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AT THE STARTING LINE TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. APRIL 13, 2014. I’ve had quite a lot of them already. I am eighty-six years old and I am standing at the starting line of the first Istrian Marathon. For my birthday, I will treat myself to a 21- kilometer run, a half marathon. I can hardly believe I am so old. How fast the years have passed and how much everything has changed during that time. I was born in 1928 in Slovenia, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Cro- ats, and Slovenes. King Alexander Karađorđević was on the throne. The first radio station in Slovenia began broadcasting as the Radio Ljubljana. Back then, a voice travelling through the air seemed like an unbelievable miracle, but since then, an amazing number of things have changed. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was transformed into the Social- ist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after the devastation of World War II. And in the smaller war in the 1990s, Yugoslavia itself disintegrated and a new independent Slovenia was born from the ashes. Capitalism replaced socialism, the umbrella of the European Union replaced that of Yugosla- via. And as for technology—well, now that there are computers and the Internet, Radio Slovenia seems like a quaint relic from a very distant past. Change is the one thing that has been a constant in my life. When I run, the world and time slow down and stand still, or at least that’s the way it seems to me. And I like that. I am at an age when I have no interest in rushing. There are many places in the world that provide a concentration of the spirit. A person can lock the door, turn off the light, switch off all communication. My home is that kind of quiet place, but I feel it isn’t yet time to close myself up in it. I don’t want to live in a grave. When I run I feel peaceful, and that is especially true today. I need peace because I want to return to the past. I want to meet once again the people whom I met on the path of my life, greet them, talk to them, and say good- bye to them, perhaps forever or perhaps only until the next time. x AT THE STARTING LINE Somehow I sense that I wouldn’t still be here today if it weren’t for the running, and so I know it is right that I choose my birthday as the day to say goodbye to running. It is time to pay off my debt. I am eighty-six years old. Twenty-one kilometers sounds young. But for now, I will have to unite those two words. I have been going on runs when my thoughts glimmered on and off, pushing me forward. Those are the kinds of thoughts I need today because I am afraid. Afraid that I won’t be able to finish, afraid that, soon, I will not just have to stop running one day, but right in the middle of this race. I have loved running for as a long as I can remember, but I have only run longer organized races for the last thirty years. Before that, women didn’t participate in such events. I remember how it was when we ran to Kumrovec, a village in the northern part of Croatia. This is a really small village, but was very popular in the former Yugoslavia. It is famous as the birthplace of Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), the President of Yugo- slavia. The birth house of Tito, built in 1860 as the first brickwork house in the village, features the Memorial Museum of Marshal Tito. Schoolchil- dren from all over Yugoslavia come to honor the Marshal. Actually, the whole village is converted into a museum, with all the houses displaying permanent exhibitions of artifacts related to the life and work of peasants in the 19th/20th century, into which Tito was born. It is not quite a coincidence, then, that it was here that I encountered the injustice: only men were expected to enter the fifteen-kilometer race; for women it was considered too long. That was in 1980, not so long ago. One of my girlfriends, Natalija, wore a disguise so she could run with men. The rest of us settled for the shorter race. But my feelings of injustice were actually coming to term. Those were the years when things were changing. The following year when in Slovenia they opened the marathon to women, I immediately signed up. I ran my first marathon in Kranj, a town not far from my home in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Up to that moment, I had almost believed the prevailing stereotypes about women and had no plan to become a marathon runner. I was used to winning in my usual com- petitive field on shorter runs, and so I cautiously signed up for the half marathon. My friend Betka, who hasn’t run for a long time now, scolded AT THE STARTING LINE xi me, saying that the half marathon was too short, that I should run the full marathon with her. “The full marathon?” I couldn’t believe my ears. I was fifty-four years old. I wanted to know how I would perform on a test that everyone said exceeded the powers and capabilities of women. I did very well, as it turned out, perhaps due to—more than anything else—my determined temperament. I finished the race in three hours and thirty-two minutes. That was the Three Hearts Marathon, in Radenci, the natural spa where the Three Hearts brand name is located. It comes from a source of mineral water discovered already in 1833 by Karol Henn, at the time still a student of medicine. According to a local legend, strange sounds and bubbling coming from the ground were believed to be the sounds of witches cook- ing soup deep underground. While passing by the mineral water spring in a carriage on the way to nearby Ljutomer, Henn overheard the sounds of the bubbling water. He took some samples of water for analysis and returned to Radenci many years later when he had become a reputable doctor and expert in the therapeutic use of natural spring waters. He bought the property together with the mineral spring, and in 1869 the first mineral water, named Radeiner Sauerbrunn, was bottled from the spring. The same year he bottled the first Radenska Three Hearts mineral water, which was later supplied to the emperor’s court in Vienna and to the pope’s palace in Rome. The mineral water became known for its healing effects, and in 1882 the first guests were welcomed to the health resort and the town later developed into a thermal spa health resort. So it was here in this place of the healing mineral water that I ran my second marathon. And after that, almost all the marathons they organized in Slovenia up to now. The first marathons in Slovenia were held in Kranj, Bovec (in the beautiful Soca valley), and Radenci in the same year, in 1981. But after a couple of years, the organizers of the marathons in Bovec and Kranj had to give up—not enough runners came. Radenci, probably because of the healing water, continued to attract enough runners, and more and more participated from year to year, and also the number of women grew. Many more races followed. In my life, I have run about ten full mara- thons and so many half marathons I cannot count them. I have run twenty half marathons in Radenci alone and have also run a full marathon there. xii AT THE STARTING LINE I have run both distances all over Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia: in Kranj, Ljubljana, Bovec, Gorica, Kumrovec, Belgrade, Umag, Bled. I have run in Trieste and Slovakia, even in America. I used to be very fast. People often asked me how I regarded all the young men and women I passed along the way, and I answered that I didn’t. I just ran with all the strength in my legs and hoped that I would be the fastest. From time to time, I received an invitation from a paying sponsor but I always declined. I ran for pleasure, the love of life, and plain old curi- osity. I was interested in how I felt when I was running, the rhythm of running, how all those individual steps bring inner peace. I liked to feel the pleasant tiredness after a race, and I also liked the desire for the next race glimmering in the fading fatigue of the previous one. Such sensations were more precious to me than results and rankings. I never wanted to be obligated to anyone. I feared that the sponsors’ expectations would rob me of those precious pleasures, and I still look at it that way today. To be a good person is a lifelong duty, but a duty one has to oneself. To be a good runner should not be for sale. And thus I come to each new race unburdened, with the delight of a child. Only in this way, do we feel pure happiness in our achievements. I have run all of the Ljubljana marathons from the first one in 1996 to the last one in 2013. Regretfully, I ran only half-marathons, because the first time the race was held, I was already sixty-eight years old.

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