All the Dumb Stuff I Worried About During My Half Marathon

Where are the safety pins? Will I ever make it to the front of this bathroom line? Why am I doing this?

I ran a half marathon last week. Sort of. A half marathon is 13.1 miles, or 21 kilometers (they love kilometers over here in Europe). But the course I ran, though it was an official race, was only 12.4 miles, so something must have gone wrong when they were measuring it.¹

I like running. It’s sort of a therapy for me. I did cross country for a couple of years in middle school and high school, and I was not good at it. But I still liked it, and I liked how clearly I could see myself improve. I even got a “most improved” award in eighth grade cross country.

I am still not particularly good at running, but I enjoy it², and I do it regularly. I started doing marathons in college because it was the only way I could convince myself to keep up a schedule. I knew running made me feel a lot better, physically and mentally. But if I didn’t have some sort of goal to train for, it was too easy to just skip running, vowing to do it the next day/week/year/lifetime. So, I’d train for a marathon for a few months, run the thing, and then take a bunch of time off until I had to do another marathon.

When COVID-19 hit the U.S. in 2020, I was so anxious about everything that I became really dedicated about running even though I didn’t have a race coming up. For almost three years, I’ve made sure to exercise (this almost always means running) six days a week, with a five-day week sprinkled in every four to six weeks. There have been four weeks in the last three years during which I only exercised four days, due to being sick.

Literally no one besides me knows or cares about this schedule. I just asked Jeff, who lives with me, how often I run, and he said, “Every day? I mean, it’s more than half of the days, right?” It’s strange the things we get hung up on. But this fixation on a schedule has kept my activity levels up and anxiety levels down, so, right now, neuroticism is what works for me.

To some extent! Since we arrived in Spain, to be honest, I haven’t felt very good about running. I was still following the same schedule, but some days I’d just go out and jog a mile and hardly try. I decided to run a half marathon to see if training would help me feel more excited about running, but it didn’t, really. My running app lets me leave little notes about my workouts, and here are some from the past few months.

• (on a 1-mile run) Woke up so cold and sweaty this morning and kept hitting snooze. Finally got dressed then sat on the couch for 20 minutes dreading my 5-mile run. Finally decided to compromise by doing a short jog

• (on a 4-mile run) pathetic, honestly, but at least it’s done before work.

• (on a 3-mile run) phew

• (on a 10-mile run) pretty disappointed but at least I did it, I guess.

• (on another 1-mile run) Another day where I was supposed to run 3 miles but had a mental breakdown over the prospect

• (on a 4-mile run): Ughhhhhhh

Obviously, I was in a really good headspace as I headed into this race.

I wasn’t worried about whether I would be able to do it. I’d done the necessary training, and I’m also extremely stubborn. But I’m also—not to brag—quite good at finding things to worry about.

The race was on a Sunday morning, near Girona in northern Spain. I’d decided to run a race there so we could make a trip out of the weekend. We spent Friday and Saturday exploring the surrounding areas, which was absolutely delightful. Everyone go to Girona!!

On Sunday, I’d need to take a taxi to get to the nearby city where the race was taking place, then take a taxi back to Girona before taking our train back home. Here is a probably incomplete list of things I worried about the night before the race, in the taxi on the way to the race, at the starting line for the race, and during the race.

• I almost always listen to music when I run, and I’d forgotten my headphones.³ How was I supposed to maintain a reasonable pace without M.I.A. singing "Paper Planes" directly into my ears?

• If all went according to plan, once I taxied back to our Airbnb, I would probably have about an hour and a half to shower, finish packing up and get to the train station (which wasn’t far from our Airbnb) to catch our train home. But what if something didn’t go to plan and we missed our train? Better worry about it just in case.

• In this area of Spain, the official language is not Spanish – it’s Catalan. When I registered for the race, the website was in Catalan, and I’d used Google Translate to understand what was going on. I worried that, since Google Translate would not be available for real-life conversations, I'd be totally lost when I went to pick up my bib.⁴ Turns out everyone spoke Spanish, and everything was fine.

• When the race elves⁵ give you your bib, they usually provide four little safety pins so you can attach it to your shirt. These people did not. I have no idea how the hell to say “safety pins” in Spanish, let alone Catalan. I looked it up on my translate app and then practiced asking “Do you have safety pins?” in my head a few times before waddling nervously back to the bib table to ask. They did not. I spent 20 minutes pacing around and wondering what to do before I worked up the courage to ask a fellow runner how he was attaching his. He had brought safety pins, and he had brought EXTRAS, which he shared. God bless that man, and I hope he won all of the races.

• I worried about getting on the wrong bus and ending up at the starting line of the marathon or the 10K. (I did get on the right bus, but the bus itself got lost for a little bit before finding its way.)

• When we got to the starting line, I went to the bathroom with a nice French girl I had set next to on the bus. Of course, ~a gazillion women had the same idea. And also of course, there was only one toilet. I stood in line and worried about whether I’d still be in line when the race started. What would I do then??? Stay in line and start the race a few minutes late? (frustrating) Leave the line and risk peeing my pants during the race? (embarrassing) Just skip the whole thing? (tempting!)

Luckily, I made it out of the bathroom line by, like, 8:54, which left me PLENTY of time before the 9:00 race. Next up, I had to find the bus that was taking our extra stuff back to the starting line.

This bus system lets you bring things to the starting line that you don’t want to carry with you during the race, like a sweatshirt, or a water bottle. You put your stuff in a bag labeled with your bib number, the bus takes it to the finish line, and you pick it up when you’re done. I think this is a very helpful and handy system.

However, it’s not very helpful if you can’t find the bus. I ripped the top off of one of my energy gels to swallow some vaguely mango-flavored goo while I jogged around looking for the bus. One guy pointed sort of to the right when I asked him, so I looked over there for awhile, but NO BUS. It was, like, 8:56 by this point. I put on a brave face and went straight up to a guy with a microphone who had been making announcements.

“Clothes bus?” I asked (I did have the presence of mind to ask in Spanish, somehow.)

He also pointed to the right, but in a more diagonal direction. I took off that way, seeing absolutely no bus, but maybe it was around the corner of this block? There! A bus!! And a woman running away from it back toward the starting line.

“Clothes bus?!” I shouted as we ran past each other. “Yeah!” she called back.

That woman was very nice and I also hope she won all of the races. I threw my bag on the bus and made it to the starting line at 8:59, which felt pretty chaotic but worked out fine.

The race began. I was holding my ID card and credit card in my hand with my phone, because I was afraid if I put them in my pocket, they might fly out when I opened my pocket to get my second energy gel. In hindsight, holding them my hand made way less sense. Instead of there being the potential for my cards to fall out of my pocket when I opened it one (1) time for a gel, there was the potential for the cards to fall out of my hand for the entire time I was running. I did in fact drop them twice and then had to frantically pick them up while other runners passed me.

Other than that, the race went pretty well. I didn’t have music, but the excitement of having other runners around me offered a different source of adrenaline. I passed some people, and some people passed me. I finished the race more quickly than I expected, and made some truly gross faces along the way (always so excited to see photos of me suffering and sweating in HD)⁶. My time was 1:37:46, and I’m guessing if the course had been a full half marathon, my time would have been around 1:43:00. I was 14^th out of 175 women, the third women in my age group, and 136^th out of 514 runners overall. My little race bag was waiting for me at the finish line, I found a taxi home quickly, and I had plenty of time to shower and catch my train.

I didn’t learn any grand lessons from this race. I’m still a person who worries too much, and who is going to have lots of mornings where I don’t feel like running or really getting out of bed to start the day at all. But on this day, I showed up, I put one foot in front of the other, and I did something I was proud of. That’s all I wanted. That, and to be able, for the rest of my life, to obnoxiously bring up in conversation the time I ran a half marathon in Spain. That’s something I’ll have forever.

Oh my god, I forgot to mention that the aid stations, which normally offer things like water and Gatorade and energy gels, were handing out water and COCA COLA.

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Question of the Week: How much do you think doing well in school correlates to success later in life? Do you think the correlation has changed over the past 50 years? Over the past 100?

Recommendation of the Week: If you are interested in starting your journey as a runner, I’m a big fan of Brendan Leonard over at Semi-rad, who makes all sorts of funny content, some of it about running. How To Go For a Run in 22 Simple Steps is a very relatable guide.

Thanks for reading!

1. This happens sometimes. One time I ran a marathon and it was MORE than 26.2 miles, which was way worse.

2. Well, it’s more nuanced than that. I think about this mug a lot: https://semi-rad.com/product/i-hate-love-running-coffee-mug/

3. I had not forgotten my headphones; I’m just dumb and forgot which pocket of my suitcase I’d put them in.

4. Fun fact: In Catalan (and Spanish), the bibs are called dorsals, like dorsal fins, which made me imagine a bunch of dolphins running together.

5. The people who organize and volunteer at these events always feel like magical elves to me. They get up so early to tell us where things are, to explain rules, to hand us water during the race… wow I love them.

6. I was trying desperately hard to pass the man in the pink shirt in the last couple of miles. And I DID, so looking like this was worth it

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