Kilometer Fourteen

On Sunday I ran fourteen kilometers. I'm writing it down like that, on its own line, because a year ago I couldn't climb the stairs of the hospital parking garage without feeling like a lung was about to fall out, and because nobody in my family celebrated it the way I wanted. Andrea sent a thumbs up. Lucía asked if someone had been chasing me.

I signed up for the half marathon in a moment of weakness, which is how I make most of the important decisions in my life. It was January, five in the morning, in the break room, while I ate some plain cookies someone had left open on the table. A coworker, Pao, had run one the year before and showed us her medal on her phone. I said "so pretty" and by the time I finished the cookie I'd paid the registration fee. Twenty-one kilometers, in October. I didn't even know what twenty-one kilometers meant in real life. Now I do: it's from my house downtown and back, plus a little, plus the little bit that hurts.

Training backwards

Every training plan I found online assumes you sleep at night. "Run early, before work." My before work is seven in the evening. My early is when everyone else is having dinner. So I run in the afternoons, in the big park near my place or along the Alameda when I'm too lazy to drive, at the hour when men come out with their dogs and couples walk very slowly holding hands, blocking the path with a lot of love.

I don't run the day after a shift. I tried once, and three kilometers in I sat down on a bench and stared at a tree for about twenty minutes. It wasn't a rest. It was a blackout. My body was telling me something with very little diplomacy.

What happens at kilometer fourteen

Up to ten I'm fine. I have my music, a playlist called "don't stop" that's nothing but embarrassing pop from 2009. From ten to twelve I start negotiating. I tell myself things like "just to that lamppost," then "just to the lady selling corn." And at fourteen, this Sunday, something strange happened: I ran out of arguments. I had nothing left to convince myself with. And I kept going anyway, thinking about nothing, my legs doing their job as if they belonged to someone else.

I thought about the bad nights in the ER. The ones with no pause, when they come in one after another and at some point you stop feeling tired, not because it's gone but because there's no point in feeling it. I thought maybe that's why I like this. That it's the same muscle. That I've been training for kilometer fourteen for six years without knowing it.

Or maybe I was just dehydrated. Both things can be true.

What's left

Seven kilometers and six months to go. I bought real running shoes at a store where a young guy made me walk barefoot on a little mat and told me I overpronate, with the face of someone delivering grave news. My left knee hurts going down stairs. One of my toenails is no longer the color it should be, and I won't go into detail because this isn't a medical blog, although it could be.

My mom says I'm crazy, that I already work too much, why would I tire myself out even more. I can't explain to her that it's a different kind of tired. That the hospital's tiredness gets put on me, and this one I put on myself. That there's a huge difference between the two, even if the legs ache the same.

Next Sunday is sixteen. I already told Lucía so she won't worry: nobody's chasing me. Well, only me.