The bus from hell
A rude awakening might’ve been running 13.1 miles without training. What I endured (pun very intended) was straight from a low-budget psychological horror flick.
And to be clear, said horrifying awakening occurred at precisely 6 AM, two hours after returning from a ruin bar that I thought the entire night was a pizza parlor.
The plot went as follows: The dumb American goes abroad to find herself. Meets up with three friends (it’s always four)… They wine. They dine. They dance. And then, this eponymous idiot ends up running 13.1 miles with no training and the carboloading of five mojitos the previous evening.
Said Idiot, “I” for short, walks miles to the starting line with a friend at the crack of dawn. I look with honesty at both her aptitude as a former collegiate runner and the acknowledgment of my own impending misery: “Leave me behind,” I plead to her.
And so she does. And so I’m left to face quite literally my demons, or in this case the bus from hell.
See, I’ve always wondered… what happens exactly to those who exceed the cutoff of a race? What happens to those so slow that they’re threatening ordinances and permits that keep the city streets closed? Some things might be left a mystery, but at least in Budapest, I quickly was psychologically taunted with the reality.
With a harsh cutoff that actually required one to actively run (or at least fully jog) the entirety of a race (very different from any American race), I slowly found myself such a guinea pig as numbers dwindled that I was eking more and more towards the back.
However, it wasn’t until the haunting yet inevitable moment that I reached the literal back that the true plot began. I looked around me and realized: damn, I’m the slowest of tens of thousands of fit Europeans and American study abroad tourists. My second realization was… that I didn’t see most the people I had passed.
Where was the girl in the tutu, I wondered? In a horror movie, this is about the moment when someone would jump out and stab me. In my real life, it’s when I realized that there was a physical bus immediately behind me that forced anyone too slow to give up then, ruminate in their sweat and failure trapped on board, and follow the rest of us slowpokes barely keeping a 12.5 minute mile. In other words, it was worse than being stabbed.
And so the psychological horror began: how long could this undertrained hungover former A- PE student keep from boarding that goddamn bus?
Every so often, my panicked thoughts would be interrupted by the loud Hungarian cries of our pacer—who’d look at me shouting in what equivocated to gibberish to my ignorant ears but whose message was loud and clear: if you go slower, your ass is getting bus’ed.
And so on I went. And went and went in boughts of misery as I felt the mojitos but more so felt sadness for each fellow slowpoke in my huddle that one-by-one fell to the bus, as if picked off by a predator. I thought about my high school nutritionist who once told me, “as long as your arms move, your legs will follow.” But how, Alicia (said nutritionist), does one move a dead soul caught between the horror of the bus and the horror of actually having to do the race I signed up for?
Yet my arms pumped and my legs painfully and reluctantly followed. Then I saw it: the 20 km in the far distance. We’re here! We’re safe! We’re nestled in. And so I began my glorious sprint towards the finish, confused why none of my fellow 12 minute milers were likewise pretending that we’re fast.
I run my exhausted heart out—only to realize that I actually don’t understand the metric system. (Or Hungrarian, but that’s a separate issue.) And so post-sprint, I feel real tears of both the mourning of my energy and the acceptance that… I still have a full mile to go. But by then, at least the bus was gone, and while I kept off the bus, the bus has never kept out of my subsequent nightmares.
At least I got a participant medal for it all.