It’s the West Side Highway that does it. From the taxi – the crawling taxi,  with its meter already at  $46.80 – I see the sign: “Eat Tacos on a Boat.” And that’s when the tears start, again.

I’d kept them under control when the doctor looked me in the eyes and told me matter-of-factly that I wasn’t going to be running the New York City marathon. I’d nodded in a way that I hoped gave the appearance of stoicism, maturity – it was only after she left the room that the sobbing started, a bout of ugly crying that the nurse walked in on before hastily retreating to get two glasses of water, both for me. I made some joke about wishing they were glasses of something stronger and then another one when my blood started to spray all over the floor as she was taking a sample to check for Vitamin  D. I did that, because it’s what I do – what a whole nation of us was taught to do – when something bad happens, something hard, something disappointing – fuck it, I’m going to say it, something devastating. Make them laugh – make yourself laugh – and the moment will pass and it kind of does, until it doesn’t.

Let’s just pause here and acknowledge that in the realm of “bad news” people get in doctors’ offices, this is probably the best kind of “bad news” there is. I’m aware of that. People I know and who I’ve loved have heard unfathomable news from the mouths of relative strangers in offices just like this one – even right now, right as I type, someone, somewhere in this city is being told something that will change their life forever. I am not comparing this to that and I know there is gratitude here, in this story, and that I will find it.  But I also know that if I try a gratitude-bypass on these feelings, they’ll find me later too.

To tell this story, I need to wind back, so you will know more about why this matters, about why this matters so fucking much. There’s the fact that I turned 50 this year and this is – would have been – my first marathon.  A year that ends in a zero makes you think – at least, it makes me think – and being able to do this now, seemed symbolic and important and a celebration of how I want to live this next phase of my life. And then there’s the fact that two years ago, at 48, I took a gamble on a surgeon offering a new type surgery that promised to fix some substantial wear and tear in my knee resulting from years of running. The surgery involved two different operations four months apart, my cells being grown in a lab in Boston, eight weeks on crutches, six hours a day in a machine to keep my leg moving and willingly having my shin bone broken. All of this, to get me back to running again. I got a tattoo on my wrist that said “RUN” in case I needed a reminder why I had set off on this hellish journey to begin with and followed the instructions of my care team with a miliary-like discipline. My goal was to get back to my casual runs in the park, a couple of 5K races a year, maybe a 10K – my longest ever distance – if I was lucky.

In my physical therapy clinic there is a large slogan daubed in black paint over the window that declares: “GET BACK THE LIFE YOU LOVE!” I don’t like the font, or the way it seems to shout at you, but I do love the sentiment and that going there, that experience has been true for me. By March, six months after my surgery, I was running, assisted in an anti-gravity treadmill (look it up, I can’t begin to  describe it!) and in July, I ran my first mile, outdoors around the Central Park reservoir. It was one of those days with the smoky air and the apocalyptic yellow skies from the Canadian  forest fires, where I probably shouldn’t even have been outdoors and an almost  Biblical haze of tiny flies swarmed around me sticking to my shirt, my legs, my face as I ran. I didn’t care, I barely noticed – I was getting to do what I loved again, what I was afraid I might have lost forever. A couple of nights later, I ran the same route again – without the flies this time – and as July turned into August, one mile became two, became four. I completed my first race – a 5K – before flying back to Ireland where I sold my house and ran seven miles – longer than I’d ever run before. By October, I was training for my first half marathon. In November, I completed it.

Writing that, it sounds linear, chronological, but it wasn’t like that, just like no run is like that – no mile is the same as the one before. There were setbacks and detours, pain in muscles I didn’t know the name of.  I joined a gym – I’d never liked the gym but apparently that wasn’t true because now I loved the gym, it turns out I just never knew what I was really doing there before. Now, I lifted weights, I squatted, I bench pressed for the first time in my life.

My second half marathon came on St. Patrick’s day – an auspicious day and it was a race I loved despite a heavy fall on my operative knee as I crossed 42nd Street. I was afraid the ugly bruise would make my surgeon think twice when I asked him for his blessing  to train for the marathon. He didn’t say yes right away, instead he reminded me of the hardware in my knee, how when I’d come to him my goal had been to get back to recreational running.  I might have held my breath  waiting for his verdict – I would have taken his advice,  whatever it was, and he knew it. But when he went in for the fist-bump I breathed again, I was in the clear. All I needed now was a coach.

The coach selection process was quick, a no-brainer – my physical therapist who’d got me so far already – and together we came up with a plan. I became obsessive – okay, maybe I’m always a little obsessive – about the plan, about my mileage, about checking the weather for the days of my long runs, about tempo runs and shakeout runs and how often I needed to change my Asics and the best way to combat chafing. Saturdays had always been my favourite running days and now were even more so with a new routine of a wonderful meeting on 69th Street and straight out afterwards into Central Park for a couple of loops. For long runs, I’d a strategy of starting  with a podcast before switching  to music and on those summer Saturdays Brendan O’Connor’s “c’mere’s” were a gentle, engaging accompaniment to those early miles.

Don’t get me wrong, these runs were tough. As the mileage climbed, so too the temperatures of New York City’s summer, so too did the humidity. On the most humid days, my skin was slick before I was even a mile in, my face, my whole body pouring water as if I’d dived into the reservoir that I no longer ran around because it didn’t give me enough miles. Getting home, I would peel my clothes from my body, a wet pile on the floor before the shower that would let me know with a sting those sensitive hidden places where I’d forgotten to apply my Burt’s Bees anti chafing balm. 

Fourteen miles, fifteen, sixteen  – the numbers went up until getting out of bed on a Thursday morning to do a half marathon before work seemed like nothing at all. One day as I ran an “easy” six miler, my app reminded me I’d just done a 10k – the previous longest run before my surgery that now seemed like a walk down Dun Laoghaire pier. Through ups and downs, through flares ups in my back and a lingering nagging Achilles pain, I loved it all. I loved every minute. I loved every mile.

Before I get to the hard part – the hardest part – I want to circle back to something else, another reason this year, this marathon, is so important. Was so important. My friend Louisa would have turned fifty this year too, but she was one of those people who found out news much worse than I did in a doctor’s office. Lou was a marathon runner, a triathlete, someone who did all of that with her signature humility and sense of humour. We would send each other photos of our runs, our races and when she was sick, I kept doing that. I had sent her photos from a snowy 10K in Central Park only  days before she died, ironically, the run that would be my last race before the knee surgery I didn’t know then  was in my future. For the marathon, I chose a charity that supported women with ovarian cancer and on the days when things were hard, I switched the wallpaper on my phone to her photo, to remind myself I wasn’t only running for me, I was running for Lou too.

One of the things about being a writer is that sometimes you want to edit a story,  you want to leave out the ugly parts. Right now, I want to write  about the beautiful September runs by Lake Ontario with the light on the water and the Air Show overhead, or uphill along the river next to Niagara Falls. I notice how I want to skip over the details of the vague pain that came and went and presented in different places around my hip, my thigh, my groin. I want to avoid the section entirely where I came home and my physical therapist seemed concerned and lined me up with a sports focused doctor freshly returned from the Paris Olympics. Going for that first appointment I was afraid my marathon dream  was going to come to an untimely end, but no, the news was  good –  the X-ray and her evaluation suggested a hip flexor strain, painful  but not unmanageable. I could keep running, so I did.

My 18 mile was amazing, looping around and around Central Park on a sunny Saturday with no pain at all, anywhere. Taking my signature photo afterwards, my whole body was filled with joy – not only for the run, but for the park, the people in it, the city that was now my home, my life here, all the decisions that had led me to this place. The next day, I got an email to tell me I’d been chosen to be the flag bearer for Ireland at the marathon’s opening ceremony. I couldn’t believe it, I’d forgotten I’d even applied. Looking back at that weekend in late September, that was it – that weekend, that was my marathon high.

There were weeks of running after that – short little runs that should have been nothing at all  but were actually more painful because whatever was happening in my hip affected the early miles and these were all early miles. Approaching my 20 – the longest distance I would  run before I began my taper – I was apprehensive and I chose West Side Highway, a flatter, easier route than Central  Park and one that had sneaked up on me to become my favourite with the breeze and the boats on the water and so much life to see along the way. That day I ran past the piers, the gaudy signs – “Eat Tacos on a Boat”-  I ran past Little Island and the Statue of Liberty. I ran over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn and back again. In Chinatown, I got lost, dodging around pedestrians and cyclists, through markets where people were selling fish from buckets filled with ice on the sidewalk. Construction scuppered my plan to run alongside the water so I wound my way through the Lower East Side, along the side of the highway, through a park  where none of the water fountains worked. My app got confused too –  telling me I ran a five minute mile – so I kept going past the magic number of 20, across Houston Street, things becoming familiar again as I headed west. By the time I finished outside a bagel shop, the city’s grime was stuck to my sweat and my upper thigh bled where my phone in my shorts pocket chafed my skin. It wasn’t glamorous, it wasn’t pretty, but it was  done.

An hour after I got home, a dear friend from Ireland arrived and for the week we travelled and laughed and wrote and watched sunsets and sunrises together. As we hauled luggage on and off trains and buses and up and down the winding hills of the upstate retreat that was our first destination, the pain in my thigh started to get worse – it was there most of the time now. By the time we reached our second destination and the sandy steps of our motel, my friend had to carry both our wheelie bags upstairs. I took the advice of my physical therapist and skipped a run,  focused instead on rest.

The rest helped and I felt better – better enough to run a half marathon on Staten Island a couple of days after I got back, better enough to go for a run in Central Park  with a running club a couple of hours after getting my MRI. Some of the running club members were doing the New York City marathon too and they urged me to join them running the last 10 miles of the marathon together as a training run the following weekend. It sounded fun and I registered the next morning. It was the last thing I did online before the nurse called me into my doctor’s office.

When I teach creative writing,  my students and I talk about the arc of a story, the importance of an ending.  I don’t want the ending of this story to be in that doctor’s office two weeks out from the marathon and I don’t want it to be tears in a taxi  driving along the West Side Highway, watching other runners doing “my” run. I’d like to think that in the future, I’ll be writing about how sweet it felt to finally cross the finish line of the New York City marathon after having overcome yet another challenge, but if I’m honest, I also carry the fear that what I might be writing is how once I tried to train for the marathon but that it never happened for me. 

The truth is, I don’t know, that of course I can’t see into the future, that I can only run the mile I’m in. But if these 20 miles and 50 years have taught  me anything, it’s that to want something – to really go for that thing you want – means staying the course, even when it’s hard, especially then. 

And that stories are only a snapshot in time – endings on the page are never really the end. Because good stories  – truly great stories – well, they continue on in our minds, long after we’ve  finished reading.