One
It started in a Facebook group.
The message was short and ended in “cash only.”
At first, I was suspicious—it seemed too cheap, but we set up a time and a place, decided to be discreet, and then stopped talking.
On Friday morning she texted: Are you still in?
Of course I was.
I uncrumpled a few bills and put them in an envelope in my pocket. The work day dragged on, and I paced around as I waited, until in the early afternoon, my phone buzzed: I still need to pick it up it read, but I’m good for six.
When I made it, I looked around, and unable to identify her by her pixelated profile picture, I decided to call. The phone rang, my heart pounded, and when she picked up I heard echoes and voices on the other side of the line.
“Sara?” she asked through the noise.
I confirmed.
“It’s easier if we share location so I can see where you are.” I weighed my options. Was there a way she could keep it, follow me after? Was this the safest approach?
No, but what choice did I have.
I sent it to her, and watched the screen to see where her blue dot appeared in relation to mine.
“Wait… are you in Madrid?” she sounded perplexed. Of course, I was in Madrid, I had flown in earlier that day. Was my location somehow stuck in Amsterdam or something?
“Yeah?” I answered.
There was a beat, and then she spoke. “The race bib is for the Granada half-marathon.”
“What?!” I said, more confused than anything. The cash burned in my pocket. Through the awkwardness of our silence, I heard Granada’s marathon expo, and I’m sure she heard Madrid’s. There was nothing else to say, so I apologized and hung up.
Months before, I had gotten it in my head that I was going to run a half-marathon before my 21st birthday. The twenty-one before twenty-one idea. And here, in the parking lot of the Madrid marathon 2025 expo, one week before my 21st birthday, I stood at its grave.1
Two
I was obviously disappointed, not only had trained for this race, I had done it in one of the most stressful and overcommitted periods of my life, where adding something else to the list was almost comical. Not running it would also mark my third “failed” attempt at a half-marathon: the first due to scheduling, the second to injury, and now, apparently, geography. Except I had never made it this close, so it stung.

As I sat with my disappointment, and embarrassment: how didn’t I notice!! I was forced to think about what this training block, race or no race, had given me. Like other times in my life, running had become almost like meditation. Amidst my piling responsibilities, it was the only place where I could focus on just one activity: my breath, my posture, my form, without everything else elbowing its way in.
This break in thinking about everything at once gave me more energy. It reminded me of Melbourne, where I went to a run club where we wrote poetry after running, taking advantage of the period after the run where endorphins spike and the brain is primed for more. This time it was the same, a run became a reset, a clean slate that made me less jumpy and more centred.
Also, there were the long runs, those were hard, but they slowly became a subconscious way of proving to myself that I could endure discomfort, which in retrospect is perhaps why I have been able to keep up everything else I’m doing now.
Lastly, getting better at running is one of the most tangible ways to understand the power of consistency. Like many, I’ve studied for exams, pushed through long weeks, and stayed up late chipping away at big deadlines. But those kinds of payoffs are slow, sometimes abstract. Race training isn’t like that. It’s the perfect kind of challenging, over the perfect length of time. Do the work, and the results will show up in your stamina, endurance, and times.

So I sat in the car, somewhat embarrassed by my oversight, trying to convince myself that it wasn’t all bad, that everything happens for a reason, and that maybe I wasn’t supposed to run the race, but thankfully, I only had to lie to myself for ten minutes because a family friend offered me his bib.
Three
I pinned my “men’s xl” bib to my women’s xs top, and for 21km I put one foot in front of the other. There’s not much to say other than it went well, and it was also hard. I had fun, but as we hit km 20 and all of us running the half split up from the full marathoners, I was very glad that it was about to end.
While I ran elbow to elbow (more like elbow to shoulder in my case), the thing that stuck out to me the most was the vulnerability. Everyone around me had trained toward a goal, and now, we were all out there, publicly risking failure. I kept thinking about why I like photographing running (sports in general) and I think it’s that. The trying. The effort.
It’s rare now, seeing people try in public. Most things are built in private, in bedrooms, gyms, notebooks, studios, and by the time we share them, they’re wrinkle free, polished. But in running, there’s no hiding. The race is a celebration, sure, but first it’s a battle, a public test, and a visible process.
Dramatic much?
que telenovela
Good point about the trying part. Makes so much sense! I mean even running though can become polished. A whole marathon can just become a strava post that you scroll, dwell on for a bit and then scroll on but there was SO much effort put into that!