Mile Twenty-Two

You hit mile twenty-two on an overpass and this is where it stops being a run. Up until now it's been fine. Not easy, but fine. The first ten miles you had to hold yourself back because the crowd was loud and your legs were fresh and everyone around you was going too fast. Mile thirteen you saw your sister with a sign that said your name and a drawing of a potato, which is a joke from when you were nine, and you laughed and it cost you nothing. Miles fifteen through twenty you settled in. You ate the gels on the schedule. You did the maths. You were on pace for the thing you wrote on the fridge in January. Twenty-two is an overpass because the course designers are not kind people. There's no crowd on an overpass. There's wind. There's a view of the city you don't want. There's a man ahead of you in a charity vest who has stopped and is walking, and you go past him, and something in you says he's right. Your legs have gone thick. That's the only word. They're not painful yet, they're just heavy, like you're running in someone else's, and the someone else is taller and doesn't run. Your maths is going too. You try to work out what pace you need for the last four and the numbers won't sit still. You've been awake since five. You had toast. This is the bit nobody trains for, because you can't. You did eighteen weeks. You did the long runs on Sunday mornings in the dark with your breath in front of you, twenty miles, twenty-one, and every one of them you finished and thought, right, that's the body ready. And it is. The body is ready. The body is doing its job. It's the rest of you that's on the overpass. There's a woman beside you. Fifties, maybe. Bright pink shoes. She's been beside you since about nineteen, not talking, just there, and now she says, without looking at you, "Overpass is a nightmare." "Yeah." "Every year." "You've done it before?"

"Eleven." She says it flat, no pride in it. "Twenty-two's always the one. Doesn't matter how fit you are. Twenty-two's twenty-two." You come off the overpass. There's a corner and then, suddenly, people. Barriers and noise and someone's kid holding out orange slices and a bloke with a megaphone saying something that isn't words. A drum. You don't know why there's a drum. The woman in the pink shoes has gone on. You watch her back for a while and then she's just another back. Mile twenty-three. Your legs are still thick. The maths is still gone. But you're off the overpass and there's a sign coming up that says twenty-four, and after that there's one that says twenty-five, and you know how numbers work, even now. You do not think about the finish. You think about the sign.