It was one of the first things I learned in my time at the DP: Be careful of criticizing athletes in the newspaper.
They're amateur athletes, and, in the Ivy League, they're non-scholarship athletes, doing what they do for the love of the game.
But this past weekend, an athlete at Penn made a pair of mental mistakes so bad in such a clutch situation that the guideline has to go out the window.
I was supposed to finish in 3:55:48. Nine-minute miles. Maybe four hours, if I was having a bad day.
Sunday was my first Philadelphia Marathon and my first marathon of any kind, and I was ready to go.
The night before, I'd gone over the multiplication tables in my head: Mile 1, nine minutes. Mile 2, 18 minutes. And so on.
In training, it was no problem. Without breaking a sweat, I went 20 miles in 3:00:00, 22 in 3:18:00 and 24 in 3:36:00.
Except Sunday, it went nothing like that. The mile markers kept going by faster and faster. It was 8:30, then 8:20, and I couldn't slow down.
Maybe it was a good thing; turns out it wasn't. The adrenaline was lying to me. I was realizing for myself the effects of the clutch situations that I'd seen and written about.
At Mile 19, I had nothing left.
I also made the mistake of drinking too much Gatorade. After each time I went over to the side of the course to vomit, I decided that I needed more Gatorade to replace what I'd lost.
Another bad decision - my digestive system was in shambles.
In the end, I missed my goal by nearly a half hour. Four hours, 21 minutes and seven seconds.
I choked under the pressure.
As I lay on the ground just past mile 25 - my third collapse of the last six miles - I began thinking about failure.
Were the six months of training worth it? Six months of going to sleep early, of crawling out of bed sore and of having Gold Bond and Vaseline as my new best friends? Was it worth it, ordering water at all the bars since the first weekend of school?
Any athlete, unless he plays for the Harlem Globetrotters, knows that failure is part of sports. While I'm happy to have finished the race, I missed my goal by 25 minutes, and there's no other way to put it.
But ask almost anybody who's played for an 0-12 football team, and they'll tell you that, even in a season that was a failure, it wasn't a waste.
They spent four months - or in my case, six months - doing something that they love to do, and they might even be a little healthier for it.
And while one absolutely cannot confuse enjoyment and success, the last six months have been the most enjoyable failure of my life.
Not to mention the most educational.
As I try to make a career as a sportswriter, I can attend seminars, take journalism courses and read all the newspapers I can find to make myself a better writer.
But there will be very few experiences as valuable as knowing what it looks like from the other side. Knowing what it's like to watch your ability to make smart decisions disappear in a pressure situation.
Zachary Levine is a senior mathematics major from Delmar, N.Y., and is former Sports Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is zlevine@sas.upenn.edu.
