How Not to Run a Marathon

(originally published June 15, 2015. My original blog, on Wordpress, was hacked in early 2016. All of the original posts, through January 2016, have been re-posted here on Blogger.)

St. Petersburg promises to be an amazing marathon. I won’t be going.

I had planned to go. I had planned that I would run my third marathon of five in this picturesque “Venice of the North.” I had anticipated strolling through the stunning Hermitage Museum and Peter the Great’s Summer Palace. I envisioned staying up to experience the “white nights,” that narrow window around the end of June when the sun never sets on this far northern city.

But I won’t be doing any of that. June 28^th will come and go, and 4,000 runners will make their way through 26.2 miles of St. Petersburg streets – without me.

Sometimes, to quote the over-quoted John Lennon, life happens while we are busy making other plans. My plan had been to run the St. Petersburg Marathon. Life happened differently. Sometimes, life is like that.

St. Petersburg - where I won't be running a marathon

When I first decided to run five marathons this year as I turn 50, I did two things. First, I questioned my sanity. Determining that I was no less sane than before I set this crazy goal, I proceeded to step number two, which was to research the marathons that are out there, and decide which ones I might want to run.

It turns out there are a zillion marathons out there. Marathon running has increased exponentially in popularity, and every city of any size – and even some of no particular size – hosts a marathon. I developed a few criteria for picking my marathons:

• They must be either an easy drive or an easy and inexpensive flight from my home in Israel. This means running Israeli and European marathons (there may be one American exception to this – more in a future post).

• They must not be on the Jewish Sabbath. Since Shabbat is a day of rest for me, this means finding marathons on days others than Saturday. Fortunately, there are many non-Saturday marathons – mostly on Sundays.

• Each marathon should be in a place I actually want to visit. So the Manchester, England marathon is out (nothing against Manchester, although the one time I was there, all of those bleak scenes from Charles Dickens novels came to mind). The marathon in Siberia is out. The marathon in northern Finland is out. 

The marathons should ideally be evenly spaced throughout the year. This has turned out to be a challenge – at least in Europe. Most European marathons, due to weather considerations, are held either in the fall or the spring. Very few take place in the summer (except, for example, the one in northern Finland). This has necessitated grouping my marathons together in the fall and spring, creating a greater challenge for myself to run multiple marathons within a short time frame.

Until now, my plan has gone according to plan. I ran marathon number one in Jerusalem in mid-March. Marathon number two was in Geneva in early May. And then I planned to run St. Petersburg less than two months later.

I hesitated, however, to register for the St. Petersburg Marathon. According to Kayak, Expedia, Travelocity and a host of other sites, this was not the inexpensive flight I had expected. Probably because the ‘white nights” are peak tourist season, the price was almost double the usual rate. But the people at Kayak (or rather, the algorithms at Kayak) assured me that there was a 70% chance of the cost going down if I waited.

Meanwhile, although the St. Petersburg Marathon registration would close after 4,000 runners signed up, by this point only about 400 had registered. So, waiting to see whether the seers at Kayak were correct seemed the prudent course to take.

That was in mid-May. Then, on May 21, after a long illness, my Dad passed away (see previous post). His death hit me hard. I traveled to the U.S. for the funeral, and was out of commission for over a week.

Toward the end of May, I checked in again. The prices had not come down, and now Kayak was backtracking, claiming trends were too erratic to predict which way the prices would go. But far worse, over at the St. Petersburg Marathon web site, three words flashed ominously from the home page:

REGISTRATION IS CLOSED

I gazed at the screen, wondering just how 3,600 runners could have signed up in a bit over a week for a marathon that was still a month away.  It all seemed a bit unbelievable, so much so that for the next few days, I would check back to see if there had been some mistake and they had re-opened the registration. No matter how often I visited the site, however, the words

REGISTRATION IS CLOSED

would stubbornly appear. Meanwhile, over at Kayak, the price had gone way up and they were urging me to buy a ticket immediately before it went even higher.

I guess the Hermitage will have to wait. But I still need to run marathon number three. So I researched what other marathon I might run in the late spring. All that came up for Europe were a few marathons that either were on Saturday, or were in middle-of-nowhere places I was less than enthusiastic about visiting and wasn’t even sure how I would get there if I wanted to (northern Finland, for example).

This leaves me no option but to run marathon number three in the fall. I’m not yet sure which one – but several look like fun (a word I use sparingly when referring to a marathon).

That hadn’t been my plan. But sometimes, we have no choice but to change our plans. Sometimes, whatever our goal, the path is blocked, and we need to find another race to run. The key is to stay focused on our ultimate destination, no matter which route we must take to get there.

I firmly believe that everything happens for a reason. Not running the St. Petersburg Marathon has its advantages. While I won’t see the Hermitage, I’ll get to see great sights in another nice city – still to be determined. I had decided I would run five marathons within a year. Had I run St. Petersburg, I would have run the first three marathons in three months. While I believe in thinking big, there’s no reason to overdo it. By not running a marathon now, I can devote my mental energy to reflecting on my Dad, as I wish to do, rather than reflecting on making travel arrangements and beating my last marathon time.

Missing one marathon is pretty trivial in the scheme of things. For many people, far bigger plans of far greater consequence have been derailed. When I think of the people at the Israel Sport Center for the Disabled, for whom I’m raising funds as I run these marathons, I realize every one of them has had to find a different race to run. Whether missing a limb or confined to a wheelchair or some other physical disability, each of them has had to confront a “Registration is Closed” sign barring their path to physical wholeness. Every one of them has had to take a sharp detour they didn’t ask for and didn’t expect.

What is truly amazing is how many of them have found a different race and made it their own, traversing it with a persistence, dignity and drive that most people without physical limitations would be hard pressed to match.

Surely they offer inspiration for the rest of us the next time our own path is blocked.

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I am running these five marathons for the amazing children and adults at the Israel Sport Center for the Disabled. We have set a goal of $5,000. Every donation of any amount makes a difference. Click here if you want to help us get to the finish line!