Hitting the wall...

"It felt like an elephant had jumped out of a tree onto my shoulders and was making me carry it the rest of the way in.”— Dick Beardsley (marathon runner)

“At around mile 23, I was beginning to feel like the anchor was out.”— George Ringler (Marathon runner)

These are first hand descriptions of what it feels like to hit the infamous “wall” in a marathon. “Hitting the wall” is a phenomenon that most marathon runners experience at about mile 20. You can stand on the sidelines at about the 20 mile mark and actually watch people drop like flies. It happens when your body has used up all its glycogen and then begins to burn fat instead. You basically shut down. Sara Latta describes the experience as follows: “At mile 20, give or take a couple of miles, your pace slows, sometimes considerably. Some runners say that it feels as though their legs had been filled with lead quail shot, …Others can’t feel their feet at all. Thought processes become a little fuzzy… Muscle coordination goes out the window, and self-doubt casts a deep shadow over the soul.”

Disclaimer: I am not a runner. The longest distance I ever ran was about a mile…and I threw up afterwards. And I was only running because I was being chased. So I don’t know anything about running. But I do know what it feels like to hit the wall.

We hit the wall this week regarding the adoption. No more glycogen…we’re running on fat here. (Christel just said that this is a good thing). I’m not sure what, how or why it happened this week. But we are spent. It happened to both of us at the same time. We sat on the porch one evening and just cried. Frustration mixed with exhaustion, and a hope that now looks like an ember instead of a fire. We are seeing it in our kids as well…which really breaks us. Some days are better than others. This was a bad week.

This coming week marks a year since we accepted the referral of Honour from our agency. (2 ½ years since we began this adoption process). I wonder if a year since referral marks the wall? There are several other families from our agency adopting from the same province in Vietnam. Those that are at the year mark, give or take a couple of weeks, seem to be having the very same experience.

Long distance running experts recommend the use of carbohydrate-based "energy" gels for runners to avoid or reduce the effect of "hitting the wall.” Recommended alternatives to gels are solid candy, cookies, other forms of concentrated sugars and caffeine. Too bad they don’t make “energy gels” for our kind of marathon. So instead, we are now significantly increasing our consumption of chocolate and coffee. We are a little more jittery and get the shakes now and then, but hope lives another day. And an ember of hope is still hope.

At a point of dwindling hope in her own life, author Anne Lamott asked her Jesuit friend Father Tom “How are we going to get through this craziness?” Father Tom replied; “Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe.”

Good advice. That’s how we plan on making it past this wall.

-Rob