Winning A Different Type of Lottery
5/6/2019
The marathon is one of those truly inspiring events where athletes (and non-athletes) of all shapes and sizes come together to accomplish the seemingly unachievable. Everyone has their own backstory and reason for why they’re running, and each experience is unique to each runner on a physical, mental, spiritual, and psychological level.
Running has been a kind of therapy for me; when I had a bad day at work or school, I’d run to sweat out the bad energy. I would rather feel the “pain” of sore muscles and my gasping breath than whatever psychological challenge I was going through. I’m an athletic girl; able to throw and catch and generally keep active, but running was hard for me for half my life. The feeling of my heart burst out of my chest, of the individual alveoli bursting like overfilled balloons in my lungs, and the cramping in my calves while sweating like a broken city fire hydrant were not appealing to me. In middle school, I dreaded the timed mile test. My anxiety would skyrocket as our scary gym teacher, with the polyester tracksuit and mullet, walked to the startline and blew the whistle to start. I hated the lack of energy I felt during and after because I was so out of shape and my diet consisted of soda, grains, and fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies from the cafeteria.
The change occurred when I was determined to get on the varsity lacrosse team. The current athletes always complained about the hard long team runs on the sidewalks around our small, hilly suburban New Jersey town. To stay ahead of the pack, I hit the gym at my local YMCA a few times a week to run on the treadmill and play around with the strength equipment during the offseason. I was so dedicated, the retired WWII veteran that worked out there every day even noticed my improvement over the winter months.
On our first long lacrosse team run, I discovered that the reason I felt like I sucked at running was because all my other sports stressed sprints and suicides as conditioning. I am not a sprinter, and I always seemed to come in last for those drills. It turns out I’m a natural endurance athlete; my slow-twitch muscle fibers had me in the front of the pack of the girls’ lacrosse team on our journey around town.
Over the next decade-and-a-half I’d find patches of time where I was consistent in running and other times where it’d fall off. I’ve only done a handful of races, but a bucket list item for me was to run a marathon. I pictured running 26.2 miles as a once-in-a-lifetime accomplishment because it was hard enough that only about 1% of the world population will run a marathon in their lifetime. It was challenging enough that only a few would attempt it, yet doable enough that I knew with the right training I could survive it and thrive. I had seen people that didn’t fit the skinny Cross Country runner stereotype complete marathons and I wanted to join in on that success story as well.
If I was going to sign up for a marathon, I wanted to go big or go home and run New York City. Having grown up just outside of the city that never sleeps, I wanted full accountability of thousands of strangers watching me pass by on the closed-off streets. However, the thought of all the time and work I had to put into training made me too scared to even enter or find out how to sign up for it, so I procrastinated for years.
In 2018, I wanted to finally commit, but most of my closest friends got married over the summer that I needed to train, and one wedding was the day before the NYC marathon itself, so that wasn’t going to happen yet. So when registration for the NYC Marathon lottery came up for 2019, I thought I’d try for it that year and, if I got in, give it my full commitment. I had done two half marathons so far, and I was pretty exhausted after those, so I knew this would be quite the challenge.
I marked February 27, 2019 on the calendar as the day I would find out if I got in. Little did I know that this run was going to be more than a physical test for me. Just one week before the drawing, I found out that my brother had passed away. He was an Iraq War veteran for the Marine Corps and struggled with PTSD when he returned home. My family and friends were devastated. I was in shock, and, to be honest, I still am months later. All week I was helping my family prepare for the wake and funeral arrangements. On the 27th, I noticed a charge on my credit card and looked up online to see how I would find out if I got in. The online forum showed that I would have a charge on my card and get an email by the end of the day. I had the charge, but refused to believe it until I screenshot the email and shared on social media.
I was so grateful to get in on my first NYCM lottery. Only 9% of tristate area applicants in the lottery get to run, and I took it as a sign that I was meant to be chosen at this time, when I most needed the distraction, challenge, and runner’s high only an extreme race like this could bring. It was as if my brother up in the sky gave a nudge to the selection committee to say that I’m ready.
And although I am ready to take on the training, challenges will inevitably come up along the way. I’m committed to the physically grueling program, and for accountability I will reflect on my weekly runs and races leading up to the main event in future blog entries. This race is for my brother, and I will dedicate each mile in training and the race to his memory, so come along for the ride.
Collage of my brother and my marathon acceptance email I used to announce both pieces of news in my Instagram post in February 2019.