21. on going the distance

life lessons, courtesy of the marathon

On what felt like the first super warm Sunday morning of the spring in Milan a couple of months ago, after having packed up the car with boxes to move from our old apartment to a shiny new one, I looked over my boyfriend Nico’s shoulder and noticed a steady stream of people running with numbers attached to their shirts. It took me a few seconds to process what I was seeing. Reacting purely from my reptilian brain, I shouted “Oh no, a f**king marathon!” at no one in particular, in a tone absolutely unable to mask my dismay. I promise I’m not usually this kind of absolute jerk but I only had that weekend to help move out all our stuff before having to leave the city again. In my head I was already way behind schedule, truly naive to the gift the universe had just bestowed upon us. Feeling defeated by the schedule disruption, I went back into the house and made myself a snack. As I sat at our soon-to-be-gone table at the one chair still left in the room, chomping on a piece of old toast (all I had left in the house), I stared out of our huge windows that I was soon going to miss and had the sudden urge to go back outside to see the action for myself. 

The only marathons I’ve ever witnessed have been in London. In my memory, there were always so many people who came out to support all the participants along the entire route - it was always a really big deal. I remember the palpable excitement in the air, the rich array of homemade signs and the classic crowded pub gatherings after. When I got outside, I was shocked. No one was cheering, and there was not even anything close to a crowd on my street. No one seemed to care about it. There were a handful of passers-by, on their way to the park or running errands but they didn’t even seem to notice the competitors huffing and puffing past them, giving whatever their version of their absolute all was in that moment. The lack of crowd encouragement felt like an opening, an invitation. If no one else was out here, we must be out here! I immediately texted Nico “THE PEOPLE NEED US! COME OUTSIDE NOW!”.

I’d like to think I’m picking up Italian fairly quickly but at that moment outside on the sidewalk I suddenly realized I didn’t know what the right thing to say was to root for these praiseworthy beings. Without the precise words, I felt shy and self-conscious, caught out in the street in odd socks, in my worn-out house slippers, covered in crumbs from the toast I had just inhaled. So I decided to use my available tools at hand and started to wield the universally known sounds of support: clapping and whooping like my life depended on it. While I waited for Nico, I looked up a map of the marathon route to find that our apartment sat at the 36 km point in the race which meant these admirable humans partaking were only 6.1 km from the finish line! That important intel made it feel like we were now on a gravely vital mission to motivate! 

Out of the corner of my eye, I could suddenly see some tired but relieved-looking people who had already finished the race with their medals walking home past their fellow participants who were still going. A feeling of fury took over when I clocked the still-going runners (some of them purely walkers at this point) looking solemnly at the ones who were done. I wanted these slightly smug obviously athletically gifted early birds to disappear! Nico finally made it outside in his slippers, with an unassuming look on his face, with no idea what he was in store for. He didn’t yet know that the people going past us now were our people: the underdogs!

For most of our relationship, Nico hasn’t really been able to walk. We met when he was fresh out of surgery for a pretty serious knee injury. He turned up to our first date on crutches, I too wasn’t at my physical best when we met. I was still recovering from a debilitating stress-induced RSI condition of barely being able to use both of my hands which had been going on for over a year by then. So we were two little broken humans that fell in love. His recovery turned out to be a pretty difficult one and changed the course of our relationship. It meant I moved to Italy to be with him much faster than I probably would have previously since travelling to see me became almost impossible. It meant not being able to make plans, it meant living a life of caution day to day and in its simplest form, it meant, as someone who loves to walk, I had never been able to walk anywhere with the person I loved. Our experiences have given us both (but especially him) a very deep sense of empathy and compassion for the non-able-bodied experience. It’s been a long road, but I’m so happy to say that in the last couple of months, he’s gotten so much better and is walking again.

So I knew as we stood there, watching these laudable try-ers, that the memory of how difficult that experience had been was fresh on his mind because it was on mine too. That’s what watching a marathon will do to you. They create the most emotional viewing circumstances because you’re witnessing everyone enduring and traversing their very own hero’s journey right then and there in front of your eyes. The magic of ordinary everyday people overcoming the biggest of obstacles. How could that not induce one to tears? Though, as a terrible runner myself, I’ve personally never been close to signing up for a marathon, I’ve seen and heard about others doing it and the emotional incentives often behind the choice to take part. Signing up after a divorce, surviving an illness, or the death of a loved one, to make that kind of sacrifice I’m sure everyone has their own reasons.

Now that Nico was here, he armed me with the necessary vocabulary. Nothing could stop us now! “Bravi, bravi, brave!” we screamed at the top of our lungs as the tears streamed down both of our cheeks. The runners looked at us both confused and bemused. Who were these two crazed humans jumping up and down in their house slippers, screaming with their faces glistening with tears? I was ready to give all the spiritual reinforcement but what I wasn’t expecting was how the people we were cheering for would somehow find a way to support us too. We received claps back and nods of appreciation, some who had enough available breath uttered “Grazie per essere qui!” (thank you for being here!) and “Grazie per averci aspettato!” (thank you for waiting for us!). 

Suddenly an older, classically chic Milanese woman (known as a sciura here) that I had never seen before exited our building and looked us up and down unequivocally unimpressed. The rumours about Milan are true, people take getting dressed seriously here and if I had to use one word to describe the pretty strictly abided dress code of the city it would be: classic maybe even austere. I’m actually quite in awe of it so much so that it’s inspiring me to want to dress a little more chic, like me but just a little more adult. That buzzwordy term I keep seeing thrown around at the moment ‘quiet luxury’ - well I can say on pretty good authority that the Milanese invented that and today we were strictly not up to code. “Cazzo la maratona!” she shouted as she pursed her left fingers together to make Italy’s most well-known hand gesture of ‘ARE YOU SERIOUS’ known to all, as she held her unusable car keys in the other hand. I felt a pang of shame remembering that an hour ago, for a semi-second, that hardened woman had been me.

The name Marathon comes from the legend of Philippides, the Greek messenger. As the legend goes, while Philippides was taking part in the Battle of Marathon, which took place at some point in 490 BC, he saw a Persian ship switch its course towards Athens as the battle was nearing a victorious end for the Greek Army. He saw this as an attempt by the defeated Persians to rush into the city to declare an erroneous triumph to claim their power over Greek land. It is understood that he ran the entire distance of 42.1 km from Marathon to Athens without stopping, getting rid of his weapons and even his clothes to lighten his load as much as possible to get a message to them by bursting through the doors of the Athenian assembly screaming that they were the ones that had won the battle, before collapsing and dying right then and there.

Since we were watching the last remaining runners of the race, in time they started to become more scattered, till there were none. When I turned to Nico and suggested we go inside to finish packing while we waited for the roads to open up again, he squinted his eyes across as far down the long road as he could see and raised his hand to point at a speckle of a human coming towards us slowly. He looked at me in complete and utter seriousness as he said “We can’t go in yet! That person needs us!” and at that moment I knew there was no one else in the world I’d rather be out on this sidewalk with.

I am reminding myself of this story now because 2 years into our relationship we are going through a rough patch. Things have been coming up that have been really highlighting where there are patterns being repeated that aren’t conducive to the relationship, showing us where we both have work to do. At this point in my life, what I’m really looking for is a life partner, so trying to figure out whether we’re actually compatible feels scary but so important. Research shows that the two-year mark in a relationship is a really significant one because after the initial blissful euphoria of falling in love, for most people that high begins to wear off after 2 years. Psychologists call this ability to adjust to the things that make us happy (and to therefore eventually enjoy them less) as "hedonic adaptation." So the very adaptive capacity that makes us such a forceful and compliant species also stops us from being able to experience a permanent form of infatuation. Meaning relationships don’t often end because of a lack of love but a lack of connection. Obviously, this doesn’t have to be a bad thing, the transformation from loving infatuation to a strong partnership is a totally necessary and healthy result of learning to grow together so why does sharing our struggles on intimacy still feel so taboo when it’s something none of us are actually taught how to do? The inner workings of our intimate relationships often feel so strictly guarded, so shrouded in secrecy, that we end up walking around having a really unrealistic idea of what it takes to actually make them work. 

It has become clear that we are at this crossroads, where we have to strengthen our practice of love as a skill and not just an emotion. Can we both learn to let go of our ideas and expectations of love that are holding us back from evolving so we can grow together? Can we learn to cultivate more understanding, patience, forgiveness, humour and resilience as we face the many obstacles of trying to learn to practice love in a society that not only doesn’t teach us how to love in a healthy way but makes us think we are not born already worthy of it? That it’s something we have to earn through outer validation, acquisition and accomplishment? Can we find the time and effort to salvage and nourish love in a world that tries to force us to think about our time only as a saleable commodity? Or has it just become more clear that some of our important values might not be aligning?

After coming inside from the race, we walked up the stairs, the same very stairs that he had struggled to get up and down for the last 2 years, as we made it through the front door, we looked at each other and both exhaled as if to say ‘wow - we really made it through that’. As I turned to hug him he whispered into my ear, “That’s the most beautiful thing we’ve ever done together” and it really was. Perhaps life is a marathon and to really go the distance, we have to keep practicing and training for it, nourishing ourselves while we build the strength, tenacity and flexibility that we need to keep going. Life throws us hurdles that put us and our relationships to the test and for us to keep evolving, to keep transforming what we truly fear into love, parts of us must die and be left behind. As the systems all around us continue to collapse, a reframing of what we truly value feels imperative. Maybe that’s what we’re actually all here to do, cheer ourselves and each other on as we keep reconfiguring and training for this imperfect complex messy thing called life, that in both light and shadows is full of surprise and beauty. At this moment I can’t say (can one ever really say for sure?) if we’re going to make it or whether we really have what it takes to go the distance but thinking back to his sweet face that day on the side of the road, eagerly waiting to cheer on that very last person, I feel grateful either way.