Story Photos
 Photo by Greg Ebersole Daily News sports reporter Ben Zimmerman eyes the finish line as he runs in the Portland Marathon on Sunday. |
Scaling the wall
Wednesday, October 12, 2005 8:53 AM PDT
By Ben Zimmerman
Printable version
E-mail this article"Hitting the wall" is something you learn to fear before running your first marathon.
But it's a moment first-timers can't truly appreciate until the big "hit" comes.
I didn't so much as "hit the wall" Sunday during the Portland Marathon, which I finished ---- without stopping ---- in just under four hours.
The wall hit me. Over. And over. And over.
Around the 20th mile of the marathon (26 miles, 385 yards of masochism), I was trying to banish the view I saw from the recently crossed St. John's Bridge (mile 17 to 18).
It was a chilly, foggy, misty gray morning, but from the bridge, runners could look to their right and see downtown Portland in the distance. It looked toy-sized, like a nativity scene, and I could see the Steel Bridge in miniature, some six miles on the horizon.
I realized just how much more work I had ahead of me. And I wasn't the only one.
"I looked out and thought, 'Oh my God, is that downtown?'" said Longview resident Carol Ruiz, 35, who ran the race with her husband, Dan, 39. "It looked 20 miles away. I remember thinking, 'I still have to run there?'"
The St. John's crossing was when Marin Hight of Longview experienced a mood shift. She and her husband Jason, both 1993 Kelso grads, "went from having a joking, pleasant jog to not speaking," Hight said. "There was nothing. We were no longer talking. We weren't wearing headphones. It was just about survival. Jason was cramping up. My knees were killing me. It was so bad, he even passed on the beer refreshment" at mile 23.
"It," Hight added, "was straight misery."
By that time, I was similarly unamused. Each footfall produced the sensation of having the top of my feet smashed by a meat tenderizer. My quadriceps were on fire.
Knees throbbing.
Hands numb.
Blisters raging on the top and bottom of both feet.
Hips burning as though stabbed with butcher knives.
But hey ---- only six miles left!
The wall was a-knockin'. The course veered right, through an undulating series of neighborhood streets outskirting the University of Portland. I stuck to the curb, which was plastered with fallen leaves. I began to notice dead squirrels along the gutter.
Not "real" dead squirrels. If they were real, I'd have tripped over them.
While the average, decent, sane human being was in church, in bed or parked on the couch with remote in one hand and nachos in the other, I was hallucinating rodent carcasses.
Although I'm barely beyond novice rank in the world of marathoning, I learned many things about myself.
Dan and Carol, who'd dreamed of running a marathon for more than a decade, said there were two traits that distinguish marathoners from normal society.
"You do it for real personal reasons, and they're different for everyone," Dan said. "You want to do it because it's there. People who run marathons tend to be goal-oriented. Everyone that I talked to after the race seemed to have one thing in common. They wanted to finish."
And the other trait?
"You have to be crazy," Ruiz said.
"Even having done it," added Hight, "I don't think it's normal. I don't think it's right. I ran a marathon to see if I could, to see if I was capable. And now that I have, the question is, why would I do another one? To see if I can do it better."
Carol Ruiz considers goal-fixation and, well, insanity, to be motivational cousins.
"I think it is a little bit crazy to enjoy the focus and the goal and the achievement once you've done it," she said. "You cross that finish line and it is exhilarating ---- and crazy. That's what our friends are saying ---- 'you're crazy.' And they're right."
One unfortunate participant smacked head-first into "the wall" on the downslope of Interstate Avenue ---- or was it Greeley? ----- between miles 22 and 23. Running downhill might seem like a luxury, a break from the monotony of the vast flat stretches of the race, a reprieve from the exquisite torture of uphills.
Wrong.
"By that point, I had no legs left," said Dan Ruiz. "The guy in front of me says, 'Don't worry, it's all downhill from here.' And another guy says, 'Yeah, if you have any quads left.'"
Running downhill kills the quad muscles, plus it requires deliberate effort to maintain pace and balance. This poor dude was pressed against the guardrail along the right side of Interstate, which is bordered by lush forest on the left and a sheer drop to the industrial coast of the Willamette River on the right. He was trying to stretch his left calf. As I plodded down the hill toward him, he suddenly wrenched off his right shoe and flipped it over, shaking out a handful of gravel.
Before he could slide his foot back inside the shoe, he projectile-vomited into it.
The Ruizes witnessed nothing quite as grotesque during this phase of the race. They were lasered in on the finish line, trying to ignore their howling muscles.
"All I felt was, 'OK, I'm gonna finish,'" Dan said. "I tried to enjoy what was going on around me. Even though I couldn't feel my legs."
"My feet were killing me. My toe was killing me. My knees were throbbing," said Carol. "I just didn't let the pain overtake me."
Marathons ultimately test mental toughness more than physical endurance. The training involved is tedious and painful, and requires tremendous discipline. Carol Ruiz signed up for the Portland Marathon Clinic, and she and Dan split time this summer watching their daughters Maggie, 6, and Lanna, 4, while the other ran training runs ranging from two to 20 miles in length.
"I thought of that when I passed mile 20," Carol said. "I knew that I could finish, I just didn't know what it would feel like. I reflected on those six months of heat and dark and getting up early."
The last several miles are like a war zone.
Runners collapsing. Weeping. Sucking air. Horking up lunch. Grunting. Moaning. Veering onto the shoulder with sudden muscle pulls.
Between the St. John's Bridge and the gradual descent back into downtown Portland, the race weaved along the University of Portland bluff. That stretch was densely packed with volunteers and racing fans ---- and a good handful of neighborhood residents taking in the curious spectacle from their porches.
A group of three women, probably in their early 20s, were standing in a lawn near mile 21. They were laughing at our faces.
Not "in," but "at."
Overall ---- marathon staff and the thousands of volunteers who crammed the sidelines to cheer, announce elapsed time, play music and dispense everything from water to Vaseline ---- were a tremendous help.
Of course, the physical toll of the marathon can breed a gruff demeanor.
"I started to notice people in front of me who didn't look like they should be faster," said Hight, laughing. "I went from being amused by the oddity to angry. The belly dancers (ticked) me off (near the U of P). I don't know about the bell-ringers. I appreciate them being out there, but cheerleading (there were three separate high school rally squads along the route) and marathon running don't go together.
"The next time I do it," she added, still chuckling, "I'd like to have more finesse and less hatred for my fellow runners."
Said Carol Ruiz: "Call me crazy, call me stupid, but I'm going to do it again."
Crazy? Stupid?
Heck. Those are compliments.
Ben Zimmerman is a sportswriter for The Daily News. He can be reached at 577-2528 or zim@tdn.com
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