The Beauty in the Berlin Marathon

The Enduring Chase of it All

We’ve all been there, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be doing this. The days when all the days come together, when running feels like it’s happening outside of you and inside of you. Miles seem like meters, minutes act as arbitrary markings of time that have no bearing on the immediacy of now. Oftentimes this is called a flow state, and when it is achievable on race day, it becomes almost drug-like in its potency. 

Sunday was that kind of a day. 

I wouldn’t be lying if I said that the past six years of running haven’t been a roller coaster ride. When I ran my last PR, it was at the Harrisburg Marathon in 2018. It was a very solid race from beginning to end, even though I had the beginnings of a high hamstring tendinitis, which had just started a few weeks before. After that race, I took off for nearly a month in order to dispel the pain I had while sitting and running, but instead of going away, it only persisted. And persisted. For three years, I struggled with this injury before finally taking care of it, freeing me up to run again, just in time for Covid.

There were two types of runners during Covid: those who took that time to focus on training and becoming better, and those that sank into listlessness. I was a staunch supporter of the second group, a card-carrying member of Lethargy Unlimited. I paid my monthly dues in nicotine and alcohol while accruing debt against my goals and dreams and motivation. As my job revolves around running, I did enough to get by, but when race day came around, it was usually derailed by lack of training and/or motivation. I could string together good stretches, but when things got tough, I usually folded. I found excuses in my mind: there will always be another race, you’re getting older, you don’t care about running and that’s okay.

But I do care about running, and I do care about doing well, even though I won’t ever be an “80-mile a week, map out the spreadsheet and max out the Vo2” kinda guy. I still want to be the best version of me, to respect discipline and do good work and show up even when I may not feel like it. 

Because as with everything in life, from parenting to marriage to our actual jobs, the reward isn’t in the rush of endorphins, the tricks of the mind that offer easy outs. The honeymoon phase wanes, eventually and always. If you’re in search of that thrill, you will be searching forever. Disappointment will show up to your door, over and over again, and you will go with it willingly. As cliché as it is to say that the reward is in the journey, it’s true. The real richness comes from digging, from doing the work even when we’re tired and sore, even when we’re not in love. Sometimes for months on end, sometimes for years.

Life is hard, it always has been. Sure, we may not be swinging as many hammers and digging as many ditches these days (more power to you if you are), but have you ever tried putting your phone down for 24 hours? We live in an addiction economy that asks us to stop doing hard things ever, that tells us it’s okay. It’s not okay. 

I wanted to get back to doing something hard, something I could hate and wonder about the point of it all. Twenty mile long runs alone, thinking about life, working through problems. Going out in the middle of the afternoon for 400-meter repeats in the dead of August, volunteering to bathe in the baths of a humid Maryland summer. To feel completely awful and think: why am I doing this? Really, what am I doing?

Only to have autumn come around and the weather break on a day in late September in Berlin. When I can reach mile 22 feeling good, feeling like I have something left and thinking: “I remember now. This is why I’m doing it. This is why I did it, all of that.”

I didn’t break any records on Sunday. There were plenty of friends I ran with who were injured or cramped or bonked and finished way faster than me. But I broke my own record, six years after I set it. 

Maybe it was the last time I did that, or maybe it’s the spark that keeps me reaching for more. Whatever it was, someday I will reach the end of this road of records, and that time won’t go any lower, no matter how hard I try. Entropy is inevitable. The number that remains, Robbe Reddinger’s marathon PR, will be an X:XX that nobody will remember or care about fifty years from now. It’s truly a pointless number. I’ll be lucky if history holds me in any regard, and if it does, it won’t be for my time running 26.2 miles of a city.

But maybe, if I’m lucky, it’ll remember me for some things, just for a little while. Things borne from doing work when it felt like work, of loving even in the depths of languishing, of giving what I had when nothing was taking. My personal best– remember me for that.