by Ed Ayres
Across the country, the fifty-mile fad was met with quick scorn and skepticism from medical and health experts. From the American Medical Association: “People can endanger themselves. We get distressed when people go out and strain themselves.”6
From the National Recreation Association: “The 50-mile hike verges on insanity.”7
From the Soviet Union’s Olympic track coach: “So a man walks 50 miles in one day—what of it? Tomorrow he catches a taxicab again to go four blocks.”8
And from folk singer Phil Ochs, a sardonic song that poked seriocomic fun at an American population he depicted as so chair- or couch-bound that a lot of people never even got their feet on the ground. Unlike the don’t-strain-your-heart American Medical Association, or the enjoy-the-view-from-your-Airstream National Recreation Association, Ochs—who called his song “Fifty-Mile Hike”—took delight in suggesting that it was high time for people to “get in step” with the Kennedy challenge.
So what was Kennedy thinking? Did he have second thoughts about the assertion he’d made in his “Soft American” article, that the need was not necessarily to train our youth to be warriors, as the Spartans did, but to achieve something more fundamental to a nation’s long-term survival? One clue may be that, unlike some of the politicians who would succeed him, Kennedy had an abiding interest in military history and in the rises and falls of empires. He probably wasn’t just thinking about the physical endurance of the Marines, but about a broader set of concerns: the roles of persistence as well as power, of patience as a reality check to sudden urgency, and of the long view as an essential factor in planning, especially in response to emergencies. I wonder if he sensed, even before its outlines were clear, that the world was headed toward a global emergency even more all-encompassing—and fateful—than that of the global war that had ended a few years earlier. Scientists had not yet clearly foreseen the specter of catastrophic climate change, and the threats of ecological failure, resource wars, peak oil, and Malthusian outcomes were then only faint shadows on the horizon. Whatever JFK had in mind, he never got to fully explain it in a thoughtful memoir, or even in policy discussions, given his life’s abrupt end the following year. But his call was taken to heart by more than the just the Marines.
If this was in fact near the spot where Bobby Kennedy had finished his walk, it was also the juncture where now, four decades later, several contingents of Marines and a whole army of civilians—people who had chosen to take what Robert Frost had called the road “less traveled by”—would once again carry on. Or, were already doing so. As I made the turn to the right, I could see a fairly long distance up the path toward Harpers Ferry, and I couldn’t see any Marines coming back to me. I felt an urge to pick up the pace but was also beginning to feel some fatigue. Conflicting internal signals vied for attention. Away from the noise of Weverton and Keep Tryst, I was once again aware of that tension between the peaceful surroundings and the violent secrets they held. Now that tension was back at the front of my consciousness, if only because my outsized fear of rocks had been temporarily pushed aside.
6
Towpath
Learning from Quarterbacks: The Slower-Is-Faster Phenomenon
Going from knee-busting single-track trail to a wide, flat, lightly graveled turf was a relief. I figured I was still ahead of about 850 of the runners, and now I could lengthen my stride without fear of falling. And because the towpath was about ten feet wide, there was no problem with passing—no need to call out “passing on your left,” then hope you didn’t fall on your face as you veered off the edge of the trail into a quick detour over a minefield of rocks hidden under undisturbed leaves.
It was turning out to be a beautiful day, with bright sunlight sparkling on the river, which I could glimpse through the trees a couple of stones’ throws to the left. Now and then, I passed a couple of Saturday bicyclists or walkers, and because they could see only one or two runners at a time—we were now stretched out for miles—they probably had no idea they were sharing the path with the largest ultrarun in the country. Sometimes large events go unrecognized, if only because our vision is so focused on what’s immediately around us that we are unaware of the bigger picture. I recalled the evening in 1990 when the mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, put on a banquet at a fancy midtown hotel to mark the twentieth anniversary of the first New York Marathon, and some of us original participants were invited up to the podium to share a few memories. We particularly recalled that most of the people we ran past in Central Park apparently had no idea there was a race going on. One of the guys recounted how he’d passed what he thought was an aid station and grabbed a piece of fruit, and then was startled to find himself being chased by a shouting fruit vendor. And of course, the runner grabbing the fruit had been as focused on the race as the people he passed were unaware of it. To see everything that’s happening around you is not easy.
Apparently a lot of long-distance runners remember incidents like that. Clarence DeMar, after winning his seventh Boston Marathon, recalled that a man who saw him running down the road one day in the 1920s took pity on him (maybe thinking he looked like a guy running in his underwear, who might be in some kind of trouble) and tried to give him a dime so he could at least afford to ride home on the trolley.
We runners regard marathons as very big events, but recalling those stories reminded me, with amusement and pain, of how sometimes even really big events, like the changing of the earth’s climate, go unnoticed. If a ninety-year-old visitor to Glacier National Park were to comment that all the big glaciers he’d seen there as a boy were now less than half the size they’d been when he was young, his grandchildren might doubt his memory—or he might even doubt it himself. We mortals forget so easily, because we’re trapped in the moment of our own time. But as I’d been discovering, at least since my first introduction to the evolutionary scientists’ persistence-hunting theory of human origins, endurance running can put us in closer touch with our long-term past—and, maybe by extension, even with our long-term future. The key is to escape from that mental box of our own frantic moment.
I was jerked from my reverie by the sight of a young Marine about fifty yards ahead of me suddenly lurching off the path and throwing his arms around a big beech tree, dry heaving. I felt for him; I’ve done my share of dry heaving in races, and it’s wretched. I had hoped some of the Marines would come back to me, but not this way. I didn’t say anything encouraging to him as I passed and would later hate myself for my silence. Maybe he’d been too aggressive in the early going, but that’s something an athlete can learn only through hard experience.
That lesson is hard because it’s not just a matter of pacing. It’s also a matter of calming the turbulence in our heads and chests, which throws us out of rhythm, poisons our blood, and burns energy too fast. The causes of that turbulence are omnipresent in today’s world, and unless you’re a Buddhist monk or a still-practicing Quaker, you can’t avoid them. Ironically, I thought, one of the most pervasive causes was that everything in our culture seemed to have turned into a race—a race to invent, bring to market, build wealth. A race to win, in a culture where if you don’t win, you lose. And here I was in another race. I knew I wasn’t the only runner out here who was feeling too much tension. But then again, one of the reasons a lot of us were runners was to blow off stress.
Of course, our tension had heightened since September 11th, but like the wisdom of George Sheehan’s “listen to your body,” the weight of that tension was a thing that everyone acknowledged but few examined very closely—possibly because we were resigned to it. We might be outraged about the terrorist attacks, but we were resigned to the pervasive stress that had long predated those attacks. Even before the planes struck that morning, almost no American questioned it: If you wanted to succeed, or even just survive, you had to move fast. Next year, it would have to be faster. And after that?
My brother Bob’s wife, Leslie, worked as a programmer on the giant Univac 1 supercomputer in the ear
ly 1960s, and it was mind-boggling to everyone how fast the Univac could do a thousand or even a million calculations. One day, not long before this race, I asked Leslie how long it would take that car-sized machine to do a trillion calculations. She recalled the machine’s speed, then we figured that if it had been run day and night, and kept from overheating, a trillion calculations would have taken about fifteen years. Yet, the day would come when Intel Corporation would unveil a chip the size of a fingernail that would do a trillion calculations in one second. The acceleration was a tsunami that engulfed every aspect of our life, so how could anyone fight it? Or, for that matter, how could anyone not celebrate it? So, while we agreed that we were hopelessly stressed out, this new power to do everything faster was irresistibly seductive.
Our parents’ and grandparents’ generations believed that the rewards of life come from years of hard work, but we were conditioned—by commercial advertising and the promises of politicians—to want those rewards now: the winning lottery ticket, the lawsuit award, the casino jackpot, the racetrack win, the guy from that “you may already have won” contest coming to our door with a check for ten million dollars—and, soon, the clever day trade, the lucrative initial public offering, the merger, the flipped house, the illicit Nigerian fortune. We’d become a nation of impatient two-year-olds! Horatio Alger was dead; Bill Gates was king. And then seduction morphed into addiction: We were addicted to ever greater speeds and to the enormous and ever-increasing power necessary to keep up.
That was what almost everyone understood and acknowledged, and almost no one resisted. It was a primrose path. But the picture I’d gotten from my work with Ted Taylor, not so long after the jolting inception of this acceleration at Hiroshima, and now from my work at Worldwatch, was different. And what I understood as an endurance runner was different—in a way that provoked not just rumination in my head, but tension in my shoulders and turmoil in my gut.
I passed the first of the twenty-six concrete mile posts I’d see along the left edge of the towpath between here and Dam Number 4. This one had a big “59” painted into indented numerals, that being the number of miles this was from the starting point of the towpath in Washington, where the C&O Canal coming from the west and Rock Creek from the north both emptied into the Potomac—at the “water gate” for which a nearby hotel of now notorious repute was named. The next post would be number 60, which would be seventeen miles into the race. The dam, a little under four hours from now if all went well, would be about half a mile past post 84.
What I learned from Ted Taylor was a brutally simple reality, but one to which most people either had not yet been exposed or just could not believe: that we no longer had control of the technologies we had created. I love movies but thought it intriguing how wrong the sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey had been. This was 2001, after all—yet what had actually happened by now was far from what the director Stanley Kubrick had envisioned. At the same time, the movie was prescient in ways he probably never imagined. Since the end of Kennedy’s Apollo program and the canceling of the Orion Nuclear Propulsion program (a plan to build the next generation of spaceships powered by controlled nuclear detonations, which Taylor had been chosen to head, but which was later ruled to be in violation of the 1963 treaty banning nuclear detonations in outer space), the US manned space travel program had halted. And Hal, the famous Univac-sized usurper of human volition, had not appeared and probably never would. We humans are still the bosses of our technologies, still fully responsible for any unintended consequences of their use. Those consequences weren’t Hal’s doing, but our own.
A spectral figure appeared in my peripheral vision. It was Frank Probst, my erstwhile age-group rival, slowly passing me on the right. This year we were in different age divisions, as he was still fifty-seven, but I didn’t like being passed by him—especially the way he looked now. Frank is tall and looks a lot like the actor Ed Harris, but today his head was tilted to the side like the top of a broken corn stalk bent over by a strong wind. Yet, the weather this morning, at least so far, was as innocent as it had seemed that morning when he was nearly obliterated by the plane that hit the Pentagon. He glanced at me as he pulled even and mumbled something about not having completely recovered from . . . and then he was past me, looking awful with his oddly cocked head, but nonetheless leaving me behind. I was too tense.
In the 1970s I realized that it wasn’t just the nuclear industry that was out of control—and causing a tension in me that even now, after all these years and all my experience as a runner, I still had trouble fighting off. Ted Taylor wasn’t working alone but had formed a partnership with my brother Bob and a group of research assistants who were profoundly concerned about the human future; they were part of a new breed known as futurists. They called their group International Research & Technology (IR&T), opened an office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, and wrote a mission statement inspired by the work of Rachel Carson and others who grasped the dangers of technological hubris. Hiroshima had been not only horrifying but—to many—secretly thrilling, because it ended the war in a flash. After the agonizing duration of campaigns like the month-long ordeal at Iwo Jima, the one-second defeat of Japan had been a revelation. Our destiny, most Americans would assume henceforth, was to keep expanding power and speed in all things.
The futurists were running scared, as were the environmental scientists I would work with years later at the Worldwatch Institute. The consensus of these scientists was that, in sheer magnitude, the coming impacts of global warming, most traumatically in the intensification of storm surges on coastal cities, could be to Hiroshima what Hiroshima had been to a gunshot. By now, global warming was widely acknowledged by climate scientists to be unstoppable. It could be mitigated—slowed—if the governments of the world grasped its urgency, but the US and other key governments owed their elections to entrenched interests that didn’t want to see that happen. Whatever urgency the environmental and climate scientists felt, I felt too—maybe even more so because I felt helpless to help them. In America, power and speed had become a virtual religion, impervious to arguments about unintended consequences. The proof of this new faith’s hegemony was that it did not bother to challenge or compete with any established religions—it simply swallowed them without their knowing it. Only the Amish, and perhaps a few Quakers and Buddhists and Unitarian Universalists, seemed to have any serious reservations.
As the race continued, I was now approaching an old iron trestle where the railroad left the Maryland embankment and crossed the river. I glanced to the right, across the canal—long stretches of it now dried up and overgrown by weeds and saplings. I was reminded of what I’d learned about the root causes of our civilizational acceleration. Both the canal and the railroad had begun construction the same year, 1828, both built to haul coal for the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Coal, which enormously escalated the power of humans to dig, lift, pump, haul, smelt, forge, illuminate, communicate, and make tools, was the beginning. It was joined a few decades later by its fossil-fuel cousin, oil, the first commercial oil well having been drilled a day’s carriage ride north of here, in Titusville, Pennsylvania. But while coal was dirtier and more polluting (possibly the most Brobdingnagian oxymoron of the entire modern era is the advertising slogan “clean coal”), it has remained the godfather of fossil fuels to this day. The C&O Railroad won the race for transportation dominance along the Potomac corridor because it was powered by coal, while the canal’s barges were powered only by mules.
The difference was big enough to be ultimately world-breaking—and fairly revealing about why I was here, in this spot, at this moment. Looking across at that trestle, I could hear myself paraphrasing the Humphrey Bogart character Rick in Casablanca: Of all the fateful forks in the road of the human journey, in all the millennia, why here, why now? This trestle wasn’t any recognized monument of that journey—not an Acropolis or Western Wall, or even a Kitty Hawk or Cape Canaveral. But it was the very spot where two fa
tefully different conceptions of what I can only call “earthly metabolism”—the energy-use fundamental to all life—had parted ways. Off to the left had gone the railroad, ten times as fast as the mule but burning fuel at a hundred thousand times the rate that the mule was. Straight ahead had been the path of the mule. The mule ate no more in a year than an amount of oats or hay that could be grown in a year on that one mule’s share of the earth. The train had won the race, but at what might well be apocalyptic cost.
How so? The Carboniferous period, which produced that coal, lasted sixty million years, and if our civilization should end up consuming (let’s say) about half of the planet’s fossil energy over a span of three centuries (nineteenth through twenty-first), before it’s either too uneconomical or too dangerous to extract more, we will have used one hundred thousand years’ worth of photosynthetic production for each year we lived during those three centuries. It struck me that the real forbidden fruit, when humans began their transition from Eden to the kind of knowledge that corrupts, was not an apple but a lump of coal.
So, the metabolic parting of ways represented by this trestle wasn’t just unsustainable; it marked a moment in evolutionary history that, if your whole life took place within it, might have seemed “normal” even though inside that evolutionary moment the speed of events was escalating astronomically. The story of the Intel chip was being replicated in every area of life—in the production of energy to do the work our bodies had evolved to do, and in the production of products we don’t really need.
