Running with the Pack (3 page)

There is, I think, a distinctively American way of thinking about running and, by extension, about what I am doing today. Books written by Americans about running almost always revolve around certain recognizable themes. In saying this, I don't mean in any way to disparage them. I've read quite a few of these books — from Dean Karnazes's inspiring
Ultramarathon Man
, to Christopher McDougall's astonishing
Born to Run
, to Bernd Heinrich's (whom I shall regard as an
honorary American since he has lived in the US most of his life) engaging
Why We Run
, and many more. But even in these thoroughly admirable books, the shared themes are evident, and this is what makes these books quintessentially American.

One theme is an unflinching pioneer optimism. You can do great things. Everyone has this capacity. Every day, you can be better than you were yesterday; and there is nothing that exceeds your grasp if you put your mind to it. This sort of optimism is, of course, a semi-ubiquitous mantra of American life. I love this belief, and I find its profession, by large swathes of the American population, touching and sincere. The only problem is that I'm pretty sure it's not true. Most things lie outside the grasp of most people. And the one unbreakable truth of life is that we get worse. Maybe you could do great things. Maybe you still can. Maybe you successfully completed an unspeakably brutal ultramarathon yesterday —
Badwater, Leadville
, the
Marathon des Sables
or something like that. I don't know. But I do know that you will get worse. If you can do great things, then the time is coming when you won't be able to do them any more.

Another theme is the emphasis on faith. Faith is what gets you through the inevitable dark times you will face on the run. Faith is, it goes without saying, a cornerstone of American life. Faith makes us strong; we are at our best when we have faith. But I — a European of shadowed soul, skulking in the middle of the starting pack — suspect that, on the contrary, we are at our best when we have lost our faith. In fact, this was, arguably, the principal message of my earlier book,
The Philosopher and the Wolf
. The loss of faith is, precisely, an opportunity to grow stronger. In the end, I believe the only attitude we can bring to bear on life that is worth anything at all is defiance. Not that it makes any difference in the
end, of course: it is going to end badly for us, whatever we do — if not, our defiance would of course be singularly misplaced. Compared to the sprightly sales figures in Europe and other parts of the world, sales of the US edition of
The Philosopher and the Wolf
were, I think it is fair to say, ‘sluggish' — a term which will also almost certainly be applicable to any progress I make in today's race. I have absolutely no faith that I will finish this race or even get very far in it — and, for me, this is part of the attraction. What's the point in trying something if you know or strongly suspect — whether it is through faith or any other means — you will succeed? In fact, I suspect it is precisely my suspicion that I haven't a hope of finishing that is one of the primary attractions for me today.

Finally, American running books will emphasize the positive value of work. Two different strands of this idea can be distinguished. Some seem to think that work is inherently ennobling. Others tie the value of work to the dreams it allows you to grasp (see the first ‘optimism' strand). But my murky European spirit tells me that work is not inherently ennobling at all: to work when you do not have to is stupid rather than ennobling. And there is no evidence of any reliable connection between hard work and realization of dreams. Nothing good comes of work, I tell myself. At its best, and its most valuable, running is play not work. This is one of the things I actually learned through running.

Optimism, faith and work: I want nothing of these things. Apparently, I am a faithless pessimist who thinks that hard work is worthless. It is a little surprising they gave me a Green Card.

I am running this marathon because I have lost my faith. Perhaps that is a step in the direction of the truth? Imagine a
toothless crocodile with Alzheimer's looking for a hat that is already on his head. This was my brother's classic 1993 ‘Fossil of the Week' birthday card to my father; perhaps the apotheosis of a family tradition of sending each other insulting, and preferably cruel, birthday cards. We put a lot of time, effort and ingenuity into finding exactly the right one. It's the thought that counts.

Perhaps my most telling contribution to this tradition was the 2007 triumph on the occasion of my brother's fortieth birthday. That card comprised a group of boy scouts on a camping trip. A boy is telling a scary story illuminated, as tradition dictates, by a torch pressed under his chin. The faces of his audience express terror and disbelief. This is the snippet of the story to which we are privy: ‘And then hair starts growing out of your nose and ears!' The card's message:
some horror stories are true
.

A few days before my forty-eighth birthday, and a few months before finding myself at this starting line of a marathon, I received a worthy riposte. Two bats are hanging upside down (that is the card's salient visual fact). One says to the other:

‘You know what frightens me most about old age?'

‘No. What?'

‘Incontinence.'

The function of religion is to make us feel better, by peddling a lie. The function of philosophy, and a carefully chosen birthday card, is to make us feel worse, by telling the truth. And the truth is of course: we get worse.

Around the time this card was winging its way to me over the Atlantic, I found myself asking my GP a question: ‘What do you mean,
gout?'

About a week before, I had woken in the middle of the night
and noticed that the big toe on my left foot had stiffened up. The next morning, walking was painful. And then it just got more and more painful. In a few days time, my entire foot had swollen up and was far too painful for me to wear shoes. I hobbled barefoot into the doctor's office to see what was up. If my question was a simple one, its answer was deceptively revealing; not so much in what it said, but in what it showed.

‘Well, it does look like gout. We can't be sure without a blood test to find out your uric acid levels.'

‘I don't have gout. Old, overweight people get gout.'

‘Well, it is true that obesity and hypertension raise your risk of gout, but they're not prerequisites.'

‘But gout! That's Henry VIII — a diet of goose legs and gallons of wine, that sort of thing. I'm a vegetarian you know.'

‘Well, yes, a diet that is high in purines, like meat and fish, increases the risk of gout. It's interesting that you're a vegetarian. Do you drink much?'

‘Drink much, me? Well … you know, a little dry sherry at Christmas time. Look I'm a writer; I think I'm contractually obligated to drink. I'll be honest. In my formative years, yes, I could put it away; but not any more, not since the boys came along. They show no mercy, you know. If I wake up a little fuzzy-headed, they can smell weakness, like sharks smelling blood. It's going to be a long, long day for me. It's just not worth it. I might have a glass or two of wine with dinner, after the boys have gone to bed, but that's it. Occasionally three, occasionally one: never more than three, though.'

‘Ah, aversion therapy: interesting. Would this be every night?'

‘Well … you know, most nights. Unless I'm going out or something — then I have to drive, so I don't drink, of course. But I don't go out much.'

‘Alcohol consumption is shown to be implicated in gout attacks nearly half the time.'

‘So I need to give up?'

‘No, nothing drastic like that. But you might want to take a night or two off, every now and then. Give your kidneys a break.'

‘Okay, that certainly doesn't sound unreasonable, doctor. But, you really think it is gout?'

‘Well, it might be something else. Have you ever damaged this toe, broken it, dislocated it?'

‘Actually, now you mention it, I seem to remember dislocating it years ago, back in my karate days.'

‘Oh, that's unfortunate. If there's joint damage, there's a possibility of it being osteo-arthritis. You wouldn't want that. It's nasty. Gout is much easier to manage. The other thing it might be is a stress fracture. You said you run?'

‘Yes, but not so much lately. There were times when I would run forty miles a week, a long run of twenty miles, stuff like that. But those days are gone — well, at least in Miami. I hate running here: too hot, too humid, too flat, and you're under permanent assault from mosquitoes. But I do have a young dog that needs a lot of exercise. So we do a few miles most days. Nothing drastic, though. I don't run marathons or anything like that.'

‘I suppose there's an outside chance that it's a stress fracture, which would be very unfortunate — difficult to get rid of. But I really don't think so. It's usually the twenty-somethings that come in here with stress fractures. And it does look like gout. So, what I'm going to do is give you a cortisone shot in the joint. That'll kill it dead.

‘Will it hurt?'

He smiles: ‘It'll hurt like hell.'

And it did. But it certainly did the trick. Cortisone is good shit.

So gout, Wikipedia tells me, is the result of a build-up of uric acid crystals in the joints. Uric acid comes from urea, a by-product of protein breakdown. If your kidneys are not doing their job properly, then urea will not be eliminated from the blood quickly enough and will form into crystals of uric acid. These collect in the joints — the joint at the base of the big toe is typical — and will be treated as foreign bodies by the immune system. The resulting melee causes a gouty attack.

But that is not important. The truly revealing part of this little chapter in the book of my general demise is the background of assumptions it reveals. I've reached that point in life where gout is the best-case scenario; gout is what I should be hoping for. And so, in my primary care physician's office, the monstrous nature of life was illuminated for me once again. As if I needed it. One day you are running twenty miles for fun. The next, you are keeping your fingers crossed for gout.

I entered myself in the 2011 ING Miami Marathon the next day, and embarked on a strict training regime — part of a new policy of showing my failing body who was boss. A few months later, around the time my calf was making its protestations known, I received the results of the blood work. My uric acid levels were normal. My painful toe was almost certainly not gout. In fact, it seems a far more likely cause was the running I had been doing to keep Hugo happy. So I had apparently upped my running to address a problem that was caused by running. My entry into the world of marathon running was, in this sense, a deeply ironic one.

But the toe, that is only a symptom — a gentle scratching of the surface of a more global decline. Some horror stories are
true. What young person would not be disgusted by their older self? It was a promising start, a few halcyon years of thrusting, burgeoning vitality. But they didn't last long. Then it was all downhill, physically and intellectually. There is life and there is death. That's the way people usually think of it. Death is the end of life, and so is not a part of life. Death is not an event in my life, as Wittgenstein once said. I suspect the truth is a little more complex.

First, instead of thinking of life as one thing and death as another, I tend to think more in terms of a gradual process of disappearing. Life, fundamentally, is a process of erasure. After a promising, but as it turns out essentially disingenuous, first couple of decades or so, I slowly become less and less of what I was. Death is an admittedly significant point in this process — a late and irreversible stage of my disappearance. But erasure doesn't stop there. Not content with my destruction, the process rumbles on until every trace I might have left, any indication that I was once here, is also obliterated. So, instead of thinking in crude dichotomous terms — life—death — I apparently like to think in crude trichotomous terms instead: decline + death + deletion = disappearance.

Conversely, it would be an error to think of death as an event safely cordoned off in the future. Death is impatient and insists on putting in little appearances before the curtain goes down; little cameos that gradually increase in their frequency and transparency. As the outstanding, and perhaps for that reason largely forgotten, Hungarian phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai pointed out: the basis of all disgust is death in life. Our decline is really death creeping up on us in various ways, sneaking us various little previews of what lies in store. My apparently gouty toe is a swollen, putrid corpse appendage. The hard body of my twenties slowly becomes
soft and slack, like an orange that has sat in the bowl a few days longer than it should. The hairs that sprout from various parts of me, parts from which, I would have thought, they have no business sprouting, these are opportunistic colonies of mould that have made this overripe orange their home. In these ways and others, my death likes to exhibit itself long before the end of the show.

Perhaps these little cameos should produce in me nothing more than a wry smile. Death does have a sense of humour, I might tell myself. Julian Barnes tells a story of a former soldier, worn down by life, who asked Julius Caesar, his former general, for permission to end his life. Caesar replied: what makes you think that what you have now is life? Caesar also had a sense of humour, just not a good one. No doubt he was being a little harsh, a little premature. But we are all now aware of the idea of a person disappearing before the end of their biological life. This is a recurring horror of mine. I've seen the closing years of enough lives to understand the levels of fear and confusion embodied in them. To approach death is gradually, progressively, to become un-homed. ‘I just want to go home now,' my dying grandmother once said to me from her nursing home. And so I imagine myself in years to come telling some person I do not know that I just want to go home now. But in this future there is no home. Soon, I'll not even remember what a home is.