The Longest Race
Page 2
Taylor’s journal, which I was hired to edit, was distributed to all the national and international nuclear agencies—none of which seemed much interested in his warnings. There was a lot of money to be made in the new industry of nuclear power, and there were well-lubricated revolving doors between the nuclear agencies and utilities. The editing work was both intense and frustrating, and after work each evening I’d go out for long runs along the DC bank of the Potomac. Running gave me a needed escape, but at the same time I found myself meditating on those remarkable parallels I saw between our fast-growing global industries and our overstressed selves.
Now, a quarter of a century later, I was in a position to draw on what I’d learned about the nature of human capability, whether to power missiles or propel our own bodies, and to use that knowledge to run faster than I once would have thought possible for a man my age. Did that mean what I could do as a runner was now more important to me than what I could do for my embattled planet? Not really. But I had no control over what happened at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or International Atomic Energy Agency, or US Department of Energy—where, for all I knew, Ted Taylor’s reports were just being fed to the shredder. I could at least have some control over what I did with my own body and soul. And in the long run, I thought, that might be what really counts.
We were tightly crowded together, the top-seeded guys in the front row using whatever subtle hip-bumping or leaning was needed to hold their places behind the white line, while the rest of us jammed as close as possible behind them on the narrow street. We were a sea of bare arms and legs and, despite the cold, even a few bare shoulders of road-racer types wearing singlets instead of high-tech T-shirts. There were men and women of all ages here, but the great majority were twenty to forty years younger than I. The sight of the younger ones bouncing up and down on their forefeet to keep warm threw my memory back to when I was their age. I felt too old now to be bouncing; I might need that bounce in the last mile.
I had started running with high school cross-country and track in the 1950s, followed by college cross-country and my first road races in the 1960s, when new chapters of the Road Runners Club of America were springing up all over the country, and eventually I’d gotten hooked on marathons. The first time I’d ever heard of an ultramarathon was in the early 1970s, when there were only a handful of ultras in the whole country. Now, at the outset of the twenty-first century, there were about five hundred ultras each year in the US—mostly on rugged rural or wilderness trails, far from public view. The JFK 50 Mile was—and is—the country’s oldest and largest.
The JFK 50 began in the spring of 1963 as an unpublicized personal venture for a group of eleven men who initially called it the “JFK 50 Mile Challenge”—one of many so-named events that took place that year and the winter before in response to President Kennedy’s challenge to the Marines. After the assassination in 1963, all the others discontinued, but this one quietly expanded—perhaps in part because of where it took place. The course the original group chose was both rich in natural wonders and redolent of American military history. It started right here where we were standing, in Boonsboro, Maryland, a town that had been founded by two cousins of the pioneer Daniel Boone a few years after the Revolutionary War. It followed the historic National Road up a long hill to a forested ridge where the civil war Battle of South Mountain left 5,867 men dead, wounded, or missing in action over at least six miles of the mountain’s spine in 1862; eventually dropped down a precipitous escarpment to the Potomac River near Harpers Ferry, where John Brown attacked the US Arsenal in 1859 and was defeated by the Marines under the command of General Robert E. Lee; wended north along the C&O Canal Towpath past Antietam Battlefield, the site of the bloodiest day in American military history with a total of 23,000 casualties and with Lee now commanding the other side; passed Pack Horse Ford, where the surviving Confederates escaped across the Potomac after the bloodbaths at Antietam and Sharpsburg; left the Potomac River at one of the five dams the opposing armies struggled to control; and followed a rolling country road to the town of Williamsport, which George Washington visited in 1790 when it was being considered as a possible capital city for the United States.
The JFK 50 quickly became an iconic event among endurance runners, even as it remained virtually unknown to the sports media or public. By the 1990s, when ultras usually had at most a few hundred entrants, the JFK had to limit its field to a thousand. For the original race director, Buzz Sawyer, and his successor, Mike Spinnler, the JFK was a logistical challenge that the Civil War generals McClellan, Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, among others who knew this terrain, might have quite respected—helping a thousand men and women who were determined to run fifty miles in less than a day to achieve their goals without anyone dropping dead. By 2001, Spinnler had established a well-orchestrated routine: As his army of volunteers dispersed to their assigned positions at aid stations, medical tents, radio communications, and course monitoring posts, the runners and support crews would arrive at the Boonsboro High School in the predawn chill, gather in the gym to keep warm, then at 6:40 AM—still a little dark—take off their warm-ups, leave the gym, and walk three-fourths of a mile to the middle of the town, where a white line was painted across the street. The start would be at 7:00 sharp—right at sunrise. For many, the goal would be to reach Williamsport before dark returned, which in late November would be around 4:30 PM—a finishing time of 9 hours, 30 minutes. About half of the runners wouldn’t make it until later, well after dark. You had 14 hours to finish before being disqualified. The fastest any man over sixty (my age bracket) had run this race, in its thirty-eight years so far, was 8 hours and 14 minutes. My goal—which I hoped wasn’t just pie in the sky—was to finish under 8 hours.
So here we were, about to go forth like that newborn infant feeling the first rush of air into its lungs, beginning its own magical journey. Life is a mystery from the get-go, no less so for a runner at the start of a long race. Though I’d been experiencing this kind of moment for more years than anyone else here, I still marveled at the mental challenges—if nothing else, the challenges to just plain sanity and common sense. In the warm gym, we had huddled in our sweats and hoodies, yet now we stood in face-freezing cold wearing almost nothing. We were here to compete, yet there was no smack talk of the sort that seemed so common now in sports; with just a couple of minutes to go, runners were shaking hands, wishing each other well. And for all of us, this would be a deadly serious undertaking, yet there was an undercurrent of joshing and joking: “Excuse me, is this the line for coffee?”
Once, in the 1980s, I had met Muhammad Ali at the start of the Los Angeles Marathon, and he seemed to grasp, in a way that took me quite by surprise, the good-humored camaraderie of runners about to compete. I was there to report on the event for Running Times (a magazine I had founded in 1977 and still did some writing for), and when I climbed onto the photographers’ platform overlooking the starting area, who should I see but the world’s most legendary athlete, who’d been brought in to fire the starting gun. I shook his hand and asked, awkwardly, “So, what do you think of all these thousands of people warming up to run twenty-six miles?” I expected him to say something appropriate to the ceremonial nature of his presence, such as “It’s a great thing; it’s inspiring!” Instead, Ali fixed me with that baleful stare he’d so often laid on reporters, and said, “They got to be crazy!” I laughed, a bit nervously. I knew it was just a little jab, but it was a Muhammad Ali jab, and I was still on my feet! Remembering that now at the start of the JFK, it occurred to me—in the spirit of the moment—that if marathoners are crazy, people who run fifty miles on trails must be twice as crazy.
The guy with the bullhorn announced that we had thirty seconds, and then at 6:59:50 he began a countdown: “Ten, nine, eight . . .” It was time to let my mind go blank, Zenlike. This was important. Over the few days before the event, I’d done a lot of mental rehearsing and spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about the first thre
e miles, which quickly confront you with a strategic conundrum. The first mile, like a scene from an old Western, is just get out of town. No problem with that. But the next two miles are a fairly steep climb to the South Mountain pass, where you leave the road and enter a thirteen-mile segment of the 2,168-mile-long Appalachian Trail (AT). The conundrum is that on one hand you want to get to the trailhead before the horde does, because the AT is a rocky, single-track path—wide enough in most places for just one runner at a time, or two at most—and if you reach this bottleneck in the same minute as several hundred other determined people, you’ll be slowed like bumper-to-bumper traffic squeezing past an accident, and you’ll lose a lot of time. Best to get to the trailhead ahead of the traffic, if you can do so without too much strain. On the other hand, going up the South Mountain road, it would be a big mistake to go too fast. It’s a tricky thing to balance, but once the race started I wanted to be on autopilot, not burning energy trying to calculate.
“Seven, six, five . . .”
I went blank, finally, the way I had late last night at the hotel in Hagerstown, when I’d finally lapsed into a few hours of restless sleep.
2
South Mountain
The Rush—and the Dilemma of Pacing
We ran through the town as if in a dream. Most of the houses on this main street—once curiously known as America’s National Road—were narrow wood structures that had been built over a century ago and looked abandoned now. A few even older stone houses appeared to date from the eighteenth century. A lone coffee shop had lights on, as did the temperature sign on the bank, but all the houses were dark. State police had cleared the road of cars. In minutes, we were out of town and starting up the mountain, and despite my effort to go blank I found myself thinking, not too fast, not too fast! I marveled at how I had once run this race, over a quarter century ago, when I was evidently too young to understand “too fast”—and somehow got away with it. At the age of thirty-six, I had run the JFK and experienced the thrill of my life by actually winning the race outright in a time of 6 hours, 4 minutes—about twelve minutes ahead of the second-place guy. That year, there’d been 483 starters, and I’d been one of the first five or six to reach the South Mountain trailhead. I still have a photo of that lead group of guys with our jaunty ’70s mustaches and long hair nearing the top of the South Mountain hill, and in the photo I’m actually smiling. Unbelievable.
In those years the trail segment of the course was a little different than now—same distance, but a bit rougher. During the Cold War, a silo-like structure had been erected high on the ridge we would be following once we hit the trail, on “government” land accessed by a narrow, paved service road. The area around it had been closed off. The Appalachian Trail had been forced to detour around the west slope of the mountain, then climb steeply back to the ridge on the far side of the closed-off area. On the climb back up, a stretch of about twenty yards went up a rocky stream bed where the slope was almost as steep as one of those climbing walls we were now starting to see in upscale gyms, and I distinctly recalled trying to run up that incline in 1977—and going alarmingly anaerobic. Going anaerobic, as almost every runner knows, is what happens when you come to the end of a hard sprint. It’s also called having “the bear on your back.” For a short distance you fly, and then suddenly you can’t. Your legs need more oxygen at that speed (or at that steepness of incline) than your lungs can take in or your blood can deliver fast enough. You’re thrown into oxygen debt, and your muscles feel like they’ve been filled with acid—which to some degree they have, as the lactic acid by-product of fight-or-flight metabolism suddenly piles up like panicked bodies at the clogged exit of a theater on fire. Within seconds, the whole physiological system either seizes up or slows to a crawl. If you’re running a long distance, going anaerobic somewhere along the way can take a heavy toll: You may have to stop, put your hands on your knees, and gulp air until the lactic acid dissipates and the oxygen debt is paid off. Somehow, on that long-ago November day, thanks to the three-a-week monster speed workouts I’d been doing, I only had to slow or walk for a few seconds before recovering.
Now, twenty-four years later, at an age when no man or woman can do three-a-week speed workouts without getting sick or breaking down, I was definitely not smiling, and there was little danger I’d let myself go anywhere near anaerobic. Up ahead, the trail had been restored to its pre–Cold War route, and today we would actually run on that paved service road that some locals noted was somehow always snow free in the winter. The structure was supposedly still there, and the locals called it “the missile silo”—referring to the system of about 265 missile bases that had been deployed around the US in the 1960s to protect the country from Soviet nuclear attack. When I first heard about the one up on South Mountain, I thought, in a sort of swords-to-ploughshares spirit, How appropriate—a transformation of the ridge’s use from Nike missiles to Nike running shoes! But then I looked up a list of all the known US Nike missile silo sites, and none was listed for this part of Maryland. Apparently, the real purpose of this structure—the reason it had been fenced off all those years—was never made public.
When we reached the South Mountain pass, we would run a short distance on the Appalachian Trail before entering the unexplained service road, which evidently accessed the ridge from another part of the valley. We’d run the road’s two-mile length before returning to the trail. I made a mental note to scan the woods when I reached the service road’s terminus and see if there really was a silo there. Right now, though, I needed to deal with the challenge of South Mountain. Was I being too conservative? Halfway up the mountain, five or six Marines went past me in a pack—guys young enough to do three-a-week speed workouts or, hell, five in a week—ooh-rah!—running as if they were on their way to plant a flag. Let them go, I thought. Some of those guys are going to come back to me soon enough.
That bit of lore—that “they’ll come back to you”—had been a part of the standard distance runner’s indoctrination at least since my high school cross-country days. Going out too fast at the start of a race was the classic rookie mistake. It was also something that, at big races where TV cameras or spectators were present, always seemed to bring out at least one entrant who got way too excited. At the Boston Marathon, at least in the 1960s and ’70s, you’d see some guy no one had heard of take off from the start at a hell-bent sprint, clearly visible in a photo of the front-runners in the next day’s Boston Globe. He’d have a nice clipping to show the grandchildren, although if they asked the guy “Did you win?” (that disconcerting question all runners seem to get asked), he might have had to admit that within seconds after the photo was taken, less than half a mile from the start, he had staggered off the road gasping, the bear on his back, and done for the day.
More common, though, were the runners who really did want to go the whole distance but had a poor sense of pace. And here was one of those ways that our speed-enamored culture had most conspicuously disconnected us from our nature. The poor pacers were those who’d maybe seen too many spectacular touchdown runs or cop chases on TV, and without thinking would go too fast for the first two miles of a 10K, then begin helplessly slowing down and drifting back through the field as more even-paced runners caught up. If you were one of the guys running patiently far behind, the guy who was slowing would appear to be “coming back” to you. I felt confident some of those Marines would be coming back, at least eventually.
There’s always a risk that that kind of confidence can turn out to be hubris, and part of what makes endurance running an adventure is that you never know what will actually happen. But I knew that if you pay close attention to what your internal signals are telling you, they heighten your chances of actually doing what you dream of doing. The most fundamental education of a long-distance runner had been encapsulated over two decades ago by the iconic runner-philosopher George Sheehan, whose signature counsel was: “Listen to your body.” Sheehan was a prominent cardiologist, one of the r
egulars at the New York Road Runners races I ran in the 1960s and ’70s, and in those days it was so unusual for a medical doctor to enjoy and advocate running that we road runners listened with our jaws hanging to what Doc had to say. Instinctively, most of us knew that what we were doing was good for our hearts and health (many doctors in those days argued that it was not), and Sheehan’s “Listen to your body” became a kind of mantra.
Sheehan was light-years ahead of his time. A doctor who ran marathons? When I was growing up, people thought of doctors as sedate, middle-aged white men with neatly parted graying hair who spoke and moved with measured deliberation. If they’d ever done anything athletic or acrobatic or impulsive—well, that must have been back in their youth, before med school and their professional life began. George Sheehan was white and middle-aged, but he definitely broke the mold: He ran hard, and in photos of him finishing a race in his middle years, his face is contorted like that of a man in either pain or ecstasy. The same year I won the JFK, Sheehan ran the fastest 15K in the US by anyone over the age of fifty. He ran hard and taught thousands of us how we could, too, if we’d pay attention to the biofeedback. He didn’t think for a minute that a doctor knows better than your own genes how to run the astonishingly complex system that is your body. And only you can listen to the song of yourself while you’re running. Pacing, so you don’t burn out prematurely, is the most basic skill a distance runner learns, and pacing is all about listening to the signals that tell you whether the rates at which you are burning energy, rehydrating, getting oxygen and nutrients to the muscles, and getting rid of metabolic waste can be sustained over the distance you’ve chosen to race.