26.2 miles of solitude and aliveness
Reflections on avoidance, meaning, and meeting myself
On Sunday, I crossed the finish line at the 45th Chicago Marathon. 48,500 runners across 29 neighborhoods through countless roaring crowds. Completing Chicago marks the end of my third marathon season and the halfway point on my six world majors tour. 3 down, London, Tokyo, and New York City to go. Chicago’s the first marathon I’ve tackled solo: a new core memory earned.
I first fell in love with marathons as a spectator on the sidelines of the iconic Boston Marathon. As a college student in Boston, it was a rite of passage to celebrate Marathon Monday in full force, waking up at 6am to kick off the day with a boozy breakfast. We’d make our rounds to the house parties then join hundreds of thousands of spectators, lining the route from Hopkinton to Boylston Street, to cheer runners on as they took on one of the most challenging major marathon courses.
If you’ve ever spent a day in Boston on Patriots’ Day, you know that there are few places in the world where the beauty of our collective human spirit comes alive as brilliantly as it does on the third Monday of every April in Boston. The energy in the air is electric. The perseverance on display is moving. To be along the course that day is to bear witness to magic: the magic of how 26.2 miles define us, move us, and make us come alive. As a spectator, you witness humans running towards versions of themselves they have yet to meet.
Boston 2018: running towards aliveness
Everyone has a reason for why they run a marathon. For me, I first started training in 2018 as an act of escape. I was at a crossroads of deciding whether to continue down the path of a career I felt increasingly misaligned with or answer the call to move out west and start fresh. Never the one to sit quietly while grappling with existential dread, I chose avoidance in the form of a marathon.
In a society where we numb ourselves with distractions rather than turn inward, training for a marathon seemed like the most productive way to distract myself. Running Boston had become a dream of mine. I wanted to feel alive and free, free from the suffocating shoulds that made up my reality: I should care about the work I’m doing (but I didn’t), I should be content living in Boston (but I wasn’t).
At the core of the crossroads was the decision of whether or not to continue pursuing the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation, a three-part industry exam for people who work in asset management. It had consumed my life between January and June for the prior three years, and after falling short of passing, I wasn’t ready to commit another 6 months to studying for an exam to bolster a career I no longer wanted to pursue. Around this time, an opportunity to run the Boston Marathon with Team MR8 emerged, nudging me to hit pause on the CFA.
Team MR8 represented the Martin Richard Foundation, an organization dedicated to the 8-year old boy who had been killed at the Boston Marathon finish line in 2013. Having lived in Boston the year of the bombings, there was no greater honor than running the marathon on behalf of Martin and his family. I trained and fundraised with a group of 100 other Team MR8 runners, each of us touched by the strength of Martin’s family and Martin’s commitment to peace, sportsmanship, and inclusion at such a young age. I had a particularly special connection to his family — my first manager, a woman I deeply admired, was Martin’s aunt. She graciously welcomed me, a young green analyst, into the workforce and took me under her wing, teaching me the value of infusing my full essence into my professional identity.
Despite the marathon season spanning the New England winter, training alongside Team MR8 was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. When I was out running in the dead of winter, I thought little of the problems I worried about day to day. My commitment to carrying on Martin’s legacy carried me through the darkest, coldest runs that season.
When race day came along, the weather gods delivered torrential downpours and high winds. I laughed as water filled my sneakers at the starting line, knowing in that moment there was no place in the world I’d rather be than running the 122nd Boston Marathon in honor of Martin.
I beamed for 26.2 miles, in disbelief that I had the privilege to run the marathon for a cause I felt so deeply connected to in a city where I had done so much growing up. To run through comically intense rainfall as crowds and crowds of people cheered us on was a dream come true.
I came alive that day in a way I’d never felt before, fully present for every moment of the 26.2 miles. Looking back, committing to crossing the finish line in Boston was the catalyst that kicked off sweeping changes in my life in the months that followed. By training to become a marathon runner over the course of 6 months, I had adopted a new identity that was previously incongruent with who I believed myself to be. It gave me permission to inject a new sense of agency into other areas of my life.
In the weeks following the marathon, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude for all the “detours” life had thrown my way, leading me straight to Team MR8. The Martin Richard Foundation found me when I needed them most, taking a shot on me, a first-time marathon runner, and gifting me the courage to turn an attempt at avoidance into a reality of agency and hope.
Berlin 2019: a runner without a cause
Running Boston unlocked a new reference point for who I could be and the life I could live. Over the next year, I set in motion a series of changes that I hadn’t had the confidence to pursue before the marathon. Within the year, I moved across the country, started a new job, and got into my next marathon: Berlin 2019.
Berlin is the only major marathon that you can lottery into as a group. Miraculously, my partner, Ryan, and I both secured a spot in our first attempt. With my Boston days behind me, I began training for Berlin with nothing to run from and nothing to run for. Life was good and I was content which made motivating for training runs challenging in a way it hadn’t been during my Boston season. The resistance brought me back to a time when a younger me believed my best workouts were fueled by negative emotions: frustration, regret, numbness. Despite being excited about the prospect of running another marathon and this time with Ryan, the path to Berlin was long, uninspiring, and uneventful.
The race itself ran through the city of Berlin on a cold rainy day. While many streets were lined with cheer squads, I realized on marathon day that the energy and joy reverberating through me in Boston the prior year had been lightning in a bottle. I felt glimmers of aliveness flicker on and off within me, but with no cause to run for, no team to represent, and no affiliation to the city, my mind wandered again and again to the question of why I thought running another marathon would be a good idea.
Ryan and I crossed the finish line, relieved that the race was behind us and that our next destination was Oktoberfest. Being untethered to a deeper purpose for running left me feeling burnt out from the training season. After Berlin, I promptly hung up my running shoes with the intention to take a short break before getting back to it.
Chicago 2023: striding towards myself
My original goal was to run the six majors in the span of six years, but COVID-19 had other plans. In the years following Berlin, our world changed drastically. I found solace in lacing my sneakers back up and getting outside for fresh air — once again running to cope with reality. By the time the world opened back up last year, I had started on a meaningful journey of introspection and was ready to recommit to my six majors vision. With four more to go, I entered the lottery for London and Chicago. In December, I found out that I’d been selected to run Chicago 2023. This time, I’d be doing it alone: no Team MR8, no Ryan, just me.
I returned to a journey that had started as an act of self-defiance, running away from myself and towards the companionship of others. This time, I was ready to run in solitude, content with my own thoughts keeping me company.
The challenge was that despite having run two marathons, I didn’t always enjoy starting a run. I figured that by now, generating the momentum needed to get out the door for a run would have become second nature. But, the reality is my body yields to physics, often happily staying at rest despite craving movement. This wasn’t an issue when I could rely on the MR8 community and Ryan to keep me accountable, but it was time to learn how to summon motivation from within.
I devised a game to hype myself up to run in even the most suboptimal conditions, challenging myself to collect the most expansive bank of strength memories possible to draw from on marathon day. Every run was an opportunity to expand and diversify the collection. Gotta catch ‘em all: humid runs, hilly runs, rainy runs, sun beating down in the middle of the day runs, mosquito-ridden runs, no music runs, early morning runs. As new flavors of discomfort presented themselves, I began rewriting my internal script of who I was as a runner and just how far beyond my limits I could go.
Rather than surrender to the grind that inevitably emerges during any worthwhile pursuit, I dedicated this race to my younger self. I was doing this marathon to run alongside the girl who spent all those years running away from herself and drawing resilience from others when all along, that strength lay dormant within her.
On race day, the weather gods delivered my first clear and dry marathon. Accompanied by my strength memories, I allowed the thundering cheers along the course, particularly from Ryan and my friends, to carry me through the first 21 miles. When I felt a dip in strength, I tapped into the reserves of aliveness I felt flowing through me, once again in awe of all that had aligned for me to be running my third marathon. I turned on a playlist that friends had assembled with their favorite hype songs to get me to the finish line. When Mile 24 rolled around, I was ready. The next 2.2 miles flew by and before I knew it, I crossed into Grant Park and over the finish line. Little Cissy, we did it.
threading together the tapestry
That run and every run this summer was a thread in the tapestry that makes up my Chicago Marathon season. Each of my three marathon seasons weave together an illustration of the runner and person I strive to be: a human who places faith in putting in the reps under all conditions and shows up for what she believes in, unfazed by the elements outside of her control. And when the universe conspires for me and plays in my favor, all the better.
Running a marathon is a privilege that I’ll never take for granted. It’s a feat that has tested and humbled me over and over again, teaching me to muster every fiber of my being to stay the course, ride the wave of the crowd past discomfort, and run alongside the self who has known all along that everything I need is within me.
This vision of striding toward a me who has always known what I’m capable of forms the basis for why I commit to hard things. When I reflect on my life at the end of every year, it's the bank of I can’t believe I ran another marathon memories that repeatedly emerge as the most defining threads of that year's tapestry. It’s these experiences that cultivate the resilience I draw from in the face of hardships beyond my control, setting the foundation for how I move through the little moments and show up for the big moments.
Thanks for reading — let me know what you think in the comments below or on Twitter! If you enjoyed this essay, check out a related essay: Hard things, good people.
Thanks to , Rose, Nikki, and Kevin for accompanying me on a few training runs this season and to Ryan, , , , ,, and Derek Wong for reviewing an initial draft of this essay.
Loved this essay Cissy! I had a very similar feeling to your Berlin marathon when I ran Boston. Interesting to see that I wasn't alone in those thoughts!
Like reading your essays. Keep writing - you do it well!