To the Sikh Who Gave Me Skittles (03/04/08)

Runners always talk in terms of "personal best". You finish a race, be it a 5k, a 1/2 marathon, or an Ultra, and you expect that you will have a time that is somewhere in the neighborhood of your PB. Every race can't be a new record, but the records become the benchmark, the baseline, and the basis for which every race thereafter attains to be.

I ran LA on Sunday, and it was none of these things. Instead, I am going to coin a new term...

PW.

Personal Worst.

In all sports there is disappointment, Every athlete falls from their pedestal. Even the mighty Mike Tyson was defeated by the overweight chump, Buster Douglas. Expectations can always fall short. I wanted to finish around 4:30:00 (about 13 minutes under my PB) and instead finished 13 minutes over.

Maybe more.

I should have known that for every great outing there exists the opportunity for an equally poor showing. You can't be in the game of pushing your body to the limits of human endurance and expect any less.

I didn't know I was having a bad race until the 17th mile. Like Apollo 13, everything seemed to be going good until it was going...

Horribly wrong.

But all systems began to fail, and they failed quickly and without warning.

For the first time, I had no-one supporting me, and the course was a lonely place. A dark place.

And yet there was a light at the end of the tunnel. A Sikh, Turban and beard, with a tray of colorful candy...

I had never been offered Skittles before on a race course, but they are now my new favorite food.

Grape.

Strawberry.

Lime.

Lemon.

It's so LA.

What a great race.

PB or PW.

LA is awesome.

And God bless the Sikh who gave me Skittles.