The Art of Making Excuses

I am barely three minutes into the famous Dipsea footrace and though my lungs are heaving and my quads are burning, my mind is sharp as cutlery, having already drawn up and finalized a list of five reasons to explain why this race will end in miserable failure.

Photo Credit: dipsea.org

I have trained too little; I have eaten too much; it is beastly hot; I woke up tired. Also, this race is stupid, so who cares. The list is so complete and satisfying that I silently congratulate myself for thinking so clearly under duress.

Other runners are streaming past me at a steady rate as I climb the 672 steps of the Dipsea Steps and continue up to Highway 1 and then down toward Muir Woods.

Ain’t no big, I say to myself, and go back to rehearsing my excuses. This time I imagine I am telling them to, of all people, my client Cindy. My body is pounding down Highway 1 but in my mind I am saying to Cindy “it was soooo hot out there.” Cindy nods sympathetically.

The Dipsea Race is an easy place to make excuses if one is so inclined. The course is 7.1 miles long and pretty much straight up, or straight down. It is the second-oldest footrace in the country after the Boston Marathon. Since 1904, people have been hobbling up the trails with pained expressions and throwing themselves down the steeps like lemmings bent on suicide.

We do it…well, no one can adequately explain why we submit ourselves to such torture, but Marin runners can’t get enough of the Dipsea. People wait in long lines to grab one of the 1,500 spots and then lay out race-day strategies as intricate as Napoleon’s.

My comfortable reverie of excuses is uninterrupted after I plod up an endless and relentlessly sunny section of uphill called Hogsback and  enter a stand of trees and their shade. Shade. I can handle this race if it’s cool. And I start running harder, just like that.

I am flying.  Forget about excuses; there are too many runners to pass. “On your left!” I breathe into the ear of a hapless woman in a pink baseball cap.

I end up finishing the race, at a little park on Stinson Beach in front of a cheering crowd, in one hour 13 minutes 21 seconds, more than five minutes slower than last year. I lurk around the finish line suspecting my showing is so poor that I will not make Invitational (the top 750 runners are invited back to race again).

But as it happens I place 464th, dropping just 74 spots from last year. It seems everyone wilted in the heat. Instead of entirely sucking I was just a little off.

Somehow this is a bit of a letdown. It only seems fair that this great list of excuses I compiled should be shared, enjoyed, even emulated. So, what do you think?