Everything hurts. From the torso down, it hurts more. But it hurts everywhere. What’s that song? Yeah, it hurts so good. After close to six months of training, the marathon finally arrived yesterday. We felt pretty ready, but then again it was our first one, and as ready as you think you might be, there are always going to be surprises when you have no frame of reference for the actual day. Surprise No. 1: The torrential downpour from about Mile 4 to Mile 10, which made our shoes twice as heavy as normal and soaked through both our water-absorbing undershirt and our RandBall Redacted overshirt. Surprise No. 2: Just how terrible you feel around Mile 22. See, training for a marathon is strange in that you don’t actually do the thing you’re training for in order to prepare. As prescribed by virtually every guide out there, our longest training run was 20 miles. It’s kind of like studying for a test but only reading 3/4ths of the textbook. And people say, “If you can do 20, you can do a marathon,” which we suppose is true since we finished. But those final 6.2 are not some magical float, especially when 21-23 are virtually all uphill. Best and worst parts of the day?

Worst: The aforementioned rain, the guy with the “almost there” sign before the race was even a mile in, all the [redacted] hills, the jelly-legged feeling just before Mile 22 and the way the mile markers never seem to arrive when you need them most.

Best: The crowd. Seriously, it was a miserable day and there were thousands of people lining the course, shouting encouragement, playing music and offering homemade treats; the crew that gave us a couple ounces of Surly’s around Mile 19. Perfect timing; the realization that the rain was tapering, then stopping; the RBBH bringing cookies at Mile 7.5; eating everything in sight yesterday (and watching a certain NFC North team lose while we enjoyed our postgame meal); and, of course, finishing. In the immediate aftermath, we weren’t sure we ever wanted to do another 26.2. Now, though, we might consider another one down the road (if you didn’t intend a pun, but then you realized it in time to write “no pun intended,” isn’t the pun sort of intended?) It’s a life experience. For us, it pushed us outside our comfort zone, which we always very much relish. It’s a mental and physical test. So we’ll see. For now, though, we’ll enjoy this one. And if we’re bowling funny tonight, you’ll know why …

Fasola-link! A guide to the Wisconsin dialect.

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