Marathon training without anemia feels like cheating, I text a friend.
She “ha ha’s” the bubble and I laugh back (virtually) and then I borough between my words to excavate more humor from the phrase but accidentally dive too deep and find myself trapped below the “training” but above the “cheating,” editing out the “feels like” to an “is.”
Because it is, isn't it? I am
Cheating.
In high school, teachers detected cheating by looking for inconsistencies—or at least, they claimed to. If a student turned in a D+ essay on a Wednesday, a Friday-ready A sounded alarms. If another wrote the beginning of a test in print but switched to cursive halfway, better call her after class.
While no one had handed me a detention slip (yet), running a sub-6 mile a few months after struggling to hold a 10-12 min pace was in the realm of suspicion. And while I often claim to be bad at math (I am) I know my multiples of two, and that jumping from a grade of 50% to 100% can look like, well
Cheating.
Before last week, I hadn’t run a sub-6 mile since high school. At least, not to my knowledge. I hadn’t raced a mile since then, either. At least, not with competition.
I had run a few 6-something miles in college, but those were done solo on my university gym's indoor track—a small gray oval propped a few stairways above a 7/11 where the “run this way” direction changed daily and which the rest of campus either didn’t know existed or chose to avoid—which is perhaps both beside the point and the entire point of this segue.
When I ran a sub-6 mile last week, I was less surprised than I was satisfied. Like most cheaters, I had entered the competition with a goal. And like most cheaters, my goal was risky. Risky because achieving my goal relied on the validity of a specific set of data—one that was built off of recent races and paces and which hypothesized sub-6 as a logical achievement—and on the inaccuracy of another set—one that contained last year’s slower runs and lower energy levels and the argument that it would be better not to race at all.
That set began accumulating last fall. It grouped together scatter plots of ever-present fatigue, lead-laden legs, and an aggressive loss of vision when ascending subway steps. Line graphs mapped diagnoses to doctors' visits to doctors' visits to doctors' visits to new seasons to now.
While each data set made sense on its own, combined they showed gaps; inconsistencies. Data set one told a story of how I had dug a hole for myself in the fall; hibernated in it through winter. Data set two revealed that I had jumped out of that hole sometime in August or June—like “hey, surprise! Everything is different now,” without proof of
Change.
Change happens in silence, I think. And change happens in darkness, too. Slips through conversations as one person loses her words and the other looks away.
I can’t count (re: math) the number of blog posts I drafted and discarded that described my anger at the discrepancy between the mass recognition of getting through change versus the mass silencing of enduring it. I titled these going through it and I won't spoil them now in case I’m ever brave enough to release one in the right moment, even though I haven’t been so far.
But in summary, people love watching a successful landing. It's the mid-air flight, the moments of suspension before a subject either clears her obstacle or slams over it, that we can't bear to see. Usually, I shut my eyes.
I shut my eyes a lot this winter; last fall. Both figuratively—refusing to start a timer on my runs—and literally—closing them in dressing rooms; the shower. When I became a fall risk, I stopped doing the latter. When I became stronger; safer, I started doing the former. But I didn’t open both eyes together. It didn’t happen all at once.
And maybe that’s why it feels like
Cheating.
I’m not cheating in that my new mile time, or training pace, or energy levels weren’t earned; built; fought for. They were, I did. But that heavy lifting was done in hiding, in secrecy, in a body with lower hemoglobin levels and lower serotonin levels and more unrelenting endurance than I could muster today if I tried—and I don’t feel like trying.
I’m cheating because I’m accepting applause for the me that came before me, who I stole from.
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