by Ed Ayres
The Marines were almost out of sight around a bend on the hill, and once again—as I’d done hundreds of times in other races—I reminded myself of Sheehan’s mantra. “Listen to your body” had become one of those casual adages that everyone respects but few runners spend much time really probing. For me it was not so easy to gloss over, in part because of a personal encounter I’d had with Sheehan half a lifetime ago, and in part because of what I’d learned in my work with environmental scientists. One spring at the Boston Marathon, I think in 1965 or ’66, I went to the starting line itching to race. I’d had a great year of training—big interval workouts, fast times at weekly mid-distance (five- to ten-mile) road races—and I was primed for a marathon personal record (PR). In those days, Boston had a gauntlet of medical doctors screening the entrants (maybe on the lookout for camera-hounds who might also be latent heart-attack prospects), and you couldn’t walk up to the starting line without getting a doctor’s official OK. I knew I was more than OK. But then a doctor put his stethoscope to my chest and kept it there a little too long, frowning. “I can’t let you run,” he said finally. “You have a murmur.” Devastated, I looked around for help—and who should I see warming up nearby but George Sheehan. I ran to him in a panic. “Doc,” I said, “They won’t let me run! The guy said I have a heart murmur!”
Sheehan walked me back to the foolish doctor. This happened over a decade before Sheehan’s book Running and Being: The Total Experience reached the New York Times bestseller list for a fourteen-week stay, making him a kind of sports celebrity. Even by the mid-1960s, among other doctors in the nascent field of sports medicine, Sheehan was regarded with a certain awe. The doctor looked up as we approached, and Sheehan nodded toward me and told the man, “I know this guy. He’s OK to run. I’ll take responsibility for him.” The doctor raised his eyebrows, shrugged, and let me in. I didn’t get a PR that day, but my heart ran like a Mercedes—or at least like my durable old VW. Later, Dr. Sheehan invited me to come to his Red Bank, New Jersey, office for a full cardio exam. He told me that yes, my heart did make an unusual sound, but it wasn’t the kind of murmur that signals any danger. It resulted from an enlargement of the heart muscle that he’d found to be common in people who’d run many thousands of miles. He called it “athlete’s heart” and assured me I had nothing to worry about.
Years later I would learn, with great amusement, that in 1911 the legendary Clarence DeMar had an encounter very similar to mine at the start of the Boston Marathon. In his 1937 memoir, Marathon, he recalled: “Before the race, as usual, the staff of doctors examined all the contestants and advised one or two not to start. They listened quite a while at my chest and gave the verdict that this should be my last race and I should drop out if I got tired. They said that I had heart murmurs. I do not know whether it is possible to run a marathon in competition and not get tired, but at any rate I’ve never done it.”1 DeMar won the race and later won Boston six more times. When he died in old age, doctors performed an autopsy and found that his coronary arteries were more than twice the diameter of “normal” arteries and completely free of plaque.
What impressed me most about my starting-line encounter with Dr. Sheehan was that he had been willing to vouch for me even though he’d not yet examined me himself. I had, to his evident satisfaction, already examined myself. In effect, he was confident—based on what he knew about me as a fellow runner, not as a patient—that I was proficient at listening to my body not just casually but in the more probing way that’s essential if you want to be really good. In 1970, I ran in the inaugural New York Marathon and happily vindicated Sheehan’s judgment by finishing in third place without so much as a moment of inappropriate chest pain or palpitation.
Years later, I found that what I had learned in my work with environmental scientists was providing a very different—yet strikingly parallel—confirmation that the kinds of signals Sheehan’s “listen” mantra alluded to were keys to a far higher and more sustainable level of human performance than could otherwise be possible. At the same time, though, I was baffled by the apparently widening disparity between fit and unfit Americans—the growing number who were running 10Ks, riding bikes, or joining gyms, and the equally growing number who were getting “soft” in the ways JFK had publicly worried about in 1960. In an article for Sports Illustrated, “The Soft American,” Kennedy noted that almost half of all young Americans drafted for military service were being rejected as “mentally, morally, or physically unfit.”2 He cited, among other indications, a study of muscular and flexibility tests that had been given to thousands of American and European children over a fifteen-year period, during which 57.9 percent of the American kids had failed one or more of the tests, while only 8.7 percent of the European kids had.
By the 1970s, though, the trends Kennedy worried about were affecting not just Americans, but people in other developed countries. I began to suspect that in the whole industrialized world, as our species’ technological powers continued to expand and take over tasks we’d once done with our hands and legs, our capabilities as individuals were systemically weakening. Europeans and Japanese, like us, were more inclined to drive than walk, and to buy their food rather than pick it. A lot of people no longer felt any compelling need to be enduring.
I think I always knew subconsciously, long before I’d ever heard of ultras, that I would someday do something like this JFK run. In the years after World War II, the people in my childhood neighborhood seemed enthralled by all the new inventions that relieved them of having to do physical work. But those new conveniences (NEW! was the big advertising hook of those days) had never given me much satisfaction. Everywhere you looked, people had willfully become more passive—content to let the power mower replace the push mower, to have the dishwasher do the dishes, and to dry the laundry in that new machine rather than use the clothesline in the backyard. TV had begun to lure kids away from playing outdoors. My Quaker parents declined to buy a TV, with all its cowboys and Indians shooting each other, and as an eight-year-old I complained loudly about not being able to watch Hopalong Cassidy in my own home. But now, half a century later, I felt grateful—and lucky—that my play had been mainly outdoors and that as a teenager I had discovered running.
President Kennedy had been far-seeing about the dangers of going soft, but amidst the national traumas of the next few years—the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the worrisome circling of Sputnik—his call for a fitter population had been swept aside by his more galvanizing call for a rocket ride to the moon. By the time I was out of college, a lot of kids were dreaming of becoming astronauts and sneaking flashlights under the covers at night to read comic books about superheroes and to fantasize about a future of flying cars and robots that would make all physical exertion obsolete. A lot of teenagers rode to school in their souped-up Chevys or Mercs. I guess I’d have done it too, if my parents had let me. For three centuries, until that postwar slack-off, the Americans who had created a revolutionary new society from scratch had been, of necessity, a very tough people. But by 1960, as JFK had surmised, something had changed.
Most of the runners now on this erstwhile National Road were too young to have personally experienced that change. From their first breaths in the 1960s or ’70s, they’d lived in a world that pursued the goal of ever greater convenience and speed in all things—fast cars, fast food, fast computers, fast relief from pain, and very fast returns on investment. Most people of their generation hadn’t played in the woods and fields much as kids but were amazingly quick with computers and video games. I had read that in the Air Force, the young men who became the top guns at flying fighter jets were the ones who’d been the fastest with video games when they were twelve. (I would also read, years later, about a study at the University of Essex in the UK that found that top-flight gamers “have reactions of pilots but the bodies of 60-year-old chain smokers.”3) The entire US culture had been hyperstimulated, while, as fitness tests confirmed, legs, hearts, and lungs had wea
kened. The trouble was, our legs, hearts, and lungs, as well as our five senses and fingers, had always been the fundamental means by which the brain connects to the outside world. Our grasp of life, I feared, was becoming disconnected.
In my work at Worldwatch, where I would need to be back at my desk on Monday morning, I’d seen disturbing data on what that disconnection was doing to the stability of the planet—including the stability of that presumably pristine Appalachian forest we runners would be entering in a few minutes. A quick summary of the work we’d gathered from scientists had suggested that each year, our civilization burned a quantity of carbon-based fuel that it had taken the planet a hundred thousand years to produce. It was no wonder the waste products of industrial metabolism had piled up in the atmosphere just the way they did in the legs of a runner who was going too fast.
We were now just half a mile or so from the pass, and there was a lot of shifting of positions and speeds—a restless impatience, despite the steepness of the incline—as we approached the bottleneck. Evidently, it wasn’t just I who was feeling that internal tug between the need to conserve energy and the hope of reaching the trailhead before it was choked. The trailhead, where we’d funnel from the thirty-foot-wide National Road to a rocky, single-track path through the woods, was just minutes ahead. I doubted that there was anyone here who wasn’t ruefully familiar with the great automotive oxymoron of our high-speed age—“rush hour”—in which the rush slows to a maddening creep.
At the top of the road, just a stone’s throw from the trailhead, we would pass the historic Old South Mountain Inn, which in colonial days had been a tavern. If we’d been hiking this course in those more slow-paced last years before the Industrial Revolution, we doubtless would have stopped for a convivial tankard of beer. Not now, though. We were in a race. All my life, it seemed, we’d been in a race—first the arms race, then the race to move up the economic ladder, make money, make waves. It wasn’t just rush hour that had made us crazy; it was the entire rush century we’d grown up in. And this was where one of the advantages I might have in this footrace came most clearly into focus. When humans rush, whether as frantic individuals or as high-powered societies, we are extremely vulnerable to stumbles—and falls. Runners who rush on rocky trails can trip. Corporations—and sometimes entire societies—that get myopically fixated on driving productivity higher at all costs have been known to collapse. President Kennedy knew his history, and he may have had some of those collapses in mind when he wrote his “Soft American” article, in which he observed, “the knowledge that the physical well-being of the nation is an important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of the nation . . . is as old as Western civilization itself. But it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting.”4 Two years later, Kennedy made his challenge to the US Marines. He probably never knew about this first JFK 50 Mile in Boonsboro, which took place in obscurity just months before he died.
I didn’t know about that first running either; probably no one but the eleven original participants and a few of their friends or mates did. That was the year I went to work as a teacher at the George School, a private boarding school in Pennsylvania that had hired me to coach the cross-country team and to teach tenth and eleventh graders in the same English department where the novelist James Michener had taught a few years earlier. I was not very competent in the classroom but loved the coaching. I was only a few years older than the kids on the team, ran with them every afternoon, and could not forget that when I’d been a teenager myself, I’d been far more interested in running cross-country than in studying physics or biology, or even the presumably easy subject of civics.
After leaving the George School, frustrated with my cluelessness in the classroom (and sad to part ways with the cross-country kids), I went to work for the Washington, DC think tank where Ted Taylor was doing unsettling research on the nuclear threat. I soon experienced the whole new frustration of knowing that, as an individual, despite my job, I had no more chance than a flyswatter waving at airplanes to help slow the arms race that loomed over us. And then, as I worked with other scientists in other fields, my frustrations only worsened. It wasn’t just the deploying of seven thousand nuclear warheads around the world, a lot of them on American mountain ridges like this one, or aimed in this direction, that was insane. The US Congress at that time was trying to pass (with many members resisting) the landmark Clean Water and Clean Air acts of 1972, in the wake of Rachel Carson’s revelations in her book Silent Spring that the country’s air and water were being pervasively poisoned by chemical wastes. As a runner, I could appreciate the importance of being able to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live in a country that was not contaminated by radioactive leaks or chemical dumping, quite aside from being threatened by terrorists driving into our cities with suitcase bombs. So, it wasn’t just in the industries of nuclear weapons and power, but in almost every industry our civilization depended on, that we were seeing symptoms of careless shortcutting in the pursuit of quick rewards. To a runner, the idea of taking a shortcut made no sense. In a race, it would be completely self-defeating.
It was then that I’d made that implicit pact with myself: With running, yes, I would have some control over long-range outcomes. Maybe I couldn’t measurably affect the risks of nuclear catastrophe, or collapsing ecosystems or failed nations, but I could have a measurable influence on the capacity of my own body. I could improve my marathon time. And regardless of what happened to the world, I could become a better survivor. And wasn’t that what the evolution of us humans had been all about? Maybe the whole premise of modern society—build a great industrial civilization so that people can live better lives—was backward. Maybe the only way it could work was by building great fitness as individual people, so we can have a more livable civilization.
In the ensuing years, I encountered more specific evidence of how a grasp of our out-of-control industrial metabolism (a term first introduced in the 1970s by my physicist brother, Robert) might improve how I manage my own metabolism—and an ultrarun could provide the quintessential test. I came across a revealing piece of that evidence in 1991, for example, when I went to work for the sustainable-agriculture pioneer Lester R. Brown, who had founded the Worldwatch Institute, where the Earth Day co-founder Denis Hayes had worked. At Worldwatch, I learned about how past civilizations had often stumbled—and eventually fallen—because, among other failures of foresight, they evidently didn’t understand that growing the same crop year after year without allowing the soil to regenerate would cause crop yields to shrivel. A beet crop could exhaust the soil in three years. A patch of Amazon rainforest cleared for grazing could turn to barren desert in five years. The idea that cycles of rest and regeneration are essential to ecological sustenance became a basic part of my perception of life and strongly influenced how I trained in my running.
At the top of the pass, we turned off the road just beyond the inn and crossed the flat parking area next to the trailhead. The level ground provided a welcome relief, and I found myself loosening my shoulders, slowing my breathing a little—getting a moment of respite before hitting the trail. Over the years, I had become aware of how essential it is to grab rest whenever and however you can, whether it’s between heartbeats (my resting pulse these days was about forty beats per minute), or in the recovery period between races, or on an easy flat stretch between the hills.
In 1987, I had read in Joe Henderson’s “Running Commentary” column that Jim Ryun, who had set the US high school record of 3:55.3 for the one-mile run in 1965, still held that record twenty-two years later. “In fact, no one has broken four minutes in the past 20 years,” he wrote.5 Why not? Henderson, the former editor of Runner’s World, suggested that the kids in the 1980s were over-raced. In the ’50s and ’60s, teenage runners would concentrate on just a few major competitions per year—as did Ryun. By the ’80s, top runners typically ran several races in a single meet and had major meets scheduled
year-round. Henderson’s observation was prescient, as Ryun’s record would still be standing after thirty-five years. Many coaches seemed to have forgotten that fundamental principle of cyclical rest and recovery.
I’d had some early inklings of that principle. In my younger years, when the country’s “more is better” approach to consumption was ramping up, some of the hard-core long-distance runners I knew earnestly believed that the more miles you ran per week, the faster you’d run your races. A benchmark for a good marathoner was a hundred miles per week, but one of the guys in the Washington, DC, area was running two hundred miles a week—and, for a while, it seemed to work. For several years, he seemed unbeatable. But then, in 1965, he finished a couple of hundred yards behind me at the Boston Marathon—a bit disconcerting for him, I’m sure. I wasn’t in his class. The following year, he made a nice comeback and finished eighth at Boston, but not long after that he must have hung up his shoes. As far as I could determine, his last race was over thirty years ago.
