Neal 20, Illness 17.

One of the things I love as a sports fan is seeing what I call the comeback look. I associate this look with some of my all time favorite athletes, Larry Bird and Tom Brady being just two of them. It only happens at the end of a game after the other team has scored to go ahead with little time left for a comeback, leaving a bad feeling in the pit of the stomach of many fans. No such emotions seem to exist for the athlete with the comeback look. Rather, I see them take a quick glance at the scoreboard, and at the time remaining, and can see them absolutely focusing on a quick analysis and formulation of a plan on how they are going to go right down the court or field and take back the lead. No self pity, no self doubt, no panic, just total devotion to the task at hand. That is how we should all handle adversity, which too many of us, me included, forget.

Believe me when I promise you I am not comparing myself to a great athlete. However, I am very happy with my comeback from my two and a half weeks of illness that I was complaining about in my last blog post. On Thursday I changed my Facebook status to say that I was just going to pretend that the last two and a half weeks never happened and run 20 miles on the marathon course. I drove to Waltham Friday night and Saturday morning, the last day of February, I headed back to the The Mount Auburn Club with two goals, to finish 20 miles and not to get lost on my way back this time. I also made sure I had a satellite lock on my Garmin watch before I went into the club before the sign in and the announcements.

The run went much better than I thought it would. Here are my splits, which I had hoped to be able to import from my Garmin through Map My Run, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

1. 9:26 2. 10:01 3. 10:06 4. 9:15 5. 9:35 6. 9:19 7. 9:15 8. 9:23 9. 10:22 10. 9:32 11. 9:43 12. 9:01 13. 10:05 14. 10:46 15. 10:28 16. 11:14 17. 11:39 18. 9:57 19. 10:15 20. 11:39

By running all the way to mile 14 of the marathon course in Wellesley before we turned around, we hit Heartbreak Hill, which is mile 20 of the course, at mile 17 of our run, so it was a fairly close approximation of the level of exhaustion we will be feeling in the actual marathon. And there was no snow to be found, so I felt a lot safer running. Most of the time I was by myself, but I kept running into the same group of Dana-Farber runners at the water stops, and occasionally ran with them. You can see some of them ahead of me as I stopped to take a picture of them running up Heartbreak Hill. I hope you can tell from the picture how steep and long it is. As I have said before, it is not that horrible a hill, what makes it so tough is that it is at mile 20 and its the third of the three Newton hills.

I used my new Blackberry Curve to take these pictures. I also stopped since there was no snow to take a much better picture of the Johnny Kelley statute than I posted previously, and finally, a picture of our post race spread, to once again, where I celebrated and had a great time talking with my fellow Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge runners.

The Neal 20, Illness 17 title refers to two things, my 20 miles, which I obviously feel was a last minute triumph over my illness, and 20-17 happens to be the final score of the first Patriots Super Bowl win, when Tom Brady brought them down the field for a winning field goal when the commentators thought they should run out the clock and try to win in overtime. Because this post is all about celebrating comebacks. And the fact that I didn't even get lost on the way back to the Mt. Auburn Club.