The plane bucks and jerks, doing its best to shake us from its back and/or simultaneously give me a heart-attack. My knuckles are white; the tendons in my already bony hands poke out as marionette strings. I try to keep calm until I see the flight attendant raise his eyebrows at a particularly violent bump and shoot toward his seat, buckling in. Even the pros are freaking out.

This is it, I think. This is that most ironic tragedy that will end it all. Finally.

No. The gusts lose interest in tossing us around and the hovering mess of fog, sleet, and wind spits us out into the dark, wet Boston spring. The wheels touch down; I compulsively stop my watch. The scary part’s over.

I’ve been up since 4am and I’m more than relieved to quickly find my enormous backpack and, hulking, drag myself through the now empty Logan terminal. We’d been delayed for a million years in Miami, waiting for our turn to plummet through this awful April evening, and now I’m ready for bed.

The frigid air slaps me awake until I find Mariana who’s come to pick me up. Huffing, I heave the bag into the back and we’re driving off towards a warm, restful bed.

 

It’s taken close to five months and a few thousand miles on foot – not to mention another few thousand traveled by car, bus, plane, milk-truck, jalopy, llama…  – to get here. I wake up early on the following morning – Wednesday, April 16, 2014 – breathing the oxygen-thick air of which I’ve been starving my body for so long. I have five days until the Boston Marathon.  I have some light running to do, but mostly my focus has  shifted to “staying out of trouble.”

There can be a lot of pressure when racing the Marathon. Unlike a shorter distance, racing a Marathon isn’t something one can do every week. There’s an eggs-in-one-basket element that seems to always be looming overhead, the sicknesses, freak injuries, attacks by rabid animals or cars…  I’ve gotten the most out of my body already. Now, I’m just trying to keep it from falling apart at the last minute.

 

As it turns out, channeling all the excess energy that comes from “tapering” takes up the majority of my time. My coach, Jon, tells me to pick up a new hobby.

“I recommend long Russian novels,” he says. “You basically need to pretend you’re not a runner this week. Focus on something else.”

Cutting my normal training volume in half, I find myself in the unfamiliar state of having more time than obligation. Mariana brings over a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle that Laika the Cat assumes has been laid out only for her nightly amusement, creating a Sisyphean labor for those of us trying to arrange the thousand (maybe nine-hundred ninety-something, now) little bits.

Despite the long day of travel, my legs are light and my runs effortless almost immediately. The drop in both altitude and running volume leave me ready to go. I sit at the dinner table, my knees jittering, an electricity flowing through my nervous system and ready to shoot me up and off for a thousand miles at the slightest urging. I want it now.

But I’m nervous. Which is weird. An unseen hand shoots a syringe full of adrenaline directly into my brain-stem every time I crest the big hill on Rt. 2 and the skyline of Boston comes into view. I can’t stop counting down the remaining days and hours, which disappear without thinking like so many potato chips until the bag carries only a pile of salt and crumbs and it’s time to go.

 

As I lie in bed that penultimate night, I try to act like I’m thinking about anything except the events to take place over the next fourteen hours. I half-heartedly joke about Mariana’s car breaking down over the two miles we have to travel to the Boston Common in the morning. Mostly, I try not to question myself.

Like on the airplane, there’s nothing I can do at this point to help myself. More worry will not help. I think back to the mantra my father instilled on me so many years ago when I talked to him about being nervous before some cross country or track meet.

“The pressure is a privilege,” he explained. “Not many people will ever be in the position you’re in. It’s good to feel pressure; it means that you care about your results. And it means that you have the potential to do something great. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

And from then on, I’ve done a good job of accepting the pressure. Letting it wash over, but not tarnish me.

But, this feels different. Maybe it’s the Marathon – the big bully that chews up even the strongest and fittest and spits out a sniveling mess. Maybe it’s the emotional weight of this race. This city. This year.

I stare at the ceiling, willing myself to sleep. My brain whirs at a billion RPM. I try to focus on the last advice that I got from Jon. “You need to be prepared to have a good race. You need to be ready to feel great at halfway and know that you’re ‘on’ that day. And you should try to enjoy it.”

Jon’s advice has never led me astray, but I still have trouble accepting it ahead of the fact. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow.