Posted by: Ed Chernoff
January 22, 2007

Though I don’t remember how I answered her, I do remember the rest of our encounter. She looked at me as if were a five year old, about to enter one of those school sponsored haunted houses. You know the ones I'm talking about. You've got to put your hand in big buckets labeled "guts" or "eyeballs" and little does your five year old brain know that the evil teachers who go home every night talking about how much they hate you, have filled the buckets with wet spaghetti and marachino cherries. Every now and then, some assistant principal dressed like a goblin jumps around the corner and yells, scaring the shit out of you because you've already been warmed up by the eyeball thing. That's the one I'm talking about. Anyway, she looks at me that way and asks, "Are you scared?" Man, that really pissed me off. I replied, maybe too forcefully, "I'm running the marathon, maam. I'm not running from lions."

But there I was, at mile 8, very scared indeed. I was thinking that maybe my part of the discussion that I had perceived as witty, was actually just plain rude. We were both volunteers after all. She volunteered to pass out "race" packets. I volunteered to go to hell. When it hit, it felt like someone was rotating a dagger into my tibia. She was right. I was scared, but it wasn't the pain that did it. I had expected the pain.

Prior to the race, I had planted a shin splint brace backwards on my calve. Then to keep it in place, I wrapped it in gauze. My hope was to distribute the pressure as I jarred it thousands of times during the "race". Nobody had told me to do this, and I didn't learn about it on some Internet site. It was just a hope on my part. I figured it would fail eventually, but mile 8 was a little sooner than I expected. And the pain was far greater than I expected. But that's not what scared me. What really scared me was that it was the wrong fucking calve!

I spent a week trying to rehab the left calve. I massaged it, I planted it in a hot tub, I took pills, I elevated it when I slept, I stretched it, I rested. Still it called out to me. It warned me of what it was going to do to me if I pushed it too far. During "race" preparations it pinged small morse code alerts on the small runs. At 6 miles it yelled at me. On 9 mile runs it crippled me. It was the bitch I had to obey. It was my second wife after the tequila wore off. But at mile 8 it didn't make a peep. Instead, it was my trusty right calve that cruelly exploded, and the bitch was still out there, biding her time.

I hobbled for a while, eventually maintaining a rhythm. It went numb eventually, and I harbored a hope that maybe I could keep it going until I hit the 20 mile wall. At mile 12, well into West U, I was moving pretty well. I popped the last four Advil I had in my pouch and downed it with a pixie cup of Gatorade offered me at Southside Place, where the wealthy community had lined the streets offering encouragement and toasted the runners with Mimosas. I began to feel pretty good. I began to feel optimistic.

I ran through the Galleria like a man blessed. How silly I was to be scared! Life brings you challenges, but its not the falling off the horse that matters, its how you put the saddle on. It's not falling down, it's the getting up that makes the man. All those fucking little platitudes emboldened me as I plodded along. The year before had been substantially easier, but here I was a year older and 7 pounds heavier, and I was going to make it! It was mine for the taking! The world was my oyster! Of course...it was at that point that the bitch decided to call my cell phone.

There are few things that someone with my alcohol and age addled brain will remember the rest of his life. For me, that pop was one of them. To be honest, I probably didn't hear the pop, but when the pain came it wasn't slow and incremental. I had no warning. It just erupted. I fell to the curb. Like a man drifting on a life raft, drinking his own urine and salt water to survive, I lost all conception of reality. I began tearing off the gauze and clutched my left calve. I squeezed it until it felt like I had separated it from the bone. No matter what I did, I couldn't relieve the pain. The runners passed by me like some expressionistic painting.

I sank into the curb. After 15 miles the cold concrete curb felt like a Lazy Boy. Logic set in. I had run 15 miles. Most people can't do that, I reasoned. Both calves were blown. Only an idiot would continue under such circumstances. I couldn't conceive of even one reason why I should risk serious injury to finish a "race" I couldn’t possibly win. Hell, some Kenyon somewhere was already getting his post race massage and collecting his $100,000 check. I still had to hobble to court the next day. My race was over. It was over. And then, I thought about my son, Fate. (To Be continued. To see Ed Chernoff cross the finish line go to www.chevronhoustonmarathon.com)

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