Category: Running

Today is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the  occasion of the 113th running of the Boston Marathon, the grandpappy of them all.  My mind drifts back to my own attempt 30 years ago in 1979.  Like Bill Rodgers in 1999, I dropped out at Heartbreak Hill, 21.3 miles into it.  I was running with a knee injury, chondromalacia patellae, having foolishly overtrained.  Not only did I mess up my knee training for Boston, I trashed my immune system: the following summer I got three infections which developed with no visible external cause.  One day, upon returning from a long hard training run, I urinated blood: a sure sign of working too hard.  Akrasia in reverse, one might call it: I got caught up in the flush of burgeoning running prowess and I failed to discipline my discipline.  Just as it sometimes takes courage to be a 'chicken,' it sometimes takes discipline to cut yourself slack.  The spirit is famously willing where the flesh is weak.  The theory of training can be summed up in one sentence: you tear yourself down in order to build yourself back up at a slightly higher level of fitness.  But plenty of rest is essential to the equation.  A little common sense and cross-training can't hurt either.

Age and prostate cancer have taken their toll on Rodgers, who is now 61.  He completed today's 26.2 mile race but it took him 3:59.  That averages to a bit more than 9 minutes per mile.  A far cry from the sub-5 minute miles of the glory days.  He is no longer competitive even in his age group.  But every finisher is a hero so long as he does his best.  And perhaps those whose pace is slower, because they suffer longer, are more heroic than the elite competitors.  As George Sheehan wrote when he was seventy-something,

. . . every finisher warrants applause, especially those farthest back.  How does their 95 percent effort differ from the winners'?  It doesn't — not in pain, not in fatigue, not in shortness of breath.  In every respect, I race at the very edge of what I can handle, and I do it longer.  Those of us who ran along with the leaders in years past and are now in the bottom third of the finishers know this firsthand . . . . When I finish, I will stand at the end of the chute and watch as those who ran behind me come through.  And I'll see that all are spent, some near collapse.  No one has done less than their best.  And their best, in a real sense, is better than everyone who finished ahead of them.  They are winners and heroes all. (On Running to Win, Rodale 1992, p. 147.)

Kirk Johnson, To the Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance, Warner 2001, p. 179:

Runners, I believe, are the last great Calvinists.  We all believe, on some level, that success or failure in a race — and thus in life — is a measure of our moral fiber.  Part of that feeling is driven by the psychology of training, which says that success only comes from the hardest possible work output, and that failure is delivered unto those who didn't sweat that extra mile or that extra hour.  The basic core of truth in that harsh equation is also one of the more  appealing things about recreational racing: It really does equalize everyone out.  A rich man's wallet only weighs him down when he's running, and a poor man can beat him.  Hard work matters.

In one way running equalizes, in another it doesn't. 

It levels the disparities of class and status and income.  You may be a neurosurgeon or a shipping clerk.  You won't be asked and no one cares.  The road to Boston or Mt Whitney is no cocktail party; masks fall away.  One does not run to shmooze.  This is not golf.  Indigent half-naked animal meets indigent half-naked animal in common pursuit of a common goal: to complete the self-assigned task with honor, to battle the hebetude of the flesh, to find the best that is in one, the 'personal best.'  

But in quest of one's 'personal best' the hierarchy of nature reasserts herself.  We are not equal in empirical fact and the road race makes this plain.  In running as in chess there is no bullshit: result and rank are clear for all to see.  Patzer and plodder cannot hide who they are and where they stand — or fall.

So although running flattens the socioeconomic distinctions, it does so only to throw into relief the differences of animal prowess and the differences in spiritual commitment to its development.

The magic came at 6:25 AM.  I was 50 minutes into the run when conditions turned auspicious.  The fleshly vehicle, now properly stoked, rose to the occasion of some serious striding under the sign of a celestial conjunction:  the Moon, on the wane but still nearly full, was setting over Dinosaur Mountain just as  Old Sol began his ascent over the Superstitions.  The heavy rains of the day before had released the subtle scents of the desert.  Their dominant note was supplied by the tiny oily dark green leaves of the creosote bush.  The palo verdes were in bloom.  The body rose, but receded, to enable that peculiar awareness in which one is Emerson's "transparent eyeball" witnessing Santayana's realm of essence.  There seemed in that moment nothing better to be than a transparent transcendental eyeball running down a road.

It makes the news when a runner drops dead during a marathon, but it is not news when a motorist dies in a crash.  This contributes to the illusion that marathoning is dangerous when it is not, compared to other things we do on a daily basis such as pilot metallic behemoths at 70 miles per hour over roads crammed with coffee-drinking, hamburger-munching, map-reading, cell-phone yacking, text-messaging, makeup-applying, substance-abusing, radio-tuning, CD-grabbing, and yes (I've seen it from my high SUV perch) masturbating motorists.  According to this source:

Heart stoppage killed 26 marathoners during races in the U.S. over the past 30 years, but Donald A. Redelmeier, M.D., and J. Ari Greenwald, of the University of Toronto, found 46 fewer motor vehicle fatalities than expected while the races were underway.

"For each person who died from sudden cardiac death, we estimated a ratio of almost two lives saved from fatal crashes that would otherwise have occurred," they wrote in the Dec. 22 issue of the BMJ.

So when I race I not only maintain my fitness, prove that the strenuous life is best by test, battle the hebetude of the flesh, contribute (via entry fees) to worthy causes, celebrate life, commune with my fellow mortals in a manner that rubs our noses in our mortality and frailty, and what all else — I also help reduce car crash deaths!

You cannot convey to the nonrunner the romance of the road any more than you can bring a spiritual slug to savor the exquisite joys of philosophy and chess.  But if you are a runner you should be able to appreciate the following passage from On Running, pp. 166-167.  George Sheehan (1918-1993) has been dead for some time now and it pains me that he is pretty much forgotten.  He was one of the pioneers along with Jim Fixx and Kenneth Cooper. The young runners I query haven't heard of him, and an old guy I talked to the other day at the starting line hadn't either.  Sic transit gloria mundi.  Here's the passage:

One of the beautiful things about running is that age has no penalties.  The runner lives in an eternal present.  The passage of time does not alter his daily self-discovery, his struggles and his sufferings, his pains and his pleasures. The decline of his ability does not interfere with the constant interchange between him, his solitude, and the world and everyone around him.  And neither of these happenings prevents him from challenging himself to the ultimate limit, putting himself in jeopardy, courting crisis, risking catastrophe.

Because he refuses to look back, the runner remains ageless.  That is his secret, that and the fact that his pursuit of running is in obedience to, in Ellen Glasgow's phrase, "a permanent and self-renewing inner compulsion."

In my 50s, I am aware of all this.  Like all runners, I live in the present.  I am not interested in the way we were.  The past is already incorporated in me.  There is no use returning to it.  I live for the day.  Running gives me self-expression, a way of finding out who I am and who I will be.  It makes me intimate with pain.  I know the feeling of too little oxygen, of too much lactic acid.  I have, always within reach, the opportunity to test my absolute barriers, to search out the borders set up by straining muscles and a failing brain.