Alice's Mommy Blog

I drove to Toronto on Saturday with my coach so that I would have to not worry about getting to the race on time on Sunday morning. I’m glad that I did but I didn’t manage to get to sleep as early on Saturday night as I had hoped. I stayed at Laura’s (my coach’s friend) condo and she is an amazing cook so all the food we had was fabulous, but I didn’t manage to get to sleep until almost 11pm.

The day started bright and early when I woke up around 5:00am and finally got up at 5:30am to use the bathroom and get my eye drops in. Steve confirmed that our baby did in fact wake up this early at home. We had picked out our running gear the night before so it was just a mater of getting up, eating our food and getting dressed and geared up before we headed out. The weather at that time was pouring rain! Lucky for us we had hit dollarama the day before so we had some nice simple rain ponchos that helped to keep me entirely dry (except for my socks and shoes). It was supposed to rain all day but likely it stopped just before we began to run. We had a heck of a time finding the bathrooms before the race, and once we did the line was very long, but we managed to use them and get ourselves to the starting coral without too much trouble. Once we were in the coral my nerves got the better of me, and I cried a bit just because of how nervous I was feeling.

The race began at 8:30am and it took us until 8:52 to get over the start line, because there were so many people running. Both myself and Cecilia got rid of our ponchos before we hit the 3km mark. The first half of the race went pretty good. I had to pee by the 11th km so we started to watch for a port-a-potty with no line and found one pretty quick. I used my ipod to block out my need to pee and focused on keeping the pace.

Everything was going well until the second half of the race. This half was incredibly hard on me physically, mentally and emotionally. Around the 24th km my muscles in my butt began to hurt again and they started to get worse as I went along. Cecilia had me stop and stretch it out a few times but it kept getting worse as I went along. I also started to feel very nauseous as I went along, so Cecilia had me skip a few water stations to try and settle my stomach but it only helped a little bit. Emotionally, it was very hard, and I ended up crying around the 37km mark. I was really disappointed in myself that I couldn’t cut the pace I needed and that my butt was forcing me to slow down. I cried for all the loved ones that I’ve lost (my sister, my oma, my opa), for my body not being strong enough to push me on, for the pain I was feeling everywhere and other reasons. All the pain and frustration that I’d let bottle up just all came flooding out despite how much I was trying not to cry. I pushed myself through all the pain, and I’m so thankful that Cecilia was there to help me through it. 

As much pain as I was in, it wasn’t all bad. Cecilia had hoped that she would be sung to and she was! I had no idea Simone and Garfunkel wrote a song called “Cecilia” so you learn new things everyday. We also taunted someone about Western. Now I don’t presume to tell anyone where to study and many of my friends from high school went there, but Cecilia was wearing her University of Washington cap which has the same colours as Western. So as we were running a guy yelled at us “Go Western” and as she kept going Cecilia yelled back “It’s actually University of Washington”, and without missing a beat I yelled “Friends don’t let friends go to Western!” Cecillia laughed and recommended that we run faster around the corner so we did. We also had a water station where everyone kept chanting “water-water-water” and I replied “loo-loo-loo” which for those of you who don’t know is a chant from my frosh week at UW! Finally, I had a water station that reminded me of Steve and my plant joke. We believe that if plants could talk they would constantly (and insecently) ask for water, so when we ran through a group of 15 or 20 people who all held out water and asked “Water?” “Water?” “Want some water?” and all I could do was giggle because I pictured them all as talking plants. This was around km mark 33 or 34 which means my brain was pretty much useless. Also, John Stanton was between the 40 and 41km mark cheering for people which we both found very cool. At the end they started counting down to the finish line when there was only 500m to go. Cecilia and I pushed me to the finish and we help our hands up in triumph as we crossed the finish line together!

Necklace from Steve for finishing the race.

My favourite signs of the marathon:

• You are all kinds of awesome!
• Pain is temporary but internet results last forever!
• Do it Gangham style!
• Free Beer at the finish.
• Go random adult! (group of teens)

One really bad thing that I never even considered was that after the race ended I still had to walk my crazy sore legs to the car! Crap that hurt! I expected myself to cry after the race but I didn’t. I wish I had in a way because it was emotional and by not getting it out I have been carrying that all around with me since then. I know you’re all dying to know if I would do it again, and honestly the answer is yes, but not anytime soon. I missed my babies a lot at the end and after 18 weeks training for a half-marathon, followed by 22 weeks of marathon training I’m a really drained and need time for my babies before I try this distance again. And honestly, the race was a lot harder than I expected mentally. I thought if I had gone through labour that this race would be no big deal but man was I wrong. Now it’s going to be Steve’s turn to give the marathon a try. He’s planning to run the next Toronto marathon in May 2013.

So now I am taking a full week off of running and then next week will start to add back my running and work on adding cross training into my fitness routine. Then I am planning to start trying for our final baby.

Two proud runners!

• ← Quickie Race post.
• Big girl is now 3! →