. On October 16, I will be (for sure!) running the Nike Women’s Half Marathon in San Francisco.
Let’s back up. What would possess me to leave the flat routes in New Orleans to run a half marathon in the hills of San Francisco? Well, the Nike Women’s Marathon sounds really fun. According to its website, it is geared completely towards women, from the Chocolate Mile at Ghirardelli Square to the glamorous “Expotique” the day before the race. But I’ll be honest, the biggest incentive for me lies at the finish line: firemen. In tuxedos. With little blue boxes holding customized Tiffany’s necklaces. A free Tiffany necklace is pretty much the only thing that would get me to run the hills of San Francisco.
There’s another thing, though, and that is my company during the race. I convinced my two best friends from high school, Nayo and Mackenzie, to run the race with me. That led me to reflect upon what made me a runner, and how I got to this point.
The three of us have been best friends since elementary school. Nayo and Mackenzie were always more athletic than me. They played softball in middle school and ran cross country in high school, while I didn’t really do much of anything. Nayo was even a captain of our high school cross country team during our senior year. The game changed, however, when we graduated from high school. I gradually started running, and they gradually stopped. I registered for a half marathon last fall, and they were both impressed and supportive. I remember over winter break, I stopped by Nayo’s house after a training run, and her mom commented about how I was suddenly the athlete in the group. Somehow, during my training process, I convinced them to run this half marathon with me (maybe it was the promise of free Tiffany necklaces).
Even though we go to different schools in different time zones (Nayo goes to Stanford and Mackenzie goes to the University of Colorado), and have very different lives, we’ve still managed to stay friends since we graduated from high school. Which is super impressive because a) I can only say that about maybe four other people I was friends with in high school, and b) I’m pretty sure the three of us haven’t been in the same place at the same time in at least a year and a half. In fact, the most recent Facebook picture I could find of the three of us was from 2009, and it was a screenshot from Mackenzie and I video-chatting with Nayo. I’m really excited that in six months, the three of us will get to spend a weekend together and accomplish something truly amazing. And now, instead of the two of them being excited for me, we’re all excited together, even from hundreds of miles away.
As Nayo said, “I’m excited and you’re excited, so based on some property of math that I should probably know, we’re excited together.”
I know that training for NWM isn’t going to be as easy as training for my last half marathon. The terrain there is so different, so I’m going to have to learn to love hill workouts on treadmills (two things I absolutely hate). But it’s going to be worth it, because I know that my two best friends are going to be with me in spirit, and during every hill workout and every early-morning long run, I’ll know that they’re doing the same thing. The slogan for NWM is “I run to be…” and everyone can fill in the blank as to why they run. On my registration form, for example, I said, “I run to be fabulous.” I told Nayo and Mackenzie that, and they both laughed because apparently that’s something I would say. But really, this time I run to be with my two best friends. When the bell rang in high school at 2:10, we’d go our separate ways. As I went home, they went to cross country practice. Now running is bringing us back together.