The Mockingbird: Issue 20

DNF

By Ali

Kjergaard

The Cross and the Finish Line

came to with a blur of faces standing over me. “Let me finish,” I mumbled. “Please, please let me finish.” I tried to get up from the stretcher but was gently pushed back down.

“We need to make sure you’re okay first,” someone told me. “We need a doctor to clear you.” I nodded and lay back down. I told myself that I would be fine, that I just needed to start running again.

A man who I assumed was the doctor came over to my stretcher. He looked me over. He asked the nurses, “She threw up?”

“Yeah.”

“Temperature?”

“103.”

“Absolutely not. She’s not going back out there.”

“Honey, we can’t let you finish the race today, okay? We’re sending you to the hospital.”

At this I started crying, hard. “Please let me finish,” I begged. “I have to finish—I have to.”

“Honey, you’re pretty sick. You can’t go back and run right now.”

By that point I knew I wasn’t being entirely rational, so I laid my head back down, feeling

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the uncomfortable warmth of the tears on my face. So into an ambulance, away from the course, to the hospital—not the finish line I had hoped for.

People talk about a runner’s high, and there is nothing quite like finishing a marathon. In spite of crippling soreness for days afterwards, you feel like you can do anything. I’d been training for this—my third marathon—since June, and now that it was October, I was eager for that “finish line feeling.”

But this particular race had not started well.

It began in a downpour, we runners wading through a flooded road for a mile to the start line. By the time I started running, my clothes and shoes were already soaked through, and each step made an unpleasant squishing noise.

This wasn’t going to be a fun 26.2.

At mile six I had to stop on the side of the road to unload the contents of my stomach.

Whatever fuel I had consumed was gone.

I told myself I’d be fine. Plenty of people get sick during a race, and at least now, I thought, I was lighter. I ran back onto the road in the pouring rain, thinking about how, at the finish line, I’d proudly reveal that I’d dealt with this mishap and had been able to finish even so. That thought was the only fuel I thought I needed.

THE MOCKINGBIRD