Marathon

I know what you're thinking: Why on earth would Shannon be posting about a marathon? Shannon is too big of a schlub to run in a marathon.

It's true (and I'll forgive you for calling me a schlub). The only marathons I have participated in are the ones where a channel shows several episodes of the same show back-to-back. (You know, like the KTLA Channel 5 Twilight Zone marathon?)

And those are not fit to be called marathons. Marathons are really, really hard. Sitting there watching an episode of the Twilight Zone is only a little hard. It's sort of like how Holocaust survivors (and rightly so) don't like it when the term "Nazi" is used to describe any person who is slightly strict.

I watched a marathon, the running kind, over the weekend. My awesome friend Katie, who is far more dedicated and hard-working than I will ever be, completed the Chicago marathon. Here is a very cool picture I took of her at the starting gate, made all the cooler by the fact that I took it by sticking my hand up over a fence.
So Katie finished, even though she was hurt, and even though it was an unnatural 85 degrees in October. And I enjoyed marathon spectatorship, because it was a really inspirational event. Watching a marathon, you see the full range of human emotion. Triumph, for sure. But also tragedy, in the form of people having to get into ambulances right before the finish line. (I cried for those people.)

And you see people cheering for total strangers like these strangers were their best friends. It's really cool.

Marathon spectatorship also involves a lot of math. You have to figure out when your friend is going to cross a particular mile marker, given how fast she was going and what time she started. You're armed with some data, such as a website that is updated with the person's location and pace, except that website uses the metric system. So you're frantically trying to do metric conversions in your head and calculating distance = rate x time problems, like the ones in math books that start with, "If a train leaves Chicago at 10 a.m. traveling at 50 mph ..."

And even with my superior math skillz (because I did used to be a math textbook editor), I failed to find Katie at 2 out of the 4 points where I tried to find her. It's kind of a Where's Waldo? situation, and I was very bad at Waldo.

But this is not about me. This is about Katie, who finished the race, and I was swelling with pride, even though all I did was stand there (and, at one point, offend a pregnant woman standing next to me).

Getting up at 5 a.m. and riding on the 6:04 train to cheer for Katie, I remembered something she did for me once. When Nathan was first born, she came down and brought me gummi worms and baby lotion. We ordered pizza and watched a boring DVD (Marie Antoinette starring Kirsten Dunst), and I'm sure she was very bored sitting there watching this dumbass movie while sitting next to somebody with a baby attached to her boobs. But it meant a lot to me that she came, and that she brought ME some gummi worms, for ME, because right after you have a baby, you feel kind of invisible.

Also, while I was pregnant, she said to me, "Wow. YOU. LOOK. AWESOME." So you see, she's a good liar, too.

Anyway, Katie is a good friend, and I'm so proud of her! Congratulations, Katie!