The Perfect Storm

Sometimes, you have the elusive perfect season. Your training is flawless. You never get sick or injured. You run a PR during your tune-up race, then smash it during your goal race.

More often, though, you have to clear a few hurdles.

Occasionally, your whole season is Hell's Steeple and you keep tripping and falling on your face.

Something like this

Last fall, I pretty much had the perfect season. When it was all over in December, I decided I would take a short break and then slowly build back into marathon training. During training, I'd run eighty miles per week. I'd race the Resolution Run 15 Miler as a tune-up, and maybe also the 20K. I'd run the Eugene Marathon in May. It would take me two hours and fifty-nine minutes.

This is what actually happened: One January morning, I woke up with a large bump on the right side of my forehead. It hurt. I ran ten miles and then drove to Urgent Care. They told me that I had an infection and prescribed antibiotics. I took the antibiotics and the bump went away. Just a hurdle.

One week later, I felt the same pain behind my ear. There was a bump there too. I consulted Dr. Internet and decided that I most definitely had shingles. I went back to Urgent Care. They told me I didn't have shingles and that it was just a swollen lymph node. The boil in my forehead had drained into the lymph node behind my ear. Ew, gross. But still, just a hurdle.

A couple of days later, I woke up to pain inside my ear. I went to my doctor. The infection had spread to my middle ear. The antibiotics weren't doing anything. It was probably MRSA, or some kind of antibiotic-resistant strain of staph. She gave me different antibiotics. Just a hurdle, but come on, dude.

The infection lasted over a week. In the meantime, I was trying to slowly build back my mileage from the break. I was barely running by my own (albeit twisted) standards. But I underestimated how compromised my body was. The lingering soreness in my outer right ankle developed into the unrelenting, sharp, stabbing pain that I know very well: Peroneal tendonitis. Shit.

I extended my break a little. I cross-trained some more. I went to physical therapy. And I gradually reintroduced running. All was good.

Then I strained my adductor.

Back to the bike. Then to the Alter-G. First for easy runs, then for tempos. I could hardly run at all at full body-weight, but at reduced weight I could run medium-long tempos at 6:30 pace. So I did a lot of those. They kept me sane.

I scratched from Eugene and signed up for Grandma's Marathon because it's the only decent June marathon in the country. I tried to balance my ambition and my health.

It always looks more reckless retrospectively.

I supplemented my lower mileage weeks with lots of biking. By the time I got to week sixteen, I felt awful, even though I'd been used to running three week cycles of fifty-five, sixty-five, and seventy-five miles for pretty much all of last year.

But I made it. I hit my normal mileage again. I started to feel better. I had some pretty damn good workouts.

So I flew to Duluth, Minnesota on a Thursday, crashed in the university dorms, and got ready to race. I was alone for most of the weekend, a puddle of nerves, nausea, restlessness, and excitement. My friend Jamie showed up at 10:30 PM on Friday. I wanted to be annoyed at her for getting in late. But I actually felt a lot more calm. There was something soothing about having a friend in the room, even if we wouldn't actually have any time to catch up and hang out and we both had to get up at ass-o-clock to push our bodies as hard as we possibly could. For the first time all week, I slept like a rock.

Jamie's alarm went off at 4:00 AM. I got out of bed at 4:45 AM as she was heading out. We exchanged half-asleep mumbles. That was the most I'd see of her all weekend.

It was pouring and I was standing there in spankies and a singlet trying to not freeze my butt off, but to still secure my spot in the starting corral. I was one of very few people my speed stupid enough to do this. Most of them were hanging out under the edge of a roof, warm and dry. A courteous runner handed me a garbage bag. I poked a hole in it and wore it like a shirt. Thank god.

This outfit doesn't go very far in the rain.

When the gun went off, I settled into whatever the hell pace felt right, which was supposed to be 7:00 pace. I don't own a Garmin or anything like that. I hit the first mile in 6:58.

The second mile was a little fast, then I backed off and settled into the 6:55-7:00 pace I was trying to hit. My shoelaces (which were definitely double-knotted) came undone at mile five. I tried to fix them, then they came undone again. They were soaking wet and the knots weren't holding. I tried to fix them again, and this time I tucked them into my actual shoe. They came undone again, so I gave up on that. I'd lost probably thirty seconds on this stupid stint, so I decided to make it all up at once, which is probably the second dumbest thing I did during that race.

The next seven miles were uneventful, except that there was a dude in a kilt running my pace, and I was determined not to lose to Kilt Boy. The rain stopped.

Around mile seventeen, I started to feel really bad. Stiff neck, burning muscles; I figured I was hitting the wall early. But I'd taken in a gel already, and I'd been drinking plenty of water and Powerade, so I wasn't sure why. I tried to remember what my coach told me. Relax your muscles. Smile every mile. Stay positive. Something about waxing and waning. It'd come back, I just needed to be patient.

Fading. 7:15. 7:30. Something.

At mile twenty, I started wheezing. I  tried to talk myself out of it. "No," I said out loud to my lungs, "stop." At mile twenty-one, I figured maybe some water or Powerade would make me feel better, so I took one of each. Ice cold. I chugged. It got worse. Much worse. Asthma. I remember this. Asthma.

I still knew at that point that if I jogged it in at my easy pace, I'd qualify for Boston by about twenty-five minutes, and then I could run it with my sister. So in the logic that only ever makes sense at mile twenty-one of a marathon in Minnesota when you can't breathe, I was like, jog it in, Talia, just jog it in. Except this wasn't the wall I remembered from NYC, the but-I-only-have-one-speed haze; this was the fire that can only be described as The 800 Feeling. I had to run an 800 for five miles.

The wheezing got worse. People around me were cheering me on, trying to encourage me to keep going, telling me they'd run with me. Kilt Boy passed me. I couldn't get out more than a word at a time. Finally, I turned to one guy and said, "ASTHMA." He ran up front to find a medical tent for me, then ran back to tell me where it was.

I was sitting in a military vehicle trying not to suffocate while a nice military woman tried to comfort me.

I was in an ambulance being drilled by questions from EMTs that I couldn't answer because I couldn't talk.

There was this thing that looked like an inhaler so I grabbed it as quickly as I could and tried to use it but then I heard "the other way, it's like a fake inhaler" and I flipped the nebulizer in a panic and took a deep breath and left it there breathing in and out and in and out and oh my god I could breathe. My lungs filled with the cool, misty, bitter bronchodilator.

I found this on Google Images and quite frankly have no idea what the hell she's spraying in her face, but this is pretty much the only way to explain how refreshing it felt to be able to breathe again.

When I finally felt like I could safely part with the nebulizer, I gave the EMTs my information, then told them that no, I didn't think I needed to go to the hospital. I looked at my watch and realized that I could still technically qualify for Boston if I jogged it in. I started to get up.

My legs didn't move. They had a hell of a lot more sense than my mind.

I slept all day. I woke up at 6:00 PM and ordered a pizza. I ate the whole pizza. Then I went back to sleep and woke up the next morning.

Now I rest. Now I stop feeling sorry for myself. Now I figure out what to do about this. I've already been in to see my allergist. This is what sport is. This is what being an athlete means. Shit goes catastrophically wrong, we fail, we learn, we move on. We accumulate experience and wisdom and become better athletes as time goes on. And when we finally succeed, it's just that much sweeter.