There were a number of full marathons I could have opted to do in late December/early January, but after giving it some serious thought I chose to register for the Arizona Rock and Roll marathon which was scheduled to be held on January 13th 2008. One of the reasons I chose this marathon was because it’s a relatively flat and fast course, ideal for a first-timer like myself. Having settled on a time and place, I began to prepare as best as I could, despite the fact that it was an extremely chaotic time in my life. Not only was Christmas and New Years Eve drawing near (not the best time of the year to be following a semi-stringent diet and running plan), but my husband had received unexpected orders to move to Okinawa and we had a move-by-date of February 11th. As it turned out my husband threw a further spanner in the works by leaving California the day after Christmas, and once again I was burdened with the task of having to pack up house on my own and travel alone with the girls. Thank goodness my parents flew out from New Zealand to help me pull off what seemed at the time to be such an overwhelming job; without their help there is no way I could have continued to train and fly to Arizona for the marathon.

The morning of January 13th, 2008 was absolutely beautiful, a little on the cold side, but knowing how quickly my body would heat up once I started running I certainly wasn’t about to complain. And at any rate, I had packed an old sweater that I wore to the start line and which I was able to discard about 2 or 3 miles into the run. The first half of the course seemed to go by fairly painlessly and I remember thinking to myself that I could easily finish the marathon if my body continued to perform as it was. But who was I to think that running a marathon would be as simple as that! Sure enough, by mile 18 my legs started to feel heavy and a dull ache began to work its way up the side of my left leg. I had heard some of the members of my running group talk about “hitting the wall,” a condition which when applied to marathon runners, basically means that they have depleted their body’s glycogen stores and are no longer able to maintain the pace at which they have been running. I “hit the wall” at about mile 20, and with the ache in my leg growing progressively worse, it seemed an impossible feat to make it a further 6 miles. Had it not been for the 4-hour pace team that came up from behind me at the next aid station, I’m almost certain I would have given up and withdrawn from the race. You see, up until that point I hadn’t realized how I was doing for time. I had stopped seeking out the time clocks a couple of miles back when it had truly begun to dawn on me that the pain and fatigue might actually get the better of me. With my energy stores almost completely depleted, and the pain in my leg/hip which was now causing me to run with a slight limp, I knew it was just a matter of time before I was also stripped of my mental faculties and the will to keep going. So the significance then, of seeing the 4-hour pace team pass me by, was that I realized I could possibly ride on the coats of their tails so to speak, and use them as a mental and physical guide to help me finish out the remaining 6.2 miles. And I did just that, well almost; I managed to tail them right up to the very last aid station and that is where I really did hit the wall. I could see the finish line no more than 1/2 mile away, yet my body was so fatigued and beat up that it did not respond to the mental cues which instructed it to keep going. Even when the 4-hour pace team were done with their aid stop and proceeded to run their final victory steps, my body still refused to work with my brain and fall in with the pace team. It was as if time had frozen, except it wasn’t time that froze, it was me. For a good minute or so I stood still and watched as numerous runners passed me by. I’m still not sure how I did it, but it took everything I possibly had within me to  snap out of the trance I was in and push myself to run the last 1/2 mile of the race. I crossed the line in 4:01:00; the 4-hour pace team crossed the line in just under 4 minutes.