The Longest Race

by Ed Ayres

  In my exposure to the ecology of agriculture and to the nature of biological processes at large, I found science-based confirmation of what I’d intuitively suspected since my twenties: While stressing the body in training is a key to making it stronger, resting it is equally critical. Adequate rest—and willingness to take days or even weeks off from time to time—is the runner’s equivalent of revitalizing soil by letting land lie fallow. Good farmers also knew how to further boost productivity through crop rotation, and here too there was a good runner’s equivalent—cross-training. In the 1960s, the term “cross-training” (alternating running with weight training, bicycling, or other complementary exercises) had not yet come into popular use, but experience told me that along with rest, variation of routine was essential to success. During my five years at the George School, I had the kids run very structured workouts most days, but about once a week I assigned them the adventure of simply running somewhere they’d never run before. It would be entirely up to them how far they went, how fast, or where. In today’s liability-spooked educational environment that might not fly, but for those boys it did wonders. They’d come back to the campus and tell me with big grins where they’d gone, and sometimes I’d have to stop them and say, “Maybe you shouldn’t tell me this.” But the various pastures, stream crossings, steep hills, escapes from chasing farmers, and (once) a shirtless dash through the very-off-limits girls’ dorm at the school, in a pack, all constituted a form of adventurous cross-training. The muscles got a day off from rigorous pacing, while the spirits (and maybe hormones, as if they needed it) got a lift. For all five years, the team went undefeated in Penn-Jersey conference competition.

  By the day of this race, I had been incorporating the paradigms of sustainability into the designs of my workouts for forty years—balancing stress with rest, energy inputs with waste outputs, hydration with perspiration, routine with adventure. When I’d sent in my entry—and asked myself how my years of studying sustainability would help my performance as an endurance athlete—I’d come up with two short answers. The first was that both are about long-term adaptation. The kind of “quick study” we were used to seeing in popular storytelling (and maybe expecting in our own lives)—as in the movie Karate Kid, in which a few weeks of lessons from the guru transforms the bullied kid into a martial-arts master—is pure fantasy. Reaching the highest possible performance as a runner is a years-long, even lifetime, venture. By the time you get to the starting line, 95 percent of what you’ll accomplish in the race has already been done.

  The other short answer, as I would soon be rudely reminded, is that when the trail is treacherous, you have to be able not only to think on your feet but to think with your feet. As a sentry waved me to the left and into the trail—miraculously clear of the horde that I knew must be right on my heels—I could feel my feet already making unbidden adjustments to the rough ground that lay ahead.

  3

  Appalachian Trail

  What Are My Running Shoes For? The Journey from Barefoot Hunter to “Boots on the Ground” to Where I Am Now

  Over the 2,184 miles of the Appalachian Trail between Mt. Katahdin, Maine, and Springer Mountain, Georgia, there are about two hundred places where you can leave your car and make a magical passage on foot from the workaday world to the wild. It’s like entering a cathedral, or a temple, or—for me—one of those old Quaker meeting houses my parents took me to when I was a boy. There’s nothing about the trail that immediately announces itself as different from any of thousands of other trails scattered around the country that go just a mile or so, or even just a few hundred yards, before ending in a Walmart parking lot, or the backyard of a new house, or just a sad heap of beer cans and litter. Yet because you know this unpresuming path is, in fact, the Appalachian Trail, you feel a kind of awe.

  The Appalachian Mountains are among the oldest ranges on earth—far older than the Rockies or Sierras or Himalayas. This ridge we were now running on had been created about four hundred million years ago by the last upheaval of a now quiescent structure geologists call the Short Hill Fault, deep under our feet. Obviously, I thought, the person who came up with the name “Short Hill” had never tried running up South Mountain.

  It was a relief to be on the trail, leaving the road for the silence of the forest and the crowd of runners for the single track. With the big climb behind me, I could ease off the hard breathing. But fending off the anaerobic threshold (or lactate threshold, as some physiologists prefer to call it) now quickly gave way to dodging rocks and roots. I was glad to be wearing my half-size-too-large Saucony running shoes with their sturdy toe-boxes and cushioned midsoles. In other races, years ago, I’d worn less protective shoes, and too many times had ended up with black toenail. Black toenail is like an inch of the Black Death, just a small reminder that no part of any of us independent Americans is independent of the life-and-death cycles of the earth we run on. I’d been painfully fascinated, in those days, to discover that with the careless kicking of too many rocks, the toenail will hemorrhage, turn purplish black, and a few days later fall off—and then grow back each time like a lizard’s tail. It revealed how little I knew about my feet.

  Nowadays, with my more protective shoes, I felt more comfortable and confident on the trail—but ambivalent about footwear in general. I needed the protection the shoes provided, but to run well I also needed a good feel for the ground I ran on. Shoes are a kind of last frontier between us and the planet on which we’ve evolved. They can be conduits of critical information transmitted from earth to brain, through the feet—or they can be impervious barriers. It can be a precarious balance.

  I recalled that when I was a kid in the early 1950s, the official Boy Scout handbook advised that hiking should always be done with leather boots or shoes that are high enough to cover the ankles. By my late teens, I discovered how liberating it was to break that rule. The rationale, beyond the protective function of tanned cowhide in the event of a snakebite, was that stiff leather supported the ankles and prevented sprains. But after a few years of cross-country running in high school, I knew that the best protection against sprains was to have strong, flexible ankles and a set of practiced reflexes that let the ankle “give” if it started to turn, the way a skier’s knees bend to absorb bumps.

  Yet, the Boy Scout rule seemed part of a more general view of man’s relation to nature in the twentieth century: You braced yourself with sturdy equipment, rather than learning to bend like a supple tree branch in the wind. In coastal developments, for example, the usual practice was to build concrete sea walls to protect houses from storm surges. But a few years ago, a study reported in the Journal of Coastal Research had found that sand dunes provide far better protection than sea walls because they are not rigid—they let the water flow around them, slowing it but not standing rigidly against it, because to stand fast is to eventually break. Sooner or later, most sea walls or dikes crack and break.1

  Until very recently, the US Army and Marines had had their recruits running in boots and not only injuring themselves but learning (in “boot camp”) to hate running for life. Even now at the turn of the twenty-first century, most hikers still wore high-top leather shoes. It was all part of the same view that led advertisers of four-wheel-drive vehicles to decide that what sells is to show these vehicles rolling unstoppably through rugged terrain—the same view that had led to the building of the Humvee as a heavyweight replacement for the army jeep. Part of the growing frustration I was feeling at Worldwatch, by now, was that the consumption habits of the general population, instead of being informed by the ecologists and trending toward lighter ecological footprints, seemed to be trending in the opposite direction. Lately, I had begun to see more and more Hummers on public streets.

  On the other hand, none of the military guys in this race were running in boots. This race wasn’t under the aegis of a giant military-industrial conglomerate; it was being run by highly independent men and women. If you asked the government (or the politicians
who spoke for it) how best to strengthen America’s foothold in a Darwinian world, the answer was still “boots on the ground.” If you asked individuals who were trained to carry their own weight and who had an educated sense of their interdependence with the planet they ran on, the answer was: light running shoes.

  A man’s relationship with his running shoes, as I was aware, could sometimes be as fraught—even obsessive—as his relationships with women. Maybe by now that was true of female runners, too, although most of the women hadn’t yet had as many years to accumulate numerous boxes of running shoes in their closets. In my first two decades of running, I’d seen very few women running (in the 1970 New York Marathon, I think there was only one). But among the guys, I knew at least several who never threw their old running shoes away and by now owned several hundred pairs. A few years ago, I’d gotten rid of a few boxes full of my own by selling them to a guy in Ohio, who happily paid me $5,000 for them. He wanted to start a running shoe museum. I was torn about selling them, but by then I was no babe in the woods; my own relationships with running shoes had run the gamut from romantic to disillusioned.

  The romance came first. In my junior year at Westfield (New Jersey) High School, in 1957, the cross-country runners were issued canvas shoes with thin, hard soles that had no cushioning, no lateral support, and almost no heel—they were what a later generation would call “minimalist.” Then I heard about a very different kind of running shoe that all the Olympic runners were wearing, made by an exotic German company called Adidas. You couldn’t get them in New Jersey, but I obtained the address of a New York City wholesaler called Carlson Import Shoe Co. that sold them. I took the train to Hoboken and the ferry across the Hudson to the city and found my way to the address—a second-story walk-up in a rundown district that two decades later would be known as Tribeca. Inside, an old man who looked like a character from a Charles Dickens novel peered over his glasses, listened to my request, and brought out the shoes. In contrast to the dull black canvas shoes we’d been given by the high school, these Adidas shoes were bright white with green stripes. They were made of superlight kangaroo skin, and when I put them on I thought I could leap like a kangaroo. They were cushioned and felt weightless. I had a magical cross-country season, breaking the school record that had been set by Westfield’s state champion Edgar Hoos ten years before. Can a sixteen-year-old be in love? I was in love with my running shoes. And come to think of it, although there’d been hundreds of innovations in athletic footwear engineering in the decades since that time, those magical, cushioned Adidas with their wondrous kangaroo-skin uppers would have been well suited to the terrain I was running on now.

  The disillusionment came two decades after the Adidas shoes. In the October 1979 issue of our then two-year-old magazine, Running Times, we published the results of a study of 120 models of running shoes that had been conducted for us by a prominent sports podiatrist, Joseph Ellis. As we noted in the accompanying article, “Previous studies have always emphasized laboratory analysis of the materials and design of the shoe. The Running Times study emphasizes analysis of the feet and legs wearing the shoe, rather than the shoe itself. This, ultimately, is what the evaluation of a shoe is for: to determine how well the shoe supports the natural motions of the legs and feet—and how well it protects them from injury—during the running motion.”2

  We used ten test runners for the study—five males and five females. The male runners ranged in ability from a ten-minute-per-mile beginner to a world-class competitor (Craig Virgin, who had broken Steve Prefontaine’s American record for the 10K just the previous year). The females ranged from a twelve-minute-per-mile beginner to a world-class competitor (Laurie Binder, a national marathon champion and four-time winner of the San Francisco Bay to Breakers race). The runners were wired to test shock (G-force transmitted up the leg to just below the knee) and motion control (behavior of the foot at forty-two equal-time points in the cycle of each step taken). A total of six hundred test runs were recorded.

  The study caused a huge ruckus. It had covered the full range of models being marketed to runners and joggers that year, including models that sold for very low prices in mass-market chain stores—knockoffs that looked similar to the shoes serious runners wore, but that if you tried running in them turned out to be bricks. In identifying the results for specific models, however, we just listed the models that tested “very high,” “high,” or “medium” in the tested qualities. But a number of readers complained that we had not named all of the 120 models tested, including the ones that had performed poorly, so in the following issue we went ahead and named them all. And that was when that metabolic by-product we’d been taught in grade school to call “number two” hit the fan.

  In the full listings, the very bottom shoe—117th of 120 in shock protection and dead last in motion control—was a model called the “USA Olympics.” The name caught our attention because that model was one of the cheap knockoffs that we were pretty sure no Olympic runner would ever wear. Yet, we also knew it was against the law for any commercial product to use the Olympic name without permission of the US Olympic Committee. So, this use (by a giant mass-market chain store) had to be an endorsement! The USA Olympics shoe had a shock reading of more than ten Gs transmitted up the leg—about five times as much as the shoes ranked at the top. We wondered: Would thousands of beginners be injured because they’d been misled by what looked very much like an Olympic Committee endorsement for a shoe that was actually a brick?

  Our concern was further elevated when, after our story made the front page of USA Today, the chain’s national management called a press conference to “refute” our results. To testify to reporters that the USA Olympics was “as good as any shoe on the market,” the company had brought a biomechanics expert—a guy we’d never heard of. We did a little investigating of him and, after wading through a byzantine web of corporate connections, found that this “expert” was the same man who had designed that model in the first place and was now on the payroll of the chain that was selling it! It was a scandal, and being the eager young journalists (and hard-core runners) that we were, we decided to do an exposé. We were immediately informed that if we did, we’d be sued. We went ahead anyway, with a cover story in the January 1980 issue, “The Great Olympic Shoe Scandal.” I coauthored the article with my associate publisher, Jeff Darman, who had been president of the Road Runners Club of America for the previous three years. No one sued. And ever since then, there’d been a general understanding among serious runners: Buy your shoes at a “running store,” from a salesperson who is himself or herself an experienced runner. Don’t buy cheap knockoffs at a department store, or your feet and knees will regret it.

  Of course, that was not the last chapter in the saga of a runner and his shoes. As the number of people participating in road races boomed, the market for good shoes became ever more competitive, and—as had happened with cars—the release of new models of shoes goosed sales and launched a sort of running-shoe arms race. The cheap models were left in the dust, but the serious brands—Adidas, Nike, New Balance, Reebok, Saucony, Lydiard, Etonic, Mizuno, Brooks—sought ways of gaining an edge, and one way was to make the shoes lighter. Elite runners—those rare individuals who had perfect form (no excessive pronation or body weight, etc.) felt they could run faster if they could cut an ounce or two from the weight of their shoes. Manufacturers were happy to accommodate, and “racing” shoes—dropping amidst great fanfare from thirteen ounces to twelve, to ten, to eight, to something called the Nike Sock Racer, which weighed almost nothing at all—became a booming business. I tried a few of them (though not the Sock Racer) and nearly collapsed my arches. By the time I was forty, I knew I’d have to run my races in the same kind of supportive shoes I trained in, probably for the rest of my life. The thirteen-ounce Saucony shoes I was running in for the JFK were the same ones I’d worn in my training runs for the past month.

  On the other hand, my diligence with the Sheehan mantra led me to a
kind of epiphany about what “listen to your body” really meant. We humans (and maybe other species as well) don’t just sense what’s happening in our bodies through the mediation of our consciousness up top in the ivory towers of our heads, but also directly through our hearts, groins, skin—and feet. I rationally accepted my need for sturdy shoes, but at a deeper level, I felt a kinship with our ancient predecessors —and maybe it was a yearning not just for more connection with my heredity as a human, but for more direct and intimate connection with the earth on which we had evolved. I didn’t believe for a minute that runners were drawn to lightweight shoes only so they could run faster 10Ks or marathons. A big part of it, I suspected, was the genetic memory of how it feels to run barefoot.

  The trail here reminded me a little of high school and college cross-country. I had always loved trail running in November. The air is exhilarating, and the sky glints through half-bare branches. October has its gorgeous colors, but by November they have turned to something darker, like the bare oak benches in an old meeting house. Even at dawn, you know it is the dusk of the year, when the mysteries of the forest are deepest, the promises most seductive. It is also when the footing is most treacherous. Damp, dead leaves cover the rocks, and in the shadows of the trees those lurking rocks can remain slippery all winter.

  My mind began leaping ahead to a section of the AT where, on a training run some years ago, I had taken a bad fall. It was about a quarter-mile long, and I had my own name for it: “Rock Alley.” The rocks on that stretch were impossible. And with the passage of the years, I wasn’t getting any more agile. I had no particular fear of twisted or sprained ankles, or broken legs, but the prospect of tripping on a rock or root and flying forward—landing hard on my face—haunted me. So common was this concern that when ultrarunners saw blood on a fellow competitor, they knew without asking what happened: “Oh, man, you did a face-plant. Hang in there!” With all the experience I had, this much trepidation felt like a serious failing. I was taught long ago to think positively, to visualize running in harmony. But sometimes, against all the wisdom of the experts, I got visions of disaster instead. It happened when I was driving a car, too—a sudden, mental “flash” of a horrible head-on crash.