Rewind to just before two marathons ago. October of 2018. I was on the cusp of attempting a big PR at Baltimore Marathon, then venturing to my best friend’s cabin in South Jersey for race recovery and a girl’s knitting weekend. (Craft hobbies pair really well with recovery time!)
One of my knitter friends is also a runner, so we were doing the Baltimore leg of the trip together, then joining the rest of our friends later. She was tackling the half while I’d do the full. My friend also knew Baltimore really well, so she picked a great location for our hotel and even had a post-race pizza place picked out. It felt like a perfect plan.
Life had other ideas. My friend’s father had been battling cancer for a long time, and just before the trip he passed away. It was devastating, and of course, there was no way for her to make the trip work.
I didn’t want to back off from Baltimore either – so that meant I’d have to go solo.
While I hate to admit it, even on the best of days, my navigation skills are not a strength. Being in an unknown city with the exhaustion of running a PR and no support at the end freaked me out. Some races have ended better than others, but I’ve definitely struggled after most races with mental fuzziness where I can’t do simple math and basic tasks seem extraordinarily difficult. Marathon brain is a real thing!
A pile of “What if…” worries collected, and nearly had me reconsidering my race. What if I was just too foggy to get back to my hotel? What if I got lost? What if I missed my Amtrak?
In the end, I did get a PR. There were zero issues getting back to the hotel, or finding the pizza place my friend had picked out. I made it to the Amtrak station with time to spare. Everything worked out just fine.
And now I know I can handle the aftermath of a race by myself. Things not going as planned can be a catastrophe, or an opportunity to expand my comfort zone. I’ll choose the latter. That thing that scared me before? Now it’s a thing I’m intentionally doing. For the first time, I booked a race trip totally solo.
Later this week, I tackle Atlanta Marathon with all its hills and heat. I’ve been training in snow and ice and twenty degrees. And I’m only just a tiny bit worried. Mostly I know I got this.