Hospital Hill

 A (Painful) True Tale of One Man's (Peer-Pressure-Inspired) Journey

(That's me, over there by the tall white guy in running clothes.)

There are two kinds of peer pressure:  good and bad. Simple enough, right?

Good peer pressure gets one to ask a beautiful girl to dinner, and eventually they fall in love and get married. These are good things.

Bad peer pressure is the kind that gets young children to enroll in terrorist training camps for Al-Qaeda on a dare. That is a bad thing.

Obviously, these are not the only circumstances under which peer pressure comes along. It could also happen when, just off the top of my head for a random example, two sisters take up jogging. After a few races, they’ll build up their confidence enough to run a half marathon. Which is fantastic! The two of them probably convinced the other to accomplish a feat few can claim as their own. Then they do it a second time! It’s very impressive by any and all standards! This is another example of good peer pressure.

Of course to every silver lining, there’s a dark cloud. Or something like that. After one or two of these 13.1-mile adventures, the sisters then say to themselves, “Hey, let’s get every single one of our siblings to run one with us!”

As you may have realized by now, these are my sisters Amy and Katie. I’m very proud of the both of them and I support them all the way to and through the finish line. That’s where I drew the line. I ran in high school, but I was never very good and didn’t feel much like revisiting these memories. So when these two running maniacs decided to drag the rest of us into it, I was one of the first Amy approached. “Hey, dude! Katie and I are trying to get all of us kids to do a half marathon in June! You should do it with us!”

I have a hard time telling people “no” when they get this excited, because then I’m afraid I’m disappointing them. If I had to guess, I would have to say that this fear stemmed from an early failure to realize that my dad’s face is just stuck like that, and that he is not always disappointed. However, I stuck to my guns and replied with a reluctant, “Yeah maybe. I think I have to watch the news that day, but we’ll see.”

No peer pressure was needed for the rest of our siblings. Ben, Corey, and Chris were all successful runners in high school, and they grew up together so they’ve always been competitive with one another, as well as everyone else around them. I was never all that competitive because I'm the youngest in my family by six years at the closest sibling. So one mention of the race and all of a sudden five Brest-born children were signed up.

Enter peer pressure, stage left.

Suddenly, said five older brothers and sisters seemed to want nothing more in the world than for me to run thirteen miles with them. Great. I declined as long as I could, resorting to screening calls and casually not replying to texts. However, they went over my head, taking the home-field advantage for their own. During dinner one fine evening, Mom casually mentioned, “Oh so Elliott. Amy mentioned you’re running a half marathon with your siblings?” NO!!! They got Mom in on it! Dad, too! I quickly found myself drowning in pressure to run this race! The pressure built and built until I couldn’t take it anymore! Fine! I’ll run the race! I give up!

This is bad peer pressure.

So it began. By the time I was serious about training for this event, we were seven weeks away. Amy pointed me to a website for marathon rookies where I copy-and-pasted a training schedule. As it turns out, training schedules don’t do you much good unless you stick to them wholeheartedly, so by the time I was really serious about training for this event, we were five weeks out.

Three weeks of dedicated training and two weeks of not-so-dedicated training later, it was racing day. Not picture-tracing or doily-lacing day, but racing day. I had already received my race packet which included my bib number and a ticket for some free fancy flip flops, and I had been carb-loading for several days. 

After a fortunately great night of sleep, I arose from my slumber at 4:00 AM and rode with Amy to the race.

Hospital Hill is one of Kansas City’s largest races, if not THE largest. We somehow found the rest of the family among the almost 4,000 other runners that had signed up this year, and as everyone went through their final stretches, Ben, Liz, and I had to visit the conveniently-placed port-a-pottys one last time.

Had I been a 6-year-old boy at the very moment that I stepped out of that stall, I probably would have broken down and demanded that someone deliver my mother to me. Not a single person around me was one I recognized. We had each been assigned to certain corrals according to our estimated finishing times, however, so I knew the general area where they would be.

As I journeyed toward my designated corral, I made it a point to look for my brothers and sisters who had abandoned me, much like Joseph’s brothers did in the Bible. Only, instead of slavery and imprisonment, I could have been murdered, mugged, or stolen (thanks again, Amy!). Unfortunately, the corrals, while fairly large, were small enough that people were literally packed shoulder to shoulder. Any attempt to make it to my corral or to find the others was quickly decided as pointless.

So much for a round of Kumbayah and good luck wishing before the so-called festivities began. The rules were explained as well as the starting process, and before long, the time came for me to begin the journey. So I did.

Before I knew it, three street-side rock bands, four water stations, and six and a half miles had gone by without a sweat. Well, in truth, there was a lot of sweat, but regardless, I felt good. I was running slightly better than I thought I would, and I hadn’t stopped to walk yet. I wasn’t completely tuckered out, but I stopped for the next water station anyway as a kind of reward to myself: mistake number one.

Before I got to the station though, Amy had suggested a Five Hour Energy shot halfway through the race. So, I took one of those: mistake number two. If you’ve ever had one of those, you know just how disgusting they are. But we’ll get to that a little later.

Any runner that I’ve talked to agrees that water always seems to weigh their limbs down exponentially, and the fact that I wasn’t even half way done with the longest race of my life didn’t help morale either. Nevertheless, I gulped half of the water, threw the cup away, and immediately started back into my pace: mistake number three.

While water adds twenty pounds of lead to my arms after I drink it either way, it seems lesser when I sip the water instead of gulping. Besides, you know that stitch you get in your side sometimes when you run? Well, there isn’t any hard evidence as to the cause, but Amy found somewhere that it’s believed to happen after drinking large amounts of water quickly. For example, half of a Gatorade cup of water a little less than half way through a thirteen mile journey.

Enter pain, stage right.

I alternated between walking and jogging for the next two and a half miles with little relief, and to add to it, I had tied my shoes just a little too tight before the race started: mistake number four. The friction in my shoes built up and soon, the bottom of my feet felt raw. Luckily, the friction only started at mile nine. The pain associated with it didn’t fully manifest itself until mile 12.

These began to fade slowly by mile 11. There, two kinds of new evil reared their ugly faces. I was running up Broadway, starting to regain some confidence, and out of nowhere, my legs started to hurt. Immediately after this, they started to cramp; the entirety of both legs from the knee down. I’ve had a Charlie-horse before, everybody has. But these were so bad I couldn’t walk. Couldn’t even move my legs. One might say that instead of Charlie-horses, these were Charles-Clydesdales.

I bent over to rub my calves, hoping they would help, and as I did so, the Five Hour Energy shot made a comeback in the worst way possible: the kind of heartburn you can taste. At that moment a race pacer ran by and saw that I was having some problems. She stopped and, while running in place, said with a surprisingly confident Southern drawl, “Ya doin’ awll right there sah-weetie?”

“Ya I guess so. My legs are just cramping up really bad.”

“Well, by golly we can’t be havin’ that now can we? Here, take some mustard packets.” She dug into her fanny pack and pulled out a packet of Sonic mustard and one of Wendy’s mustard and handed them to me. I was dumbfounded, and she could tell. “If you eat ‘em, they sure help with cramped legs!”

And with a smile and what I can only imagine was a cheesy wink behind her sunglasses, she was gone. Mustard? I like mustard on ham sandwiches and potato salad. That’s where the list stops. I have long hated mustard, and for that I would have to blame my brother Ben. When I was little, he took his careful time and had me completely convinced that mustard was in fact cow manure straight from the bowels of a cow, which is why it’s yellow, not brown.

So there I stood in the 85 degree weather, near the end of my first half marathon, with mustard in my hand. Besides, I don’t care who you are, if you’re in the middle of any kind of race, no kind of food is anywhere on your list of priorities, let alone mustard; I don’t care if you do like it. However, if you have two miles left to go and you can’t move your legs, you’re willing to give anything a try.

After a few gags and another few minutes form forcing the mustard down and waiting for the pain to subside, I was back to hobbling, and I’m sad to say that that was the best I could do for the rest of the race.

The last two hundred yards, my family met me and cheered me in. I was embarrassed because every time I tried to run my legs would seize. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t let myself be the guy who walks across the finish line on front of a sea of spectators.

Had I remained on pace with my time at 8 miles, I would have finished in 2:11.00. As it happened, I finished at 2:51.37.

In my division (males 19 and under), I took 48/48.

In my gender (yes, males), I took 1654/1697.

And overall, I took 3202/3351.

So, in summary, I got smoked in my division, but I held true to my cross country goal: don’t be last overall... Oh, and I beat Amy and Katie.