Perhaps it is because deep down I feel like I did not give the race my all. A time of more than 15 hours was gut wrenching and not being able to run the marathon almost broke me on race day; not the cramp itself, just the fact that I couldn't run. I had trained so hard and yet I was not able to complete the race as I had scripted it in my head.
I know that's a load of bollocks and I should be proud of my achievement and, trust me I am, but that hasn't stopped me being more than a little disappointed. The fact that training has been far from ideal this year is also playing on my mind and has made me reluctant to write about my race experience for fear that it will discourage me even further.
But recently, I have had a few fleeting moments of reflection of all of the amazing and wonderful things that happened to me last year in training and the enormity of the target that I set myself and achieved on 15 January.
I have just re-read Dean Karnazes' brilliant first book Ultramarathon Man and his descriptions of his ultradistance running experiences brought all my experiences flooding back in technicolour. His third book, so eloquently entitled Run, and which I read in record time, also stirred many emotional memories of race day. But perhaps it was today's run up Dunedin's Pineapple Track and Flagstaff that has rekindled my enthusiasm to tell my tale.
Today's was a 90-minute easy, recovery run and last year this would have resulted in me selecting the flattest route possible, preferably out of the wind and somewhere that I didn't have to think about things too much. But today I decided the Pineapple Track was a must do. The track rises more than 520 metres to the summit of Flagstaff and opens to a panorama across the city to the ocean, breathtaking views inland to the Rock and Pillar Range and over to the Taieri Plains as they stretch out beneath. The track to the summit is 4km long and it took me 38 minutes to get to the top, but I felt exhilarated when I reached the top, not tired at all. It has been more than 20 years since I have been to the top of Flagstaff and never before have I considered running it, and hell would have frozen over before I'd have selected it as my long easy run.
Today, I realised that Challenge Wanaka has changed me. Easy has a new definition. No longer is easy the path of least resistance. Easy is now about how I approach a challenge (a state of mind and attitude towards the challenge), not the challenge itself.
I think I had expected a huge change to wash over me as I crossed the finish line in some baptism of enlightenment. When that didn't happen I just assumed that I had not achieved what I had set out to do and that is what I have continued to believe for the past six months. It's not that I didn't feel different following my race, I did. I felt some how more... I don't know... just more, actually. It was, and continues to be, a weird feeling. But today, I realise that the huge change that has happened is actually very small: so small I didn't even notice it's there, yet so huge that it has changed the course of my life forever. In a way it is the opposite of my accident, which was so instantly and tangibly life-changing (in both good and bad ways), when the reality was the changes I made as a result of my accident were so very small. The accident imposed change upon me, Challenge has empowered me to make a change.
The tale of something so life-changing
Watch this space...
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