by Ed Ayres
Ooh-rah!
At around thirteen miles, I found myself suddenly on that dangerous stretch I’d been obsessing about, Rock Alley. I was hyperalert here, focused mainly on the ground four or five strides ahead, and once again thankful that I could focus there and not on the ground immediately underfoot where the next few steps would land. Once, in another race, I’d heard a runner just ahead of me on a stretch of outrageously rocky trail exclaim, “Do my feet have eyes of their own?”
It would be natural to assume, in this age of remote-controlled war planes and Google, that the kind of automatic guidance of the feet that bypasses conscious decision-making, while impressive, can’t compare with the capacities of some of the twenty-first century technologies we’ve built. But a few months ago, at a meeting of the Foundation for the Future in Seattle, I’d heard the physicist Michio Kaku say something quite to the contrary: that even if Moore’s Law of expanding computer processing speed held up, it would be the year 2049 before machine capacity caught up with that of the fully deployed human brain. Civilization had now come to a very rocky path. I was glad I didn’t have to depend on electronic guidance systems to run this last segment of the AT. It was hugely empowering to know that if I was good at this, I could not just think on my feet but think with my feet. Maybe, in retrospect, that feeling of empowerment was just a bit too hubristic.
I made it about three-quarters of the way down the switchbacks of Weverton. The AT is usually a good path, but on this stretch it snakes through a true boulder field. Every step of the way, you have to rely on that quicker-than-consciousness mapping of the protruding rocks and roots with unwavering focus. You might come up behind a runner who is moving more slowly and call out “passing on your left,” but just the distraction of glancing at him as you move by momentarily joggles your subconscious calculation of the height of a rock. The sole of your shoe scrapes the rock instead of clearing by a quarter-inch and you lose balance and lunge awkwardly for a second, but recover.
Just a few hundred yards from the bottom, though, a rock that wasn’t supposed to be there hit the toe-box of my shoe—just a quarter-inch more than a scraping, but enough to stop my foot in its track while the rest of me flew forward and down in a full face-plant on more rocks. Actually, when such an event occurs, the human body is so remarkably programmed that the face almost never hits the ground; it is the knees, followed by elbows, forearms, wrists, and both of the hands, that fly forward in the head’s defense. I remained prostrate for a shocked second or two, and the next runner behind me stopped. He didn’t have to, but it’s what ultrarunners almost always do.
“Are you OK?”
“I’m OK, thanks.” I had no idea whether I really was, but it would have been unbearable to me to be out of the race. The guy took off toward those cheering voices. I got to my feet and followed slowly, blood trickling down my leg and arms. A few minutes later, coming out into the sunshine, I got a terrific cheer from the crowd.
5
Keep Tryst Road
With a Little Help from Our Friends: The Not-So-Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
If the JFK ultra has a midlife crisis, this is where it begins. Just minutes ago, you felt your mojo at its peak, flying down off the mountain into Weverton and arriving at the aid station to raucous cheers. Looking back, though, it’s almost like you’d been racing through an endless hotel corridor and burst mistakenly into the wrong room—a big celebration of some kind—in your shorts, all bloody and sweaty, and your socks and hair festooned with dead leaves and dirt. Where on earth did a trail ultra come up with spectators? But it was no mistake. The crowd formed a big, friendly gauntlet—hands reaching out to offer water, banana, gels, electrolyte drink. You paused briefly to take whatever aid you needed, and in seconds you were back into the trees running a half-mile section of wooded trail that took you under a highway bridge to another sunlit place where you’re about to cross a railroad track, and reach—at last, thank God—the C&O Canal Towpath. Weverton still echoes in your head, but it’s like a flicker of dream that’s fading quickly.
You are about to begin a twenty-six-mile-long stretch of flat, turf/gravel path—the real test, because you no longer have the hazards of the Appalachian Trail to give you focus and keep you in the moment. You’ve already been running for over two and a half hours—about the time it takes a very good runner to do a marathon, except that the rocky trail has burned up a lot more energy than a marathon, so you no longer have much glycogen left in your legs or liver. Your body has played athlete since dawn, and you’ve succeeded in not crashing (well, there was that rock that reached up and grabbed my foot a few minutes back, but that’s not the kind of out-of-fuel crashing I fear most).
I have always struggled with anxiety, maybe more than most people do, and as soon as the fear of falling was behind me a new anxiety hit: Where was my crew? I’d expected to see my wife Sharon and daughter Elizabeth in the crowd at the bottom of the descent, so I’d passed up the aid tables there in favor of my own electrolyte drink, which Sharon would have ready (I didn’t trust the commercial ones, which contained refined sugars and chemicals). But then suddenly I found myself back in the woods on the link trail to the towpath without having seen her—and with my bottle still empty. How stupid was that? There was another place where spectators gathered at the end of this next half-mile, though. Maybe . . . and then, there they were. I refilled my bottle and gave Sharon a kiss. It was just a few seconds, but a kiss from my wife, and the realization that I really couldn’t run this race without her support, was one of those moments on which the long hours of the race rested. The stop took less than a minute, but seemed to give me as much lift as a half-hour’s worth of glycogen. I gave her and Elizabeth an appreciative smile and headed back into the race. And then almost immediately, I was hit by another anxiety: I’d forgotten to ask about the competition. Had they seen any other guys my age go by ahead of me?
But then, of course, how would they know? At the gym in Boonsboro, before the start, there had been a hundred guys who looked like they might be in their sixties—balding, gray beards, creased faces. A lot looked like the pictures I’d seen of nineteenth-century prospectors or trappers, and not at all like the too-well-fed, smooth-faced politicians and celebrities our age that you’d see on TV. And the older guys at the start looked as fit as the young ones, just more weathered or craggy. I’d seen Frank Probst and a few others I could identify from races I’d run over the years. But most of the older guys I didn’t recognize. I knew from the entry list that they were from all over the country. No way could Sharon know if I’m the first one through here or not. In any case, I needed to shrug off my anxiety and my competitiveness; at just sixteen miles into a fifty-mile race, it was bad medicine.
At the little open area where Sharon and Elizabeth were waiting, a cracked asphalt road comes to a dead end at the old Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad track that runs along the canal, with the Potomac River visible just beyond. This is Keep Tryst Road, which we had scouted yesterday with the car. Maybe in part because of its name, it reminded me of other dead-end roads I’d come across in my past life, where teenagers would park on summer nights and make out. We called them “lovers’ lanes.” Even before I was a teen, I knew of a few such roads. In those days my family didn’t have TV, and nobody had video games or other virtual worlds. Our world was the outdoors, which offered adventure aplenty. The first time I ever witnessed a sex act was not in an X-rated movie or video, but peering through the window of a car I came across one afternoon at the end of my street in Berkeley Heights, which at that time dead-ended in the woods. I was probably eight (a fairly innocent age in those days), and it felt as if I’d stumbled on something profoundly forbidden.
I would eventually learn, as I grew older, that the “forbidden” in my country—and probably in most countries—is almost synonymous with the unknown or the poorly understood. Before the journeys of Leif Eriksson and Christopher Columbus, the unknown regions of the Atlantic Ocean were, for Euro
pean seafarers, a forbidden realm. Worldwide, people of different cultures shared a nearly universal abhorrence or fear of exploration that went too far—whether by a Galileo probing the solar system in violation of church dogma or a young couple exploring new mysteries in a car, out of their elders’ sight. One of the fundamental appeals of an ultra is that it is a venture into the unknown. Can you withstand having your heart race not just for the twenty seconds of an exciting action-movie chase, but for eight straight hours? When you sign up for an ultra (or any long-distance footrace, now), you sign a legal waiver of any claims should anything go wrong. If a train was approaching as you reached the track here, and you rushed to beat it and got killed, it was your choice.
I had felt a bit of unwanted tension on that half-mile link trail from Weverton, because the railroad here is still active, and if a train comes along, you have no choice but to stop and wait. In a foot race, having to stop and wait feels awful, like having a really good dream interrupted, and if you’re trying to run for a record, it feels like disaster. The company that owns the trains, CSX, is a corporate giant too big even to recognize the existence of something like a trail race, say nothing of adjust its schedule to let the race cross its track unimpeded once a year. Mike Spinnler, the race director, had asked, but to CSX his request had apparently been like asking American Airlines to please not fly any planes over suburban Maryland on Saturday afternoon because you’re having a pool party. They declined, and when Spinnler then asked if they could at least tell him just when the train would go through on the third Saturday of November each year, so he could alert the runners, he apparently didn’t get an answer to that either. (Years later, they would relent.) I’d heard that some years a train would pass Keep Tryst Road at a point when maybe the first two hundred runners had crossed the tracks and the next hundred would have to stop and cool their heels. For runners chasing age-group records, it was a disaster (what if the guy you have to beat barely makes it across just before the train, and you’re fifty feet behind him, catching up, and have to stop? Or what if you’ve run your heart out building a ten-minute lead over a rival, and he runs at a more relaxed pace and catches you standing there just as the last box car crawls past?) And these trains didn’t just take a minute or two to go by; they were long-haul freight trains moving at around eight miles an hour and sometimes pulling a hundred cars.
One reason the trains here moved so slowly, I’d found, is that the track goes through a narrow, curving tunnel that was cut through the rock along the Maryland shore of the Potomac for the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Railroad in the 1870s. In my recent cogitations about the history of technology, I’d stumbled on an unlikely connection with this very railroad. One of the characters I most vividly recalled from my boyhood was the folksong hero John Henry, who wielded his rock pick in a race with the new jackhammer that had been brought to the rock-breaking business by the Industrial Revolution. I’ve never been a Luddite, but I liked the spirit of John Henry—his unwillingness to let his strength be usurped by a machine. I didn’t know< where John Henry was supposed to have done his feat—until I came I across an intriguing bit of research. Scott Nelson, an associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary, found evidence that after the end of the Civil War an inmate in a Virginia prison named John William Henry had been rented out by his warden to work on the C&O railway, and it was this John Henry who was the basis of the legend. What particularly struck me, in view of what I’d been thinking about the lethal nature of an American economy in which technologies were rapidly supplanting our own bodies and minds, was what Nelson had written about the way the workers who dug those tunnels endured such punishing work: They “managed their labor by setting a stint, or pace, for it. Men who violated the stint were shunned.”1 The workers had a song that told “what happened to men who worked too fast: their entrails fell to the ground. You sang the song slowly, you worked slowly, you guarded your life, or you died.”2
Luckily, this year, no train was in sight as I reached Keep Tryst; I quickly crossed the track and came to the T at the famous C&O Canal Towpath—a flat gravel-and-dirt path that runs parallel to the canal along the Maryland bank of the Potomac River for 184 miles from Washington, DC, to Cumberland, used by mules pulling the canal barges in the nineteenth century. At the T—a momentous intersection for any runner in this race, but especially for me—I paused. Here I would turn right, but first I had to take a thoughtful look left.
The war between North and South, despite the fact that its ghosts were all around us here, seemed a faint schoolbook memory. I had a personal link to that war, though, and it was hard to pass this intersection without thinking of it. A few miles south across the river was the village of Waterford, Virginia, a Quaker town that proved to be a virtual no-man’s-land during the war. In the 1860s, the town’s postmaster, John Dutton, had three daughters who were unusually independent for those times; they published a fiercely pro-Union newspaper, the Waterford News, that lectured on the evil of slavery, and they distributed copies to both sides. The sisters, who were twenty-six, twenty-four, and nineteen years old when the war came to their town, also had the chutzpa to declare in their paper that Waterford was a war-free zone—a century before Berkeley!—and that any soldiers of either side entering their town would be required to check their weapons. I loved it! That didn’t exactly work out, however, and the rebels did considerable damage to the town. Given Waterford’s proximity to the bloody battles of Manassas and Bull Run, and the girls’ anti-Confederate provocations, the Duttons were fortunate not to have their house burned down (it’s still there, in good shape). After the war, the youngest sister, Lida, married a Union cavalry officer, John Hutchinson, who then became a Quaker himself. Their great-grandchild, Alice Hutchinson, turned out to be my long-distance-swimming, bicycle-riding, organic-gardening mother.
Also to the left somewhere was the spot where Bobby Kennedy had finished his own fifty-mile hike on a wintry day four decades ago—one of the first of the thousands of Americans who responded to his brother’s challenge to the Marines. That unexpected response, not just of Marines but of civilian men, women, and kids all over the country—then dubbed the great “fifty-mile craze” of 1962—had begun its gestation when JFK wrote his “Soft American” article, arguing that a high level of physical fitness was essential to the kind of intellectual strength and civil resilience the country now needed, in what was proving to be an era of unprecedented dangers.
In the winter of 1962−63, John Kennedy came across an executive order that was written half a century earlier by another president who valued physical vigor and had been similarly concerned. In 1908, Teddy Roosevelt declared that all US Marines should be able to prove their fitness by walking fifty miles in three days, doing the last half-mile by alternating two hundred yards of double-time marching and thirty seconds of rest, then sprinting the final two hundred yards. The records showed that some of TR’s officers had done the distance in one day, and Kennedy wondered whether the Marines of 1963 were as fit as those of 1908.
On February 5, 1963, the White House put out a press release about the Roosevelt order, noting that the president had suggested to General Shoup that he find out how well his Marines could do, compared with Teddy Roosevelt’s Marines. A group of officers was called up to do the test. However, JFK’s brother, Bobby, who was the nation’s attorney general, decided he was going to do it too, and wasn’t going to wait for the Marines. That Sunday, Bobby set out on his hike. The weather was freezing, the towpath was covered with slush, and one by one the aides all dropped out. As the last one quit at mile thirty-five, Bobby commented to him, “You’re lucky your brother isn’t president of the United States.” Kennedy reached fifty miles in 17 hours, 50 minutes.
Within days after Bobby Kennedy completed his hike (there’s a photo of him looking uncharacteristically exhausted and having his feet massaged by his wife, Ethel), thousands of civilians likewise responded to the challenge intended for Marine officers. A fifteen-yea
r-old, Paul Kiczek, did the distance and decades later revisited the experience in an Internet search of 1963 newspaper stories about the hikes. He found that a New Jersey paper, The Daily Record, reported on February 15, 1963, that a twenty-four-year-old policeman and ex-Marine, Francis Wulff, had done the feat on the spur of the moment. “I read about some army officers shooting off their mouths about the Marines and I decided to give it a try,” Wulff told the reporter.3 On February 16, the same paper reported that a group of eight teenagers from Boonton, New Jersey, had set out in subfreezing weather, and three had gone the distance. One of them, seventeen-year-old Ken Middleton, remarkably finished the fifty miles in under twelve hours—which meant he had to have run a good part of the distance. On February 22, the paper reported that The Mansion House Tavern, in Boonton, had announced a competition, a “Fifty-Mile Endurance Walk” to take place on March 10, with a $25 Savings Bond for the winner and free draft beer for everyone who finished. Meanwhile, in Marin County, California, four hundred high school students set out to do the fifty miles, presumably even without the incentive of free beer, and ninety-seven of them finished.
Needless to say, not everyone who tried the fifty miles shared Bobby Kennedy’s mojo. JFK’s overweight press secretary, Pierre Salinger, hiked six miles and called it a day, commenting, “I may be plucky, but I’m not stupid.” He told reporters that if he were to attempt fifty miles, the result would be “disastrous.”4 In Butler, New Jersey (again, from The Daily Record), two high schoolers who had neglected to get their parents’ permission to be out past the town’s curfew got stopped by police after just three miles. And in Washington, DC, William Kendall, an aide to Republican Congressman Peter Frelinghuysen Jr. walked just five miles, which he apparently considered quite enough to prove that Republicans, unlike impulsive Democrats, walk “for a purpose.” (Maybe this was the origin of the proliferation of AIDS walks, breast-cancer walks, and other fund-raisers that helped to deflect social costs from taxpayers half a century later.) Kendall explained, “We did not set some hopelessly unattainable goal such as Pierre Salinger did. We had an objective . . . whereas the Democrats strike out aimlessly with no objective. When they get worn out, somebody picks them up in a truck.”5
