Epilogue

I sat amongst my friends at The Mad Hatter, the most depressing bar Tim and I could find, and also the dive in closest proximity to his apartment, and marvelled at the attendance level. I say it's depressing in the most positive fashion: we knew it would be empty, as it nearly always is, and as such we knew our friends could come in and take over. I was pleased to discover when I hobbled in that they were, in fact, dominating the place. My parents had found a table up front and were munching on appetizers while my local gang gathered in the back. I stopped briefly to greet the adults, invited them to join us in the back once they'd finished, and waddled onwards to greet my public.

They started clapping. I smiled and bowed my head sheepishly in embarrassment. I'm not very good at accepting congratulations. I need more practice, I guess.

Frisbie offered me a beer from the bucket. Yes please.

Blair and Cassie wanted to meet my parents. Hoo boy. This is how it starts.

Over the next several hours, more people began to filter in and I smiled and chatted with all of them (I hope- I had another pang that evening thinking that somehow I hadn't sufficiently made the rounds and that someone had come to my marathon afterparty that I'd inadvertently ignored. Such a thing, of course, would not have been my fault, but I worry about these things sometimes.) I learned a number of fine statistics and fun facts:

• My dear friend Liz accomplished her goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon with her time of 3:35:14. This made me happy. I knew she would do it, of course, but I'm not sure she shared my confidence. Perhaps her prior experiences explained her anxiousness; as I had discovered, anything can happen over 26 miles.

• Tim clocked in at 3:49:13, good for 9414th place, roughly 20,000 places ahead of me. This result was not totally unexpected- I figured he'd break 4 hours. (I thought I might, too, but we'll get to that in a bit.) I think he's reasonably pleased. That time doesn't qualify him for anything other than a pat on the back, though. We discussed possible follow-ups to this spectacle, focusing on a running-boxing Biathlon (not unlike the Winter Olympic Biathlon involving cross country skiing and riflery) in which we'd run 5 miles and then fight each other for a round before running again. As far as extreme sports go, this might be our best idea yet.

• More people had been following this blog than I'd thought. I can track visitors, but generally speaking I can't tell how interested they are in the articles. For example, through the magic of web statistics, I've discovered that by typing the words "Matuska sex" into Google, the the first page of results includes a link to this blog. I can't help but think that websurfer was looking for something else. Nevertheless, the positive feedback I received was overwhelming, and as I fielded inquiries over beers that day, I started to feel like a writer.

• I realized the bathroom in this place was downstairs. This made me sad. Seriously, this was a major miscalculation on my part. I had a desperate moment, sitting on the toilet, thinking that I may have to spend the rest of my life in the basement of this crappy bar. Somehow, though, as all of us do at one time or another, I found the will to wipe my ass and stand up again.
  

My friends seemed fascinated by the prospect of entertaining my mother and father, as they rarely sat alone at the back room table, as my mother gushed deeply personal secrets of my childhood to the peanut gallery (or so I imagined.) Normally, such a gathering would horrify me, but I was concentrating on trying to drink my beer. Never before have I experienced such difficulty in downing a magic frothwagon like I did in those hours after the 2008 NYC Marathon, as if my body somehow wasn't ready to go back to being Mark Matuska.

I don't want to frighten anyone, but it still isn't.

I'm going to channel Rocky IV for you one last time as I wax philosophical: over the course of those 26 miles, I's seen alot a-changin'. It's become a pinnacle of politicized corporatespeak lately, like "synergy" and "paradigm shifts", as if "change" is a thing in and of itself. The underlying theme that I fear has been lost in it, though, is that we can do better. That doing better means individual efforts on a daily basis, not a single heroic act to save the world from the terrorists or global warming or whatever you're afraid of. One guy's not gonna do it. But it might not be a bad place to start.

Old habits die hard, or so my platitude cheat-sheet says. I'm trying to kill mine. Not just in an effort to do better. But to be better.

"Cause if I can change... And yous can change... EVERYBODY CAN CHANGE!!!!"

And that's why this probably won't be my last marathon. My knee's still a bit annoyed, nearly three months removed, but it won't stay that way (I hope.) I've decided I kind of like running. Maybe those sixteen weeks of training, which I considered at the time to be the toughest four months of my life since freshman college football, ought to be the norm instead of the exception.

There is also the question of goals. A friend of mine suggested to me months before that when I finished this Marathon, that the feeling of accomplishment would fill me like a glowing ball of warm fuzzies. I waited for that feeling at the end, and it didn't come. I was disappointed. But not like I'd been when I ended my football career, or graduated from the fourth grade. It felt more like a lost game, amidst a season of many. If I want to, I can keep playing.

4:55:13 feels like unfinished business. It was the best I could do on November 2nd, 2008. But it's not the best I can do.

As hard as I try to color this picture in negative fields, however, it wasn't all disappointment and cynicism. After speaking with my parents at the afterparty, my friend Cassie came over to me and said, "Matuska, your parents are so proud of you." I chewed on that for awhile, wondering what my mother could have possibly told her. Probably something like "We're so proud of him," I decided. Not so bad, I guess. Not to mention that it seemed a whole lot of other people seemed to be pretty psyched for me, too.

I peeled my broken body out of bed the next day and strolled gingerly over to a local bodega in search of a newspaper. I slapped down a couple bucks on the countertop and carried it back to my apartment, being careful not to damage it. Drained from the four-block walk, I collapsed into my desk chair and started leafing through. As I read the New York Times on Monday evening and found my name in the Marathon finishers section, I found a way to be proud, too.

But, as I've written before: I'm not done yet.