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Monique Maddy's ING New York City Marathon Journal
Monique
Maddy, 41, will be running the ING New York City Marathon on November
2 and attempting to attain the sub-2:48 U.S. Olympic Trials "B"
qualifying standard. Originally from Liberia, West Africa, Monique holds
a bachelor of science degree in international politics and economics from
Georgetown University, a master's degree in economics and development
studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International
Studies, and a master's degree in business administration from Harvard
Business School. She is an entrepreneur and in 1993 founded Adesemi Communications
International, which financed, built, and operated low-cost wireless telecommunications
services in developing and emerging market countries. She recently completed
her autobiography: "Learning to Love Africa: My Journey from Africa
to Harvard Business School and Back", to be released by Harper Collins
Publishers in February 2004, and is currently pursuing two new business
ventures. With a marathon personal best of 2:48:38, Monique's preparations
for the ING New York City Marathon include a training stint at the High
Altitude Training Center owned and operated by Lornah Kiplagat in Iten,
Kenya. In the first installment of her training journal, Monique outlined her unorthdox development as an "accidental" runner. Installment #2 recounted her discovery of the High Altitude Training Center, and in #3 she chronicles her stay there. The fourth installment will cover her experience in New York on November 2 and a post-race analysis. Stay tuned for this fascinating and suspenseful story of an athlete's journey on a path of self-discovery. Entry #3, October 29, 2003: Gold Rush Matriculation
The city of Eldoret is the breeding ground of many of the world's foremost champions of long-distance running. The competition is at once friendly and fierce. Ultimately it boils down to an extreme version of Darwinism — survival of the ultra-fit. A tiny pool from a vast ocean of supremely gifted runners will go on to literally run themselves out of poverty by breaking world records, winning lucrative endorsement contracts, and achieving the worldwide fame that they have dreamed about for years, if one is to judge by the behavior of the hundreds of local children. These children, some as young as six years old, spontaneously break into a sprint every time they spot a group of runners in training, often keeping up until they are ready to drop from exhaustion. Running is their path to a better life. Shortly after I arrived at the camp I proudly announced my 2:48 ING New York City Marathon goal to the entire HATC family. "Of course you will make it," they all laughed. "That is not a very ambitious target." I had traveled 7,000 miles only to be told that I was an underachiever! While my goal may not have appeared ambitious to them, it certainly was to me, and I was going to need all the resources and support that I could muster to meet it. Marathon
Migrations
The long endurance runs were my favorite workouts. We did them on Sundays, beginning at around 5:00 a.m., when it was still pitch dark outside with millions of stars beaming brilliantly from the sky. All the athletes in the camp participate in this weekly ritual, as do other local runners, quite a few of whom have globally recognized names. The runners begin together, regardless of ability. After the first two or three miles, the group starts to break up, as if carefully choreographed, with the top runners surging ahead in one pack, until they too subdivide based on speed. Eventually there are five or more packs of runners streaming up and down the hills, amidst cornfields and tea plantations, evoking in my mind images of the grace, elegance, and endurance of the great animal migrations of the nearby Maasai Mara and Serengeti plains. Monkeying
Around
The hill workouts started out as my least favorite but by the end of the two months I loved these sessions, if only because of the fitness benefits that I derived from them. It was here that I concluded that if there is a word for moderation in Swahili, the Kalenjin have either never heard of it or it has been permanently banned from their lexicon. The workouts consisted of up to 20 climbs of a steep 400-meter hill deep in the forest in an area heavily populated with beautiful black and white colobus monkeys, who delighted in swinging playfully from tree to tree and even occasionally jumping on the ground from as high as 20 feet. Entertaining though they were, even their amusing antics could not distract me from the physical pain and mental torture of the seemingly endless repetitions. I was only able to complete these workouts thanks to my 21-year-old training partner, Pius Kiptoo, whose command of the English language I substantially enriched with the stream of unprintable epithets that I hurled at him with each repetition. Absolutely unflappable, his response was always the same: "You must resist." And so I did. Minding
Gold In addition to the physical training, I learned that a major edge that the Kenyans have in long-distance running is the mental toughness that they bring to the sport. For this component of my training I consulted with Abraham Limo, the HATC marathon veteran. At age 40, Limo still runs 2:13 marathons. I expected him to give me some survival tips for my race on November 2. I soon discovered, however, that Limo is no more conversant in the language of survival than he is in ancient Greek. For him, as for most of the other top Kenyan runners, the marathon is a theater of war. He could not advise me on how to simply "hang" with my pace group because to him, such an approach lacked conviction and was therefore alien. The best he could do was to advise me how to race not only to beat my pace group, but to target the stragglers from within the faster-pace groups. Even after subscribing to his marathon-as-battleground theory, I was unable to convince Limo that I harbored no expansionist illusions of violating the territorial integrity of the superpowers like Lornahtopia, Nderebaland, Denisovia et. al. All I wanted to do was annex a tiny piece of adjacent property and live in peaceful coexistence with them until we reached the finish line at Tavern on the Green. One day, towards the end of my stay at the camp, I asked Limo a question. I wanted to know how the various components of my training — endurance, speed, strength, and hill workouts — would all come together if I never practiced them all in one session. Limo turned to me and said, "Monique, you know, the marathon, it is like suicide." Those words, perhaps more than anything else that I had learned in Iten, put the task ahead of me into perspective, at least into the Kenyan perspective. To race well, Limo's words implied, I had to approach the marathon like a kamikaze. Whereas on numerous occasions Pieter's schedule had felt like pure murder to me, on November 2 I would be in sole charge of my destiny, and I would have to go for broke, ramming everything from his program (except the resting) into an interval of a few hours, with no holds barred. The "you must resist" mental discipline seems to come naturally to the Kenyan runners. More than a mere tolerance for physical pain, it is a calm acceptance and even embracing of it. This mind-set is no doubt arrived at and sustained by the adverse and extremely Spartan conditions in which most of them are born to, grow up with, and continue to live and train under, even after they have attained the highest levels of success. This psychological component is probably the most elusive aspect of the Kenyans' training for a stranger to master, and therefore the area in which they are most invincible. But having enjoyed the opportunity and privilege to train with them for two months I actually found myself experiencing a new high — the gold rush of Eldoret maybe, extracted from the nugget of insight that Limo had given me. Gone was my trepidation; instead I found myself eagerly awaiting November 2 and the opportunity to take on 26.2 miles, the Kenyan way.
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