Everything went according to plan, until it didn’t.
The night before my first marathon, I ate the classic runner’s dinner: a bowl of fettuccine Bolognese, a side of Caesar salad and, to top it off, a few miniature cannolis. That morning, I woke up before my alarm, tiptoed downstairs to toast three waffles and slathered them in peanut butter. I had slept eight hours, my unreliable left knee wasn’t bothering me, my stomach was full. I was ready.
Then my girlfriend knocked on the door asking: “Have you checked your email?”
The Twin Cities Marathon in Minneapolis and St. Paul had been canceled. Race officials sent an email at 5:16 a.m. announcing the race had been called off due to “black flag conditions” — record-breaking heat, with projected highs of 85 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
It’s the first time the race has been canceled because of the weather, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. As many as 8,000 people were scheduled to run the marathon Sunday morning and another 12,000 had signed up to run a 10-mile race on part of the same course.
Running anyway
While I understood why the race organizers didn’t want to put runners at risk of running in record-high temperatures, I also knew that I had trained in the hot, humid and 85-plus degree heat of Washington, D.C., all summer. If I started earlier than planned and finished around noon, I’d miss the worst heat of the day. My girlfriend, Louisa, a born-and-raised Minneapolitan, offered to bike alongside me, with water, snacks and salt pills in tow. If it got too hot, I’d stop.
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Adam Baus, a 43-year-old pianist and music director at a church in Cottage Grove, Minn., said he woke up to a text about the news. Baus stepped outside his house in St. Paul to avoid waking his kids and quickly called his friend to figure out what to do. About 40 minutes later, Baus was at the starting line in downtown Minneapolis “chugging a gallon of water,” ready to run his own marathon.
“I didn’t give myself a lot of time to think it over,” Baus said. “Quickly, jokingly, we sang The Star-Spangled Banner and set off.”
Baus said he’s run three “personal” marathons — races that were either virtual or otherwise canceled — and he still considers the 26.2 miles he ran on Sunday to be a marathon. But it’s not the same as running “the” marathon, the spectacle, with pickle-juice shots at mile 14 and the bells ringing from the nearby basilica.
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“The hardest part,” Baus said, is that these “personal” marathons don’t feel as real. There’s no medal or finish line. You just go home and continue with your day.
Competing in a mental race
There is a psychological difference between running 26.2 miles and running an organized marathon, said Ashley Samson, a professor at the University of Kentucky and a sports psychology consultant, who’s also a long-distance runner herself.
The 26.2 miles becomes a shared challenge when you’re running with thousands of others, she said. That gives a runner confidence they can finish the race as well. And then there are all the signs and affirmations coming from the crowds of spectators. It feeds into a sense of self-efficacy, or your belief that you can run the entire race.
“When you’re in that marathon setting, having people on the sidelines, having people running alongside you, maybe running in a new location, there are so many other external things to help keep you focused,” Samson said. The sights and sounds “give you a little of a break from the internal rumination that can happen when you start to struggle.”
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“It is a mental race,” she said. “For most people, running a marathon is probably 80 percent mental. Because, by the time you get there, you’ve done the physical training.”
Meg McDavid, a 39-year-old elementary school physical education teacher from the Houston area, planned to run the Twin Cities Marathon to try to qualify for the Boston Marathon in 2025. When she heard the news, McDavid went to the starting line to see if anybody else was running despite the cancellation. She joined a group of local runners who knew the route.
“Running-wise, this one felt more like a long run to me. A long run with friends,” McDavid said, adding that the other runners gave her a tour of the Twin Cities along the way. “The pressure was off.”
Help from the sidelines
Even though the race was canceled, there were still spectators along the course, often neighbors gathered outside of their houses handing out bottles of water as they watched runners go by. The supporters “made it feel like a real marathon,” McDavid said.
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By the end of my “personal” marathon, bystanders had given me one ice-cold sponge and a wet rag, a half dozen water bottles, a handful of orange slices and half of a banana. Somewhere within the last two miles, I was also offered a cup of beer from a keg on the side of the road but I declined.
Jake Perry, a 34-year-old sales consultant who lives in White Bear Lake, Minn., said he’s not sure he would have been able to run 26.2 miles on Sunday “if it wasn’t for the supporters who showed up that day.”
“I was crushed that the marathon didn’t happen,” Perry said. “But I was overfilled with joy to still see the amount of supporters who came out.”
McDavid said she now plans to run the Houston marathon in January to qualify for Boston. The run on Sunday wasn’t the same type of open road marathon that leaves her “completely depleted,” but she still considers the Twin Cities to be the 7th marathon of her career.
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“Sometimes it’s nice just to slow down and soak it in and stop worrying so much about the time,” McDavid said. “It was a different experience, a different memory than crossing” with a personal record.
No finish line, but still a victory
Five of the last six miles of the Twin Cities Marathon route are largely uphill, a slow climb from the Mississippi River marching east toward downtown St. Paul. Much of this slog is along the aptly named Summit Avenue that eventually, miraculously, stops climbing when you reach the Cathedral of St. Paul. Beyond the cathedral, the rest of the route is downhill. By that point in the race, my thighs felt like jello and my hamstrings were rubber bands. I tried to lunge down the hill, using gravity as my guide, but my right thigh kept locking up on the long strides.
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The finish line, or the half-deconstructed scaffolding, tents and bleachers at the intended finish line, sat at the bottom of the hill, in front of the Minnesota Capitol. From the top, I could see dozens of supporters cheering runners home.
Since we had all started at slightly different points, and, at one point, I had taken a wrong turn around a lake, some runners were finishing well before the “finish line.” I kept glancing at my Apple Watch, counting down the meters until I was done. About halfway down the hill, my watch ticked to “26.2” miles. My time was 4 hours, 26 minutes.
I called out “I’m done” to Louisa, who had been delivering much-needed encouragement along the way. I let out a dry sob (or two) and gave Louisa a hug. After months of training, the unexpected emotion felt like a cathartic release. Despite the race getting canceled, it felt like I had just run a marathon.
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