Running with the Pack (2 page)

Thoughts sit on a printed page, but they echo through a life — the echoes of a bell that tolls slowly in the distance. But rather than simply replicating the peal that produced it, the echo is always subtly transformed: always transformed because life is always moving. This is the Doppler shift of thought as it occurs in a life; the mutation of thought that is lived and not merely thought. A book about running, I slowly came to understand, must have the structure of running; if not, the thoughts that make it up just will not fit and so will not make sense. Running is undifferentiated activity. Every movement — every stride of the long run, every swing of the arms — flows into the next. The thoughts that make up this book are like that. They flow into each other, never constant, never stable, always changing, shifting as the run goes on.

The separation into chapters is, in some respects, nominal. The chapters are organized around runs, discrete episodes in
my life and the life of the pack that ran with me, but the thoughts that animate these runs flow into each other. From the perspective of thought, if not life, each chapter begins where the last chapter ends — even though the runs they describe might be separated by many years. Ideas that I thought I had left in the dust miles back, years back, insist on reappearing in new and subtly mutated forms. Logic: that is still there, but not so much as the legs and arms that drive the run as the signposts that direct it. The book does not unfold as a logical argument should, with premises that neatly, efficiently and decisively yield conclusions. Rather, this book is the record of someone struggling to run — as on many of my runs, often slowly and painfully — in the general direction of a conclusion. I will get there in the end. But on this run, there are many dead ends, no through roads and blind alleys. Sometimes, even the roads that actually go somewhere had to be run and rerun over and over again before I understood where they led. I apologize if there may sometimes appear to be repetition. In reality, the routes are always subtly changing, both in landscape and destination, and that is one of the most important things about them. In the end, the run always takes us home, back to where we started. But sometimes, if we run long enough, that home will have become transformed. The end of this book is also its beginning. But if the book has worked, that beginning will have been decisively changed.

I sometimes think that running may be a place where I channel my history. Running is a place where I really do stand on the shoulders of giants — or, more appositely, run in the conceptual slipstream of thinkers older and better than I — a place where things that I have read and seemingly forgotten, things that have become buried long, long years in the
trivialities of life and the life of the trivial, once again have their moment on the conscious stage, to strut and pout and remonstrate: why did you forget me? This stage they enter and exit, changing nothing or changing everything, and I have little say in any of it. Running is a place where I remember. Most importantly, it is a place where I remember not the thoughts of others, but something that I once knew, a lifetime ago, but was forced to forget in the process of growing up and becoming someone. I knew this although I did not know that I knew it; and in this I was just like everyone else. Running is a place for remembering. It is in this place that we find the meaning of running.

1

The Starting Line

2011

This could go one of several ways, all of them ugly. Daybreak is still around an hour away. What remains of the night sees me standing in corral G, slap, bang in the middle of around 20,000 people, my immediate vicinity seemingly populated exclusively by pumped-up septuagenarians. They surround me — these ancient pots and pans bubbling over with excited anticipation, detailing the times and split times they're expecting to run. I am feeling a little less sanguine. Emil Zatopek, the great Czech distance runner of the 1950s, once said: ‘If you want to run, run a mile. But if you want to experience another life, run a marathon.' I wouldn't know, I've never run a marathon before. But it does strike me that my training for the marathon did tend to follow the general contours of life: a promising, but essentially misleading, start — and then it all went downhill. There are around 52,000 steps between here and the finish line, and I have no idea if I'm going to be able to complete more than a hundred of them.

It had all been going so well. In fact, I clearly remember boring my wife with interminable commentaries on how I had utterly nailed the preparations for my first marathon. It's not that difficult, really. Most people can run a marathon if they put their mind to it. But, there again, most people are far too sensible to want to put their mind to it. If you are already running around twenty miles a week — say four runs of five miles each — then you are only about four months away from being able to run your first marathon. In fact, I wasn't even running that much when I started my preparation. The cornerstone of this preparation is what is known as the ‘long run'. This will typically be done on a weekend. The week is then reserved for shorter, faster runs. I started with three short runs of four miles during the week. The short runs always stay relatively short — when my training was in full swing, I was running six miles, eight miles and six miles during the week.

The long run is really the key to training for a marathon. On the long run, you keep your pace down to something that allows you to hold a conversation, or would allow you to do this if there were anyone else there. I run only with my dog, Hugo, who is not the best conversationalist. For me, that pace was just a little over five miles an hour. Then, holding this pace more or less constant, you gradually build up the distance, week by week, mile by mile. The first, and rather inglorious, long run of my training regime was a pathetic six miles. In my defence, this was September in Miami: the temperature was in the mid-nineties and the humidity made it seem ten degrees hotter than that. People who have never run before in serious heat and humidity are shocked at just how much more difficult it is. I know I was. Your heart and lungs have to work so much harder just to keep you cool in those
conditions. Sometimes, I would find myself sucking in air, like I had just come off the back of a series of sprints. But I slowly built up the distance — an extra mile per week, give or take. That, I suppose, was not as easy as it sounds. Every week, the last extra mile was a killer. I ran it if I could, I walked it if I had to. The key was simply to stay on my feet and keep moving forward. By early December 2010, I had my long run up to twenty miles — and for a marathon virgin like me, the long run never really goes above twenty miles. I was set.

There were still two months to go until the race, and so I did what I usually do in these situations: I broke my own cardinal rule. When I first decided to run this race, I told myself in no uncertain terms that I was not going to even think about times. This was my first marathon, and my goal was simply to negotiate the 26.2 miles without dying. Whatever you do, Mark, I told myself, just focus on that. You're not young any more — less than two years to the big five-o in fact. Your goal is simply to finish. Don't get caught up in anything else. But then December arrived, I was running twenty miles without too much difficulty and I started thinking. I could fit in another five or six of these long runs before race day, even allowing for the tapering-down in the final few weeks of training. I could really work on getting the times down. I could not only run this race, I could run a respectable time. Maybe not four hours, but 4.30 is definitely on; even 4.15 is not beyond the bounds of possibility. And so, a recurring theme of many of the best tragedies, it was my unseemly ambition that brought me down. My body threw in the towel when I started asking it to do this extra distance in less time.

When it happens, a grade-two tear of the calf muscle feels like someone has whacked you across the back of the leg with
a stick. But I knew that already. Grade-two calf tears and I go back a long way — back to the mid-1990s, I seem to remember. The typical rehab for this sort of calf tear, for someone of my age, is six weeks plus. If the patient turns out not to be patient at all — and I am a very impatient patient — then that period extends accordingly. I treated this particular tear with more than usual deference, at least initially. I did my rehab, got the scar tissue broken down and did all the exercises my PT told me to do. Then, just as I started getting better, I lost all patience, tried to run, my calf broke down again after a few hundred yards and I was back to square one. This happened several times. So eventually I just did nothing: complete rest. The tear occurred on 4 December 2010. It is now 30 January 2011. I am standing at the starting line of the Miami Marathon — and, more significantly for me, my first marathon — and I haven't been able to run for the two months leading up to it.

I am therefore, as they say, a little ‘undercooked' — and that's probably putting it mildly. Until Friday lunchtime, if you had asked me whether I was going to run, I would have told you ‘no' — or some more emphatic variation on that theme. And I think I would have almost been sincere. This was the official position that I used not only in my dealings with others but also, more importantly, with the rational part of my mind. But there was a small, sneaky, irrational but enormously influential part of me that always knew that I was going to find myself standing at the starting line of this race. So I wasn't entirely surprised to find myself driving over to the Miami Beach Convention Center on Friday afternoon to pick up my race packet. I still had to deal with the rational part of me, of course. Just keeping our options open, I told it. Indeed, my rational self replied, is that why you also purchased a calf sleeve, and interrogated just about
every runner you met at the Center about how to approach running a marathon when in a seriously under-trained state? That's the rational part of me — he can occasionally be a little snide. But despite the abundance of countervailing evidence, I think I was still spouting the ‘just keeping my options open' line when I crawled onto the train at 4 a.m. this morning. But now, it seems, the time for options is over. Perhaps I should have listened a little more to the rational part of me. This was all very preventable.

The most likely scenario, given the events of recent weeks, is that my calf immediately breaks down again and I don't even make it as far as the MacArthur Causeway. I suppose that would be a little humiliating — my abject failure on display to the thousands who run past me. But suppose it doesn't happen like that: suppose my calf pulls itself together. Then the question is: how long will it be before I am wishing that it had gone? I'm not entirely sure what sort of shape I'm going to be in, but I suspect it's not going to be good. Just how far am I going to be able to go? I could always call it a day at the half-marathon mark. But will I even get that far? Just how painful is this going to be?

Then there is the question of time. Suppose I do make it around the course. Just how long is that going to take me? This has nothing to do with pride. Well, if I am being honest, I suppose it may have something to do with it but, vanity aside, the one thing you absolutely, positively don't want to do in the Miami Marathon is take your own sweet time about it. There is, as in most city marathons, a graduated reopening of the roads. You want to stay ahead of these reopenings if you can. After six hours, all the roads are open again. Having to finish the race weaving my way in and out of traffic would not only be somewhat mortifying — it would be positively dangerous.
I've been in many countries where the drivers are clearly insane. Greece and France spring to mind. But in those countries the vehicular psychosis is more or less predictable. After you've been there a while, you can more or less predict which senseless gambit is going to occur in what situation. After a while, it all seems wearyingly quotidian. But in Miami, nothing that has to do with the roads is predictable. There is no public transport in Miami worth speaking of. The city's elevated monorail has, as the writer Dave Barry once put it, about as much significance in the life of the average Miamian as a shooting star occasionally glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye. Everyone drives. And so the demographic runs from boy racers to boozed-up businessmen to heavily medicated centenarians, even the occasional heavily-medicated-boozed-up-centenarian-boy-racer. No one really has a clue what's going to happen at any given junction. And since a significant percentage of them are armed — the medicated centenarians, especially, seem to like to drive a little ‘heavy' — remonstration is a dangerous game to play.

On YouTube yesterday, while I was ‘researching' my run, I found a video record of last year's race entitled, unfortunately not inaccurately: ‘Scumbag Miami drivers honk marathon runners.' The humiliation of immediate calf breakdown, a protracted and painful run, or mortality by vehicular means: disappointment, pain or death — Zatopek may have had a point. This is certainly going to be ugly. I feel a strange tingling, something I haven't felt for quite some time. Is it fear? Perhaps that is a little aggrandizing. Let's just say I'm nervous. And it is not entirely unpleasant.

Why am I doing this? It's not an easy question to answer, and to avoid trying to do so, when people ask me this, I am more
than happy to resort to platitudes. I could say, ‘Because I enjoy it.' In some sense of the word, I enjoyed the training — while it lasted — and I am enjoying the trepidation of these pre-race minutes. I am enjoying the feeling that I may have bitten off more than I can chew; I am enjoying the uncertainty — the not knowing what is going to happen next. In some sense of ‘enjoy', I might even enjoy what is going to happen next. So there would be a modicum of truth in this ‘enjoyment' answer. But it's not a particularly illuminating modicum — it is not the sort of truth that advances understanding, but merely invites the further question: why do I enjoy these things? I could add: I'll soon be fifty, and if I don't do it now, I'll probably never do it. And it would be a shame to have lived a whole life and never run a marathon. I am sure that's part of the reason; but it is still just a stock answer, and vulnerable to the same sort of objection as the original response. After all, why do I think it would be a shame to have lived a whole life and never run a marathon? The real reasons, I suspect, are more difficult to identify, let alone explain. But it is an interesting sociological fact that (a) many people seem to have opinions on what my reasons are, and (b) the content of these opinions depends on where — specifically which side of the Atlantic — those people live.