Page 581 - WhyAsInY

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burgh! It completely fit the bill and was unlikely to be much of a travel hassle. Another initial contender was the Rock ’n’ Roll Marathon in San Diego, the name of which appealed to me. And there was the annual Pikes Peak Marathon, the name of which, for obvious reasons, did not. But San Diego was not very accessible, and it didn’t matter if Pikes Peak was. Pittsburgh’s marathon would be held on the first Sunday in May 2000, and, at that time of year, temperatures were historically in the low fifties. The course was rated “relatively flat.” I could start training in the fall. So, what could be better?
According to the second book, the training program was simple: Monday was the day for a short run, Wednesday for a middle-distance run, and on Saturday you would do the big run of the week. I believe that the first week called for one mile, two miles, and six miles or some- thing similar. One would/should work up to a week in which the Wednesday run would by either ten or twelve miles—I forget—and the final big Saturday run would be twenty-two miles, not, I was relieved to see, twenty-six and about two-tenths miles, the marathon distance. I’m sure that there were diet restrictions that were recommended; I’m equally sure that I paid little or no attention to them.
After you finally complete the twenty-two-mile run, you are advised to taper your running for the two weeks remaining before the race. That was something (the tapering, not the race itself) to which I really looked forward. On the twenty-two-mile Saturday, temperatures were in the forties. I completed that course without stopping or walking, and I also did so without drinking water (what the real athletes refer to as “hydrat- ing”)! Either I did not know that you were well advised to drink water, or I just couldn’t run with a water bottle (something that is easy to do, it turns out). Anyway, I had a major success and was primed and ready to taper and to run.
The only other hurdle was that that Saturday afternoon, Kathy and I had tickets to Siegfried, the third in the Wagner Ring Cycle, which we were experiencing for the first time. (We have since traveled to Copen- hagen, Saint Petersburg, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., to hear the Ring Cycle.) Siegfried’s running time was five hours and thirty minutes, a longer
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