Training
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Broken. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
There comes a time before a big race when you realize most of your training is over. In my first racing season, two summers ago, I might have pegged this at the taper—the point a week or two before race day when you back off your workouts to rest the muscles and replenish the glycogen stores and reset the mind.
But this year I felt it on Saturday, more than two months before the New York City Marathon and with my most intensive preparatory running still ahead. The marathon organizers put on a practice race in Central Park, a double loop they called 12 miles. I decided to try out my goal pace for the big day, about 5 percent faster than at the Brooklyn Half in May. This is ambitious—marathon paces are usually slower than halves, because of course you get more tired as you go on. But I figured that if I could do this near half-marathon at my goal speed on a low-stakes day, with no taper, then the combination of rest and adrenaline, and the training I’ve done till now plus six weeks more of it, should level me up for November 5. We’ll see how that goes.
I hit my target for this one, at less than maximum effort, and it was after I crossed the finish line and hopped on a Citi Bike to ride downtown for yoga that my realization came: The work is substantially done. Not just the work of this season, but also those first bicycling hill climbs in Griffith Park, or even the leisurely sunset rides in Venice, or the T-ball games in 1987 where I picked dandelions in the outfield. It includes every bike crash and every recovery and every hamstring stretch and every swim. It includes 17,000 minutes of Transcendental Meditation. It includes a sub-eternity of hours staring down the desk where I’ve written a hundred editions of this newsletter and several novels’ worth of a novel.
Everything is preparation, because that world-famous finish line in November—monumental though it’ll be—is just where what I’ve been doing all this time will briefly culminate. And then that will sublimate into another waypoint, a memory, an increment, a rung. This is the nature of the goals we attain: They are the inevitable conclusion of how we’ve lived.
We’ve always been preparing for exactly now. We couldn’t even help it.
If you enjoy Western Coffee, please make a donation on my fundraising page for the nonprofit Achilles International, which is how I’m gaining entry to the New York City Marathon this year—my first. All donations go to the nonprofit and its work with disabled athletes; I’m paying my own race fees, etc.