RUN LIKE FIRE ONCE MORE Chasing Perfection at the World's Longest Footrace by Sam Shaw
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LET T E R FRO M QUE ENS RUN LIKE FIRE ONCE MORE Chasing perfection at the world's longest footrace By Sam Shaw Te runners slog legs, lampooning past a bivouac of the runners' form, plastic card tables sometimes divert- and folding chairs, ing the race into past electric-green traffic. "The first Port-O Lets ripe couple years, the with disinfectant, kids threw things past indifferently at us," a volunteer groomed hedges told me. and the red brick Such were the facade of Thomas hazards last sum- A. Edison Voca- mer in Jamaica, tional and Techni- Queens, at the cal High School. At tenth running of the comer of 168th the Self-T ranscen- Street, they cut dence 3,100. The north to the Grand fifteen partici- Central Parkway, pants-all but two the course rising gently as trucks and tables, where women jot notes on clip- of them disciples of the Bengali Guru cars rocket by. The concrete apron is a boards, like a delegation of Green Par- Sri Chinmoy, who has resided in the blinding white line. They pass illegal- ty poll watchers. At a comfortable pace, neighborhood for forty years-hailed ly parked cars, wipers festooned with you can walk the loop in about ten from ten countries on three continents. tickets. Trash has blown into the grass minutes. The course of the world's They ran in all weather, seven days a ofJoseph Austin park, named for Mario longest footrace measures .5488 miles. week, from 6:00 A.M. to midnight, or Cuomo's childhood baseball coach. I firstwalked it myselfon a balmy day until their bodies compelled them to Here are silent handball and basket- last June, then found a seat at Base rest. If they logged fewer than fifty ball courts, and a playground where Camp among a half-dozen volunteers, miles on a given day, they risked dis- sprinklers throw a flume across a mid- bright-eyed European women and men qualification. By their own reckoning, way empty of children. Alone or in with the lost-boy quality of scoutmas- the runners climbed eight meters per twos or threes, the runners pass the hy- ters. A giant digital clock was perched lap, mounting and descending a spec- drants and trash cans of 164th Place, atop a pair of milk crates. Every few tral Everest every week and a half. moving southward to Abigail Adams minutes one of the racers passed by, They toiled in this fashion for six to Avenue and thence east a half-block and we all applauded. eight weeks, however long it took them under shade trees to the row of card At 3:00 P.M., amid a crackling of to complete 5,649 circuits-3,100 police bullhorns, 2,000 mostly black miles-around a single city block. Sam Shaw is a writer living in Brooklyn. This and Hispanic teenagers emptied out Before any concerns aesthetic or ishis first articlefar Harper'sMagazine. of Edison High. They pumped their spiritual, the loop serves the practi- 62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I AUGUST 200? Illustration by Luke Best cal function of enabling the Base nounced the completion of his mil- man who had inspired seven thou- Camp crew to attend to the physical lionth "Soul Bird" painting (art- sand followers in sixty countries to requirements of runners traveling at all works expressing the "heart's one- forswear alcohol, tobacco, meat, and speeds. (By the sixth week of the race, ness"), and his disciples resolved to sex. I wanted to stop, but the race nine hundred miles would separate match the feat by running, collec- paused for no man, not even an course record holder Madhupran tively, a million miles. Abichal avatar of divine consciousness. Wolfgang Schwerk, of Soling en, Ger- pledged an even thousand. Within a A few paces ahead, Abichal stud- many, from Suprabha Beckjord, in last year, Chinmoy had painted another ied the objects he'd received: two place.i ) But in another, more ethere- million Soul Birds, and the running strawberries, cupped in his palms like al sense, the Self-Transcendence Race project was scuttled, but Abichal bulbous, red communion wafers. "I could not exist on any other course. kept it up. In Wales he edits a don't know why he gave me two," he Here was a kind of living koan, a race magazine and a website devoted to said. He turned to me, suddenly seri- of invisible miles across a phantom multiday ultra marathons. He had ous. "I think one of them is for you." plain wider than the continental Unit- finished the Self-Transcendence Our fables, stretching back to the ed States. For fifty days, breathing Race twice before; a third attempt myth of Persephone and Genesis 3:6, miasmal exhaust from the Grand Cen- failed when his visa expired 2,700 teach circumspection in receiving tral Parkway, the runner traversed miles in. gifts of fruit. Abichal nodded, and I a wilderness of knapsack-toting We passed Edison High, progress- ate the Guru's strawberry. Within a teenagers, beat cops, and ladies pilot- ing counterclockwise up 168th few weeks, the runners would be hob- ing strollers. Temperatures spiked. Street toward the Grand Central bled by distance, gorging ice cream Power grids crashed. Cars also Parkway. (The runners switch direc- and butter to stem the loss of body crashed-into the chain-link fence tion every day, not for the sake of weight. We passed the giant digital around Joe Austin park or into other novelty but to ensure that the toll of clock, and the women applauded. cars. There was occasional street rounding corners is borne equally by Two thousand eight hun- crime. One summer a student was both legs.) Abichal does not consid- ~ dred and thirty miles to go. knifed in the head. The runner en- er himself an athlete. "The race is a dured. He crossed the finish line metaphor for life." He gestured, las- ..I.he specter of death has hung changed. It was said to be the most soing the whole of Jamaica around over long-distance running since difficult racecourse in the world. Point- us. "People in the neighborhood, Robert Browning published his Dra- to-point racing is gentler on the spir- we'll see them year after year. They matic Idylls in 1879. In a flight of lyric it, and concrete is ten times more pun- stop by, say hi. They ask, 'How do fancy widely mistaken for truth, the ishing than asphalt. Such hurdles were you do that?'" He laughed. This was poem "Pheidippides" describes an ill- more than necessary evils; they were the first interview I conducted while starred footman sprinting from central to the nature of the race. As power-walking. It was awkward. My Marathon to Athens with news of a one of the disciples told me, grinning pen kept slipping in my hand. surprise Greek victory in an early bat- and drawing air quotes with his fingers, Abichal wore an iPod clipped to tle of the Persian Wars. "It's 'impossible." his waist, jarring my notion of the So, when Persia was dust, all cried, I fell into step beside Abichal Chinmoy disciples as latter-day as- "To Akropolis! Watkins, a forty-five-year-old cetics. I wondered what he had been Run Pheidippides, one race more! the Welshman with a keen, appraising listening to. "Fix You,'" he said, "by meed is thy due! squint. After only five days, he Coldplay." For more than a hundred 'Athens is saved, thank Pan,' go looked like a man who had wan- miles, Abichal had been listening to shout!" He flung down his shield dered out of the desert with a story the track on a continuous loop. Ran like fire once more: and the space to tell. "There are so few things for ("Lights will guide you home," the 'twixt the Fennel-field the mind to dwell on here," Abichal chorus intones, "and ignite your And Athens was stubble again, a field said. "It loses its strength." Relative bones.") He gazed philosophically at which a fire runs through, to most of the racers, Abichal-born his iPod. "There's something special Till in he broke: "Rejoice, we Kelvin and rechristened in 1999 by about this song." conquer!" Like wine through clay, Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he Sri Chinmoy----eame to distance run- As we neared 164th Place, a white died-the bliss! ning late in life. That tale begins in town car pulled gently to the curb. the mid-1990s, when Chinmoy an- With the speed and nonchalance of Never mind that the story is plainly a dope dealer, a man in the passen- apocryphal, a pastiche of Herodotus, ger seat reached through the window Plutarch, and Lucian. When Pierre I The fifty-year-old proprietor of the Wash- ington, D.C., gift shop Transcendence- and deposited something into de Coubertin organized the first Perfection-Bliss of the Beyond, Beckjord is Abichal's hands. Sri Chinmoy. The modern Olympic Games, his friend the only female competitor in the race's sight of him tripped me up. Here was the philologist Michael Breal urged history and the only ten-time participant, the Guru himself, gold-complected, him to include a distance race in having returned to Jamaica every June since the inaugural running. She has logged resplendently bald. Dressed as if for a tribute to the doomed runner. To- enough miles around Edison High to circle day at the public pool, in shorts and day, in spite of the fact that hun- the equator.