When The Legs Are(n't) There

First things first: THIS COMING TUESDAY JUNE 2, dear, beloved, brilliant pals Christine Smallwood, Andrew Martin, and I are going to talk one of my all-time favorite literary terrains: siblings, at one of my favorite all time bookstores, Greenlight. Possible we will spontaneously attempt to guess your birth order, go long on Grete Samsa or how my older sister used to hit me with a hairbrush on the drive to high school; wine will definitely be served. RSVP here!

Also: A couple spots remaining in Rumaan Alam’s summer school. You’ll learn and read and laugh and learn some more. APPLY HERE

(Still writing here about training for a marathon and Harry Styles…)

(Dear sweet Harry, looking sad)

A little over a week ago, I ran the Brooklyn half-marathon, down Washington, up Flatbush, around Grand Army Plaza, back down Flatbush, along the bottom of the park then the full loop, out the park again and straight down Ocean Parkway for five miles. It ends on Coney Island.

My friend came over the night before because the start was close to our house and she was running, lives in Queens.

“What are you hoping for?” She said.

We both hemmed and hawed.

It’s a sort of rule of running, at least for me, the people that I know, and certainly for longer distances, not to commit too much to a goal (hence, (one of) the absurd fact(s) of this substack). So many different things can happen. It’s shameful, embarrassing, to lay claim to a time you end up unable to reach.

The time I thought vaguely I might hit was sub 1:25, thirteen six and a half minute miles but I didn’t say this to my friend. Not easy but reasonable if you’re trying to be in the shape you need to be to run 26.2 miles at 6:45.

To my friend—a close, good friend who loves me and will love me regardless of how seldom I hit my silly running goals—I said I wasn’t shooting for anything.

Classic posturing, Pathetic really. I can only be myself!

I’d felt sluggish the past couple weeks. My sleep, as ever, has been awful. I keep getting up at two and my mind races. I panic and am incapable of getting back to sleep. But I’d done lots of things I hadn’t done before the half-marathon in April, trained, for instance, not run 12 miles the Monday before the race. I’d run a 1:28 that time.

Three minutes is no joke, but, again, one has to buck up at some point and push. I’ve been spending too much time on running Instagram (even though I deleted Instagram from my phone months ago, am not supposed to be on it at all). A woman said, one of the women that likely I should block for my own mental health and time management, you have to remember that it should feel hard.

“I want to see how I do if it feels really hard,” I said to my friend.

We got up at 4:45 and my friend and I drank coffee. We were out of peanut butter. I hadn’t noticed and peanut butter toast with jelly is my favorite pre-race food. I had to settle with toast and butter, only jelly. It felt like a bad sign. I could tell, or maybe what I did was convince myself I was feeling off, and then I did, but I felt squirmy the whole morning.

My sweet husband drove us to the start line at 5:40.

My friend and I were in different corrals, and I sat on the curb in mine with all the sort of aggro men and read my New York Review of Books while they did strides and talked strategy. The two men closest to me kept saying numbers back and forth and I finally realized they were talking about how much they weighed during each race they’d run in the last year, and I stood up and found a spot further from them on the curb. Three different men I saw walk past had 26.2 tattooed on the backs of their calves and then a tally of the number of marathons they’d run below it in ticks, 34, 21, 18, respectively.

(Relatedly: I did think briefly, maybe I should get Harry’s face tattooed on my calf?)

I kept thinking, I don’t feel great. I overheard one of the guys in my corral say to his friend, sometimes the legs aren’t there, and sometimes phrases lodge themselves in my brain and I can’t get them out and this one stuck.

At 7, the race started. I don’t wear a watch or use my app for races. I just want to do whatever I feel and see what happens. Maybe I won’t always do this. We crossed the start line a minute and twenty seconds after the gun; I tried to hold that in my brain, so I could check in with my pace each time I saw a clock.

At first, running past the first and second and third mile marker, I could figure out my pace. The first mile was around 6:30, fine, good, except it felt faster than it should have. It shouldn’t, I knew, have felt as hard as it did. I stayed at roughly that pace through the first 5k, 6:40 maybe for the next mile and 6:35 for the next; the next 5k included the park which has a couple hills. I slowed down on the one major incline but still stayed steady enough except it felt unsustainable. I kept feeling my body sort of begging to stop or slow down. This did not feel good or normal. But also, a bunch of 6:35 miles over hills are not supposed to feel great. I tried to remind myself it was supposed to be hard.

I like to try to let the smarter looking people who are around me help me act smarter, so I stayed three or four feet back from a guy who seemed like he knew what he was doing. He kept looking at his watch and seeming pleased. I started to make deals with myself, what was a time that I could stomach, what was a pace that I could hold, that would feel hard, but that I could feel sure I’d get to the end. I watched that guy and tried to stay just off his shoulder, but then he slowed down on a downhill and I needed to sort of let things loosen up and so I passed him and then I was in one of those strange lulls where there is no one close around you and I got a little bit unmoored.

I did not like the long Ocean Parkway straightaway.

After the hills of the park, it’s relatively steady, slight inclines sometimes, slight declines. Much less twisty and up and down than the Manhattan Half had been. There were very few people on the sidelines, not much shade.

I told myself a seven-minute mile is steady, calmer. I just needed to back off and settle in, calm down. I had to settle, settle. I’m terrible at settling. I hadn’t drunk enough water that morning or the day before, and my stomach felt funny so I could only take small sips of Gatorade every three or so miles.

I thought too much about how we hadn’t had the peanut butter; if only we’d had peanut butter. I kept thinking, the legs aren’t there the legs aren’t there, and then I thought, fuck that guy for saying that right at the start.

The legs, though, did not seem to be there.

I told myself to back off and then pick back up at mile ten. At mile ten, I told myself to back off until 12.

At twelve, I tried to do the math of the minute and twenty seconds off whatever the timer said when we passed but I was no longer capable of math like that.

At the 800 meters to go sign, I thought, 800 meters is not that long and I sped up but not that much.

A woman sprint past me (granted, she looked 22) and I thought, her legs are there.

I finished with a 1:29.

Respectable enough. It did not feel great and it did not feel great to think, to run a sub-Harry’s best time marathon, I’d have to do that twice and wouldn’t that day have been able to.

A guy I don’t know well but whose kid is friends with my kid, also ran and checked my time and texted me congratulations—kindly, thoughtfully—and I had to pretend not to be pissed.

My friend finished with a PR, and I was grateful to get to be glad for her, to ride the subway back to our place with her, to sit in our backyard with her and talk about books and life instead of being cranky that the legs weren’t there. I took our older kid into the city, and we got coffee and lunch and looked at art and bought too many books. What had sucked, the last half an hour, running, the sun and heat, felt wonderful, wandering around Manhattan, talking to my kid.

The next night, in bed, trying again to work on that whole sleep thing, I got an email of notes on my new novel. Short version: the legs are not yet there.

The whole next week I threw a quiet temper tantrum, took two days off then let myself do a few easy runs without a watch, went a little further, Thursday, Friday; finished my grades; read a friend’s (brilliant) manuscript, sent unhinged emails to my agent, started to fiddle in the novel document, walked the dog a lot, had a couple of friends over for coffee, read lots of books—the highlights of which were Patrick Cottrell’s, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, the two reissued Nancy Lemann books, The Oyster Diaries and Lives of the Saints, the new Claire Vaye Watkins, Yellow Pine, a Diane Arbus biography.

That Sunday, I got up at five and worked. Back in the document, I thought, I’ve missed this world. I thought, how sad I’ll be when I don’t get to fiddle with these scenes and people, places anymore. It was raining and the kids slept in and my husband gave me a forty-minute-deep dive on a Bob Dylan album that helped me add a sentence to an early scene.

Around 10, I put on shoes and tights and t-shirt, went into the park and did six-ish loping easy miles, splashed in puddles, flew down hills, went home; our younger kid has started running and I picked her up and we did another couple miles, soaking wet and laughing the whole time.

Of course, in all the ways that matter to me—who’s most of all, and glad to be, just some lady sweating—the legs were and are just fine.