A few weeks ago, on April 13 to be precise, the American athlete Desiree (Des) Linden, winner of the 2018 Boston Marathon, an Olympian for the U.S. in 2012 and 2016 (and only narrowly missing out on a pass to Tokyo 2020/1) ran the Brooks 50k & Marathon, covering the maximum distance of fifty kilometers. The race was held on a course carved out around Lake Eugene, Oregon, a land that lends itself well to long-distance racing due to climate and landscape characteristics. It is the place where – to wit – he grew up athletically.
Steve Prefontaine
, one of the greatest athletes ever, coached by Bill Bowerman, one of the most famous coaches ever and co-founder of Nike, but that’s another story.
She ran it, I said (and okay, so far maybe that might not be news), and she won it, with an incredible time of 2h59’54” that simultaneously became the new women’s record for the distance, bettering Alyson Dixon’s previous of 3h07’20” (2019) and also the first in history for a woman under 3 hours in the fifty kilometers. For Linden opens, with this result, the gate to the path to theOlympus of female athletes Ultra, women who-increasingly-are making room for themselves in a world until recently reserved for male athletes and in some cases-increasingly-leaving everyone behind.
What struck me more than anything else, listening to the interviews done in the days that followed, was his story related to the preparation; a story that convinced me that this experience that is so personal and so unique is capable of teaching us all something, especially in these hard times. To succeed in her feat, Linden prepared for months, starting almost from scratch with training and resetting her mental approach to prove to herself, after failing to qualify for Tokyo, that she was still capable of doing something she had never done before.
She studied the distance as if it were her first ever race, trying to figure out, day after day and mile after mile, whether it was possible to overcome the swampy and uncharted terrain she had plunged into, that psychological zone where you can’t understand whether the signals your body is sending you are real complaints or whether they are things you just imagine. He skipped workouts when he didn’t feel like doing them, made up on days when he was better, and scheduled things to do by giving himself ambitious but attainable goals and trying to fit in something to increase motivation (e.g., he recounts that there was a month when he ran the number of miles indicated by the number of the day, so on October 1 one mile, on October 2 two miles, etc. etc.). With a career behind her that has taken her to compete at the highest level in the world, Des Linden is back in the game, as if she still has everything to learn and nothing to lose. And it is this way of doing things, this ability to see a positive side even in fatigue, that has once again led her to write her name in the history of athletics.
And you know what the great thing is? That if this “not settling,” this wanting to do something new and never stopping, is done by a great athlete like her, why shouldn’t you and I be able to do it? What do we have that is different? Nothing, I tell you for sure. We just have to start thinking about it. And believe it.
Photo credits:
Josh Cox on Twitter