Leaning back, eyes closed, concentrating on releasing a breath, my knee is visible, bent up towards my frame. This pose is familiar to anyone who has experienced the pangs of child birth; that time during an intense contraction when you are trying so hard to concentrate on anything but the sheer pain. I count through the time, try to catch some sense of what I am going through, relax, and start again in a few minutes.
However, this isn’t a photo of childbirth. I am sitting and lying back on a small mound of grass. There are trees in the background, a few still holding the leaves that have managed to survive another northern winter. Beyond the trees, in the distance and ever so slightly visible are a few high rises. The grass is just beginning to sport its spring colour of emerald green and I could still smell the aroma of musty leaves, left to rot under the snow cover of the Ottawa winter. And there I lie, resting on my elbows, in some self-imposed agony as I let the weight fall from my shoulders and my weary legs and feet. I am in the Nation’s Capital, it is Mothers’ Day and in spite of the pain I am thrilled to have just run 26.2 miles, 42 km, my first marathon.
The course took me from the south east corner of the city, at Carleton University, to downtown in front of the Parliament buildings and out to the far west end of Richmond Road. A striking memory is that the pavement was very slightly sloped so one foot, the left, was always just a bit higher than the other. Imperceptible perhaps on a 5 km run, this was infuriating by 30 km and painful by 40 km. Who, I wondered, would have paved a road like this?
We have come to Ottawa from Boston, where we were living. Boston is of course the mecca for marathoners, home to the famous Boston marathon and where I had trained for this event. We lived not far from the last few miles of the course and Bill Rogers, the local famous son of the Boston Marathon had a Running Shoe Shop, not far from our apartment. I watched the marathon every year we lived there, absolutely engrossed in the crazy hype; I remember being near the finish line to see Joan Benoit win the marathon, before she won gold at the Olympics. The course, all 26 miles, is always lined with well-wishers screaming and supporting the best of the best as well as the stragglers who struggle to cross the line.
The Boston course unlike Ottawa, had a hill that had become notorious because it was situated a little after the halfway mark of the marathon. It was actually three small hills combined and was infamously known as Heartbreak Hill. It is the spot, they say that the marathon is won or lost. Not long before the Ottawa marathon, I specifically went out to run the Heartbreak Hill 10 km road race, just to get the t-shirt. I thought it would bring me luck and inspiration to finish the marathon in Ottawa and it had. In training I had never completed the full distance of 26 miles or 42 km and as I ran in Ottawa for every km that ticked by I could hear my inner self saying “wow we have never run this far before!”.
As I lay on the grass wearing my red bandana, my lucky red and white Heartbreak Hill t-shirt and looking like I was in the middle of giving birth to my first child, I was absolutely delighted with myself. I knew that like childbirth, the pain would be forgotten. This wouldn’t be my last marathon.
