Running has changed the way I think about distance. I grew up living about four miles from the nearest town, where my adoptive parents worked and where I went to school. My adoptive mother complained about the inconvenience that the seven-minute drive into town caused her, often using the opportunity to saddle me with guilt about having to be at some rehearsal or at having to pick up a school friend to play. I also remember my difficulties as a Boy Scout completing a five-mile hike (not least because my flat feet caused me pain after only a little bit of walking). The idea, then, of someone running four or five miles long daunted me, and I regarded those who did with a small sense of wonder.
Only when I found myself around a lot of people who run did it begin to occur to me that running several miles at a time might be something I could do. And, so, I started running with an eye towards chalking up greater and greater distances on each run. When I discovered that I could cover a mile in a relatively short time, miles shrank for me, not physically, of course, but psychologically.
Perhaps, then, a key moment in learning to run longer distances is to experience the distances contracting in one’s mind. Now, running one mile, four miles, even ten miles no longer seems intimidating.
The heat notwithstanding, then, I believe that I was psychologically ready to finish the moment I started the race. I knew that I might plod along like Aesop’s tortoise, but I also knew that I would finish and that it wouldn’t feel as if it were taking forever.
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