by Peter Sagal
“There’s a principle in the Talmud called Ganeyv-Daat, which means to mislead,” he said, sounding quite sage. “But you didn’t do that. There was no intent to deceive. It wasn’t Rosie Ruiz.I You didn’t tell people you were planning to enter the marathon, run part of it, and claim you ran the whole thing officially. Your actions didn’t cause anybody to suffer a loss. You didn’t take anyone’s place, so I would argue there’s no ethical transgression.”
Reassuring! Yet I couldn’t take it as definitive. I sought a second opinion, from Christine M. Korsgaard, Ph.D., a Harvard professor and a foremost expert on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Many of my critics made an argument that began with “What if everyone did what you did?” and in doing so, were unknowingly (perhaps!) relying on Kant’s seminal 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Kant called this notion “the categorical imperative,” and Professor Korsgaard proceeded to beat me about the head with it.
“It’s applied as a thought experiment,” she wrote to me. “Imagine a world in which everyone acts on the same principle that you do, and ask yourself whether, in that world, you could act that way, too.” I understood this as a formal statement of the turnstile principle: If you jump a turnstile, the subway will run fine without your $2.25. If everybody jumped the turnstile, the subway would collapse for a lack of funds and nobody would go anywhere. And since you can’t stop anyone else from jumping the turnstile, you have a responsibility to at least make sure you don’t do it. The professor also took issue with my argument that I had used few public resources in my run: “Why does the public consent [to let the marathon use the roads]? Maybe the public just approves of marathons, and wants to support them. Or maybe the public gets something in return—the thrill of watching a race, caring who wins, etc. If that’s how it goes, the fact that you didn’t enter at the starting point or try to finish doesn’t excuse you: it makes it worse. You were using just about everybody as a mere means to your ends. So that means you messed up pretty badly. I love your show.”
Thank you, professor.
Finally, I called Carey Pinkowski, the longtime race director of the Chicago Marathon. If I had committed a crime, then Pinkowski had the best claim to be a victim—and was the one person who could, legitimately, sit in judgment.
“You don’t have to pay for the Gatorade,” Carey said, magnanimously. But, whether or not he knew it, he was a Kantian: he stressed that the risk to the race organizers was not one person drinking sugar water he didn’t pay for, but an unknown number of people on the course cumulatively taking up space and resources with no ID, no way to know their medical history, and no way to track them.
“We forecast all our allotted resources, fluids, security, medical personnel, against a number of participants,” he said. Each unregistered runner is an additional strain on resources, and each one on the course puts them one step closer to not being able to manage the event.
Now, he never would have said this to me—no race director would—but a marathon can handle a certain number of unregistered participants. If it couldn’t, the whole thing would have fallen apart the second I stepped onto the pavement. A marathon is not as fragile as, say, the door that Jack and Rose tried to get on after the Titanic sank, which flipped over if one too many people tried to take advantage. But above a certain, unknowable number—A hundred bandits? A thousand?—the event becomes increasingly unmanageable. Thus, the Chicago Marathon officially has a zero tolerance policy for bandits, even the official entrant’s friends who jump in to pace a runner in the last mile, let alone the entitled mooks who run a whole twenty.
When I asked Carey what penance I could perform, he offered two choices. I could work a shift at the chip verification station at the expo for an upcoming Chicago Marathon, sitting there for hours, making sure runners had the right packet, so as to understand how thorough the marathon is about making sure every participant is correctly accounted for. Or, I could take a shift at a water stop—“The last shift, when everybody’s been through it,” said Carey, cheerfully—with a broom and a bucket, cleaning up thousands of cups, so I could observe, firsthand, how much work and supplies and drudgery goes into looking after the paid, official, honest runners.
And that’s how I ended up at the mile-18 aid station two years later (I was out of town for the 2012 Chicago Marathon) filling and stacking layers of Gatorade cups along with some high school girls. And I was glad to be there, and grateful for the chance to make amends.
I don’t think banditing is equivalent to theft or, please, rape; I still don’t know who the victim is of a single act like mine. But if there is any true value in running as a sport, it is that it is a great leveler. Runners don’t gear up, armoring ourselves like football players; we strip down to the minimum and empty our hands and become what we are at our most natural, and thus we are reduced to what we all have in common: legs, lungs, heart, and mind. We are all out there on the same course, heading the same way, whatever our speed, a brother/sisterhood of chafed thighs and aching feet. My offense wasn’t so much against the race organizers or the other runners—neither of whom knew I was there—but against the notion of this fellowship. Even though I thought I was joining all the registered runners on the course that day, what I was in fact doing was separating myself from them, and using them, as Professor Korsgaard said, for my own ends.
As a runner, you spend a lot of time by yourself, during all those miles, thinking of yourself as independent; it is your pace, your legs, your heart, your fatigue, your strength. It’s easy to think of yourself as being solitary and alone, doing what you must and devil take the hindmost. But at a certain point—when you join a running group or start recognizing people in your circuit of local races or just start looking around you as you pass the same streets over and over—you realize that you’re trying to break out of that shell and create a community around yourself. And if that’s what you want, to run with people, to have people to run with, then you’ve got to treat them with respect. You wave when you see people out at 6 AM on a frozen morning. You never, ever respond to someone else’s race result, no matter how slow, with anything but thrilled congratulations. And you don’t bandit races. Because, as Kant tells us, if everybody did it, we’d all be back to running on our own, and there wouldn’t be an “everybody” to run a race with. But also, as I discovered, because it is a way of separating yourself from the crowd, by letting them know you’re better or smarter or more clever than the dumbasses who paid. And, of course, the thousands of suckers who got up early and put on their volunteer caps and worked for six hours or more to make the whole thing happen.
• • •
The stacking and filling was done. The girls and I had built a remarkable thing, a trembling sculpture of paper and liquid, painstakingly created so as to be picked apart hours later, a sugar-water version of a Tibetan mandala. Looking at it, I felt a profound sense of satisfaction, as great—maybe greater—than I had finishing my first marathon. That had been my own achievement, done for myself, and by myself—without a thought (I had spared none at the time) to the thousands of people who had cleared the roads and put up the signs and poured out the Gatorade and water and patrolled the race before, alongside, and after me. But this morning’s work, although not something I could brag about, or be congratulated for if I did, was done purely in service. As we admired our creation, the people who we would serve were arrayed in a long snakelike progression, racing or running or struggling at a walk, and when they arrived I would be in a position to give them a little help. We were ready. We were willing. We were happy.
I picked up a cup of Gatorade from the top row, right at the edge, drank it—volunteering is thirsty work—and awaited the opportunity to serve. The first cohort of runners was some miles away but getting closer. I thought about the time two years before, when I had been among them.
* * *
I. The woman who “won” the 1980 Boston Marathon by taking the subway to a spot a half mile short of the finish line and t
hen running across it, three minutes before the first actual female finisher, Jacqueline Gareau. Ruiz was actually crowned the winner—literally, with a laurel crown, as they do in Boston—before witnesses came forward to expose the scam a week later, because in those more innocent days no one could imagine anyone doing that.
Nine
The problem with being a midlife-crisis runner is that once you start, you’re already in decline.
I had run my first marathon in 2005 at the age of forty, coming in at 4:03, and then learned to train more wisely and effectively, and managed to cut more than forty minutes off my time to run a 3:20 the next year. It was an impressive achievement that got me into Boston for the first time, and I was duly impressed with myself.
But in the years afterward, even as I kept up my regular training and ran one or two marathons every year, despite my effort or intensity of training my finishing times increased by a few minutes each time. I ran Boston in 2011 under sunny skies and a cool following wind, and even with excellent preparation I still finished in 3:27, seven minutes slower than my best marathon time five years prior, and felt like I had nearly killed myself to do that. Was that it? Was I done? Were my best days in fact behind me?
According to Professor Ray Fair of Yale University, yes, they were. An economist, Fair had run statistical analyses for race results of thousands of elite runners over many years and determined that, on average, marathon times inevitably decline about a minute per race for every year of age past forty . . . no matter what. So, as I hobbled away from the finish line in Copley Square, I wondered: should I just resign myself to increasing finish times and body measurements, and enjoy my slow journey downward on Professor Fair’s slope, until the reverse roller coaster dropped me into the abyss at age sixty?
Or . . .
Would it be possible, at (what then seemed to me) the impossibly old age of forty-six, to run my best marathon ever? I had no idea what such a thing would require. I had already logged a lot of miles, and by finishing a marathon in under 3:30, I’d proved I was in the top percentile of amateur athletes my age. What would it require to reverse the arrow of time, if only for a year?
In the end, it required a lot, and most of what it required was miles—but not, by any means, all of it. In the end, making the attempt at my PR, which I decided to do at the Philadelphia Marathon on November 20, 2011, required me to change everything I thought about running, and racing, and what constitutes success.
There are not a lot of training tips in this book, because in general I am skeptical that training advice is useful for most runners. It’s analogous to writing advice. You want to be a writer? Don’t worry about the brand of pen or paper or software or exercises or outlines, just sit down and write at whatever time of day and in whatever room works for you. The more you write, the better a writer you will become. You want to be a runner? Run when you can and where you can. Increase your mileage gradually, as I laid out in an earlier chapter, and your body will respond and you’ll find yourself running farther and faster than you ever thought possible. “Just do it,” to quote a company whose name I can’t quite remember right now.
And yet, in this, I’m a hypocrite. My first marathon, Chicago 2005, was run after I made almost every training mistake I could make. I ran too far and too fast too early and injured myself, I didn’t eat well, and I didn’t include enough long slow distance runs (partly because of the injury), and although I finished the race in 4:03, I suffered mightily and unnecessarily. For the following year’s race, I corrected my ways: I joined the same running group I run with to this day, and I went from running six or even seven days a week to running just three.
That training plan, called Run Less, Run Faster and created at the Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training (FIRST) at Furman University, applies an essential insight to running: too much of anything is bad. When I ran every day, ramping up my mileage every week, I put a strain on my body and something snapped (as it turned out, it was my piriformis nerve). By running every other day, you allow the body to heal, and by cross training on off days—biking, swimming, or any other cardio—you maintain fitness while avoiding burnout. The three training days were hard—track work on one day; fast, mid-distance tempo runs on the second; long, slow distance on the third—but the cumulative effect was impressive, and the lower weekly mileage and rest days helped make sure I didn’t injure myself (again). The result: I cut forty minutes off my marathon time, and ran a 3:20:41, setting my PR and qualifying for the Boston Marathon for the first time by nineteen seconds.
But in the five years that followed, as I continued to train using the Furman method with my friends who were doing the same, I fell into Professor Fair’s rut: I was doing the same thing at the same intensity but losing speed as I aged. To go faster—to go much faster, cutting more than seven minutes off my April time by the time November rolled around—I would have to run more. Much more. I consulted the experts at Runner’s World, including former Boston champion Amby Burfoot, and they created for me an exact and demanding training schedule.
It was daunting. My usual marathon training had me running thirty miles a week, perhaps thirty-five or forty on those weeks with a twenty-mile run on the weekend. This schedule would double it, to sixty miles a week and beyond. I would do the runs on a strict schedule, changing from hill work in the beginning, to build a base of leg strength, to speed work and tempo runs, along with long runs. One day on the schedule, about twelve weeks into the sixteen-week training period, called for a ten-mile tempo run on a Saturday, followed by twenty miles the very next day. Good news: I could slow down for the twenty miles. Thanks, Amby!
My training did not begin auspiciously. It was my own idea to inaugurate my attempt on my own record with a half marathon, a serendipitous race I was able to fit in while on a family trip to visit my then in-laws at their home in a small town in Minnesota. As I walked up to the starting line, I actually thought of myself as a Big City Runner, come to teach these country folk a thing or two about half marathonin’. Sure, it was 80 degrees out, but I figured I’d smoke my age group, then, perhaps, in my generous way, hang out by the finishers’ chute and cheer on the local hoi polloi.
Instead, one hour and thirty-eight minutes later, I was flat on my back on the grass, trying to suck in that soul-moistening humid air of a hot Minnesota summer, thinking that giving in to death might be simpler. The idea of running twice that distance at the same pace—which I’d have to do to beat my PR—seemed less likely than spontaneously evolving wings and flying it. As I gasped for air, it occurred to me that I was beginning my quest to stop growing older exactly how I had started growing older in a New Jersey hospital room forty-six years before: lying prone, trying to figure out how to breathe.
The actual schedule began with four miles of running hills, to build leg strength and prevent further injury down the line. That wasn’t a problem, but the utter lack of hills in the glacier-polished plains west of Chicago was. Instructions were instructions, however, so my quest to turn back the implacable march of time began with me running up, and over, and up, and over an overpass crossing the I-290 expressway. I hummed the Rocky theme to myself, but I could not hear it for the traffic noise.
The schedule then called for a slow, gentle progression for the first few weeks, adding just a single extra day of running at first, for four days a week. The tough part, at first, wasn’t so much fatigue as getting used to a new daily (or near daily) rhythm. I had always filled in my off-running days with another workout—a swim or a bike during my flirtation with triathlons, or a trip to the gym or a yoga class. Now, there were no nonrunning days. Instead of trying to put on the right gear in the dark—Spandex? Flippers? Both?—I just got up, put on shorts and shoes, checked the assigned mileage, and stumbled straight out the door.
I had thought of myself as being fit, but my muscles missed their days off and let me know. One morning during those first few weeks I did eight fast miles on trails on a Tuesday, then got up on Wedn
esday to run more as instructed, and my lower legs, groaning and creaking like wooden beams in an earthquake, simply would not cooperate. Instead of running, I sat on a park bench and negotiated with my calves. “Come on, guys,” I said. “I know this is tough, but it’s got to be a team effort. The lungs are committed—right, guys?” My lungs coughed assent, and we agreed that all of my body parts would reconvene the next morning and see if we could get on the same page.
By the end of August, though, a remarkable thing happened. The aches began to fade, and then disappeared. I started to look forward to each day’s run, because each day’s run was getting easier. My running style, under the evolutionary pressure of daily runs, began to adapt. Instead of lowering my head and churning my legs to press through the end of a day’s run, I tried to relax, stay upright, and tread lightly on the pavement. I imagined my midfoot gently landing on the ground, lifting off, alighting again. Through miles of feedback and constant revision—unclenching my hands, lowering my shoulders, activating my calves and ankles—I started to change my running style to something that could last. It wasn’t beautiful, but nothing hurt.
About halfway through the four-month training schedule, it was time to measure my progress. On September 11, I joined the Runner’s World editorial staff at the Chicago Half Marathon. I was feeling good, even cocky. In fact, I announced a bet: “If I beat every other RW staffer and contributor, then I get to pick the cover model for an upcoming issue.” (I said this while pointing at myself and clearing my throat.) One of the editors, the fastest runner on the assembled staff, took me aside and said, “I’ve got to beat you, because if you’re on the cover, sales are certain to tank.”
I have always hated this particular half marathon. Most of the course is out on the concrete surface of Lake Shore Drive, which turns into a rock-hard frying pan on hot, late summer days, and my memories of it mostly involve trying not to give in to cardiac arrest as I staggered into the shade of the trees around the finish line. My PR for the course was a painful 1:29:23, a number written in blood and bile, and my goal for this race was simply to not give in to the perennial urge to kill myself on race day. I had always believed that if you had anything left in your tank when you crossed a finish line, you were doing something wrong. If so, then today—applying a lesson I had learned at the prior year’s Chicago Marathon, which I had run so soon after breaking bones in my back—I was going to do it wrong intentionally.
