New Perspective

Pat, wanted to share a marathon story from one of the Penguins that gave me a new perspective on the marathon. This person finished the marathon in 7 hours so she may have been the last person to finish I'm not sure. From pretty close to the beginning she had the end of the race truck right behind her. I don't know if anyone else has had this experience but I did my first year. Even though you know you are slow it is amazing how fast the huge crowd clears out and you find yourself among only a very few people at the back of the race and feeling kind of weird and lonely. Then the end of the race truck gets behind you and slowly and with a monotonous grinding sound stays there plaguing you the whole way. You wonder if it is going to stall because you are going so slow and you keep thinking about it being there. It was there behind her for a long, long time but she just kept going her usual slow steady pace. Finally at some point the people in the truck told her they were leaving her and she said OK. I'm not sure exactly where this was but I believe this was somewhere around mile 16 to 18. So now she really was all alone. Then she was in east Austin where she didn't know her way around and all of the cones marking the course had been taken down. People were packing up the water stop. She didn't know what to do or where to go and then one of the volunteers ran to their car and got her a map. She continued on her slow steady torturous way...alone, with no water, no mile markers and no course markers. She finally bummed some water off a guy in a passing car. Her husband was on his bike and finally found her around Lakeshore drive and tried to convince her that this was ridiculous and she should just stop. She said something like "if that's what you came here for, you can just go home." And She just kept going and finally at 7 hour crossed the finish line with a few family members waiting and not too many other people. A volunteer had to dig a metal out of a box for her. While I have known what it is like to be slow and have had the end of the race truck behind me for parts of some races, I have never finished all alone and last. I think this woman deserves a tremendous amount of credit for not only sticking with the training for the long tough 6 months but especially for finishing the marathon under much more difficult and lonely conditions than most of us will ever experience. It is easy to admire and look up to the fast runners but to me this 'marathoner' deserves more credit and admiration than anyone else who was out on the course that day. Thanks

Marie Mahoney Orange Coach