My Good-Bye Marathon a Man Must Find His Occasions in Himself, It Is True.—Thoreau, Walden, Chapter 4 by TOM HART
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My Good-bye Marathon A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true.—Thoreau, Walden, chapter 4 BY TOM HART he halfway point of any marathon is a good time to assess how things are going, though these on-the-fly assessments can be treacherously tricky. T Boston marathoners in particular know the seductive surges of power they can feel cruising invincibly through midpoint Wellesley and how those same siren surges are sometimes regretted a few miles later, in the Newton hills. My self-check-in at the halfway point of my last (most recent and final) marathon told me I was doing reasonably well. Yes, I could feel the accumulating miles a bit, but I was comfortable, breathing easily, legs feeling OK. Better than OK, in fact—I was seated happily in a Lexington, Massachusetts, bistro with a delicious slice of pepperoni pizza in my stomach and the last remains of a cold pint of Sam Adams in front of me at the table. It was noon, and my 26.2-mile walk had begun a little before 7:00 that morning. I would be moving along again soon and probably would be done before 5:00, marathon accomplished. OK, OK, people—bear with me here, please—yes, I am talking about walking a marathon, walking the marathon distance, that is, 26.2 miles. It’s silly, I know, hours and hours. Don’t worry; it won’t take that long for you to read about it. And I don’t want to hear any grumblings about my lunch break—here I was simply following the example of serious long-walk predecessors, who were not averse to taking breaks along the way. Ancient Mariner Samuel Taylor Coleridge, celebrated British poet, critic, and party talker of two centuries ago, on a walking tour of Scotland in 1803, totted up some 263 miles in eight days—an average of about 33 per day! True, at 30, he was less than half my age, but he already suffered from numerous physical complaints (mainly some painfully debilitating forms of gout) and was hitting the opium pretty hard, so we can’t exactly count him as some extraordinary physical specimen or as being in the bloom of youth. Sam took his time, as for instance on September 4, 1803, when he left his inn (after a hearty breakfast) just after 8:00 A.M. and arrived some 13 hours later (9:00 P.M.) at his destination, had tea, and went to bed. At my (roughly 20-minute-per-mile) 62 l MARATHON & BEYOND l November/December 2013 meandering pace, he could have covered nearly 40 miles that day, though he does mention a midday break during which he “sits on a grave stone to write about the experience.” I also presume he ate somewhere along the way, resting there. The point is, he could walk all day, with breaks. I had decided to allow myself equal privileges during my effort and had indeed practiced the same marathon day lunch on my preparatory 20-miler 10 days or so earlier. Yes, I was walking a marathon, and why not? If the mile is the universal coin of the running realm, the marathon is surely the most widely known road-race distance. There are more than 400,000 marathon finishers a year in America today. Tell someone you’re a runner and you’ll likely be asked, Oh, do you do marathons? Ask a randomly selected passerby to name a road race or an Olympic distance race and you’ll likely hear the word “marathon.” It wasn’t always thus, and a quick look at how the marathon came to be so prominent offers a fine example of unintended consequences. (Iwill make it quick, and I’ll ask you, meanwhile, as I digress, to imagine me walking and walking, postlunch, returning toward my hometown, Concord, now along a shady, paved bike trail.) Crowd control by qualifications In 1969, after seeing the field for April’s Boston Marathon top 1,000 runners for the second straight year, the Boston Athletic Association announced that in 1970, anyone who wanted to run in its annual 26-miler had to have run a previ- ous marathon in a time of four hours or less. Will Cloney, Jock Semple, and the other reigning Guys (I capitalize Guys to emphasize the maleness of marathoning at that time—the first official women’s division wouldn’t arrive at Boston until 1972) of the B.A.A. doubtless thought they had put a lid on that little overcrowd- ing problem. The runaway growth they had seen would now be brought under control. Mission accomplished. Sorry, guys. As a means of limiting the race’s field, the policy was a miserable failure. Despite ever-toughening standards (they cut a half hour off the qualifying time, down to 3:30, in 1971, went to 3:00 in 1975, and then 2:50 after 1979 for men under 40, for example), fields grew rapidly. The 1996 100th-anniversary Boston Marathon—the last marathon I ran, after emerging from a marathon “retirement” of over a decade to qualify in a 3:30-ish time the previous fall as a 50-year-old—had a mind-boggling 38,708 official entrants and some 36,788 starters. There were a reported 35,868 weary finishers, of whom I numbered myself among the very weariest, stumbling across the finish line in around four hours (my chip time, I believe, was closer to 3:45, but even that was over an hour slower than my best for the distance and, despite that, a lot more painful). Tom Hart l MY GOOD-BYE MARATHON l 63 Despite their entrance-requirement strategy’s failure to curb growth, Boston’s curmudgeonly organizers should be congratulated for the far-reaching effects of their ruling, which coincided with the arrival of world-class marathoning in the USA and was a huge factor in American distance-running improvement. Boston fields are now a bit smaller (the 2010 edition had a mere 26,736 official entrants, for example), but that is much more a function of the availability of so many other excellent marathon opportunities around the country than it is a sign of reduced marathon popularity. Runners are like everybody else in at least one respect: what is made inacces- sible to them is also made more attractive. Getting into Boston, once qualifying standards were set out, certified a runner’s competence, so more runners were pushing harder in more races to make the grade. Now there was a recognized level of achievement to which a runner could point and say, “I made it.” “Boston qualifier” races sprang up all over, and what had been a handful of marathons nationwide quickly became a full schedule in every region. Boston is not even the biggest marathon any longer—several cities boast races that vie for that honor. New York’s megaevent, once a cult-status multiloop Central Park trot, had some 37,899 entrants in 2008, for example, while Chicago 2009 claimed 33,475 finishers. A minor handicap to running Now, in 2010, I was going to “make it” to the consecrated distance again, but walking this time. Yes: I was indeed compelled by the desirability of the unavail- able. Being short a lung (my right one was removed in 2009 when a cancerous tumor showed up there) doesn’t create day-to-day living problems for me much at all. I walk, ride a bike easily, play golf, can do some modest cross-country skiing in the winter, and so on. Lately I’ve even learned how to scull, rowing my single in leisurely fashion along the Charles. Recently retired, I can always find time for a walk and get out for about an hour every day. Decades of running helped me, even in my mid-60s, make a solid recovery from the cancer surgery and resume regular activities relatively quickly. But my most regular activity, my daily run, was denied to me. I resented that and wanted to push back against that denial somehow. If running 26 miles and change back in the 1970s had made me feel like a “real” runner, had been a centerpiece of my running and planning and training for years, couldn’t I at least now achieve that distance, if not at the same pace, again? I was being reminded, all too forcibly, of the inevitable diminishment and loss we all must face sooner or later—but I wanted to focus on what I could do rather than what I couldn’t. Long story short, I was walking those 26.2 miles because I couldn’t run them. Of course, beyond that angry motivation lay plenty of other reasons to think an all-day walk would be a good experience. I was 95 percent sure I could, 64 l MARATHON & BEYOND l November/December 2013 physically, do it (keep going and sit down when you get tired, right?). I had been walking about an hour daily, and my marathon ramble would afford me ample opportunity to think about how that basic life routine was coming along as a running replacement. It would be a day of discovery and celebration, set aside as a gift to myself, like my 37-mile-run day on my 37th birthday decades ago. It would be special, and it would be, yes, it would be fun! In the end, the walk was undertaken with the goal, consciously spoken or not, of investing the experience with enough specialness that it would force me to pay attention.