Gubbi of Arabia: Expat Life in Dubai

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Know When to Walk Away, Know When to Run

I have to say, the Dubai Marathon and I have had a pretty good “run,” if you’ll excuse the horrible pun.

For three years now, I’ve woken up before dawn on a balmy January morning, taken a little 42km / 26.2 mile jaunt up and down Beach Road with a few hundred of Dubai’s running faithful (oh, you know, and Haile Gebrselassie - no bigs), puked a bit at the finish line… and then hosted an epic day-drinking brunch to celebrate. (What?! Mimosas totally have electrolytes.)

There was 2008, when I didn’t train at all but somehow shuffled my way through the race to prove to myself that, despite all the recent changes in my life - namely my relatively haphazard decision to move 7,000 miles away from home to this big, crazy, foreign, running-unfriendly city called Dubai - I was still me, and being me meant I was a runner, preparation and training be damned.

Then there was 2009, which fell right in the midst of my Dubai running “glory days.” I had solid training buddies, I put in the miles, and that January I blazed through the race on the heels of finishing the Beirut Marathon in November and en route to running the Two Oceans Ultramarathon in April. Running a marathon is never a particularly fun or easy thing to do, but 2009 was as good as I could have asked for at the time, and I look back on those running-days fondly. 

And then there was 2010. I wasn’t in the best shape of my life last January: I had spent the end of 2009 working in Saudi Arabia and then South Africa, which - for reasons of Islamic law and personal safety, respectively - aren’t the most runner-friendly places in which to train. (Although I look back fondly on the 10-miler I eked out in Riyadh - the subject of some of my first posts on this blog - by repeating 1km laps around the inside perimeter of my gated compound.) Over the holidays I put myself through my own personal “Gubbi’s Guide to Cramming for a Marathon” boot camp (seriously - there was a week in early January last year when I did a 12-miler, a 15-miler, and an 18-miler all within the span of 7 days), and sure enough, while it wasn’t pretty (or fast), I made it across the finish line. 

Which is why it is with great sadness - and no small measure of annoying Type-A OCD guilt - that I’ve decided I won’t be toeing the line when the race takes place this Friday. I could blame the tendonitis that derailed my early training, but to be honest, that’s been healed for about a month, meaning if I’d had the pathos or the chutzpah or the kraziness to put myself through another last-minute training cram session like last year, I could have gotten it together. 

But you know what? I didn’t want to. I wanted to enjoy our holidays with family and friends in the US without having to stress about when I was going to squeeze in that 8-mile tempo session, and I wanted to eeeeeeeeeeeease my way into the new year in Dubai without having to worry about carving out 3-hour blocks in my schedule to go running.

And at first, I got really down on myself for those feelings. “How can you not run the Dubai marathon?!” I asked myself. “You do it every year - it’s YOUR THING!”

And then I realized, you know what? I’m the only one who cares. And if this year I decide it’s MY THING to park myself somewhere near Mile 25 with a bag of Egg McMuffins and a megaphone to cheer wildly for those who did find it within themselves to toe the line… then you know what? That’s okay too. 

To paraphrase the immortal words of the Steve Miller Band: you gotta know when to walk away, know when (not) to run…

  1. youseftuqan said: Aww fret not little Gubbins! There will always be more finish lines to cross. Sometimes, a little bit too much business travel, holiday wine and more corporal matters like tendonitis can get the best of us. You will get that 3:30 - just you wait..
  2. alyssaoutofwater said: So impressed!!!
  3. ladyofleisuredc said: It is so okay to not pressure yourself!
  4. gubbiofarabia posted this
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