The Longest Race

by Ed Ayres

  As a runner, I now understood that, in metabolic terms, civilization had gone into a dead sprint. What was oxygen debt for a human runner was resource depletion for the human economy. What could be a run of no more than one or two minutes before a gasping, hands-on-knees halt for a sprinter, versus many hours for an endurance runner, was equivalent to a civilizational run of a few decades, versus centuries or millennia to come. We were living in a sprint economy. At first, I thought of it as an intriguing parallel; later, I grasped that it was more than that.

  One of the first scientists to see a significant parallel between the human body and the industrial economy was Henry A. Bent, a professor of physical chemistry at North Carolina State University, best known for his landmark 1971 article in the journal Chemistry, “Haste Makes Waste: Pollution and Entropy.” In 1978, Bent wrote:

  Exhaustion of muscle cells’ high-energy phosphate reserves by strenuous exercise, like exhaustion of a planet’s oil reserves by fast living, requires (after 20 seconds or so for the human body) a further decrease in the system’s power output.1

  Bent wrote this just a few years after the US lower forty-eight reached peak oil production in 1973 (it has been in steady decline ever since), triggering intense discussion among energy experts about how long it would be before we reached the inevitable global peak. Some were forecasting that it would be reached around 2012, although we’d then need several more years of data before we’d know for sure that the peak had in fact been passed. And some believed that once that confirmation came, if alternative energy was not yet fully ready to take over from oil, global chaos would ensue.

  So, now I knew that when the railroad had split off from the canal and crossed the river, right here at this trestle, it wasn’t only the new king of American industry that had taken a road never before traveled. The train was an early leader of a global race that, at its current pace of consumption and waste, couldn’t possibly be sustained. It was like that clueless guy who sprinted the first half-mile of the Boston Marathon only to crash minutes later. And meanwhile, it was generating turmoil in anyone who sensed what was happening—or at least in me.

  High-level athletes have found a way of conjuring calm in the storm, and when they apply it they can sometimes achieve extraordinary, even astonishing, performances. It is a skill they describe as “slowing the game.”

  In the years leading up to the 2001 JFK, I started to notice a significant link between the time perception of an endurance athlete and that of a sustainable civilization: If you want to go as fast as you can, don’t rush! It’s a genuine paradox, and on a basic, athletic level coaches explain it as pacing. In physiological terms, there’s no mystery: If you go too fast, metabolic waste products can pile up in your legs and lungs and force you to a halt. Or you can use up your glycogen before you reach the finish and be forced to rely on frustratingly slow-burning fat—or, worse (if you are stubborn enough to keep going) be forced into cannibalizing the protein in your leg muscles. Of course, in an athletic event lasting only an hour or two, you can also go too slow and end up realizing that you still have energy left. (A football or soccer coach, after witnessing a great performance, will sometimes talk approvingly about how an athlete “left it all on the field.”) The goal is to find that sweet spot between exhausting your fuel too soon and having something left. In an ultra lasting many hours, however, there’s unlikely to be anything left, other than excruciatingly slow-burning fat. The main risk is running out of usable energy too soon.

  On another level, however, the don’t-rush paradox can be hard to grasp and harness. Experienced athletes know not only to seek the physiological sweet spot but to seek the somewhat more elusive condition in which all systems are working in complete physical and emotional harmony—where everything feels right. In sports talk, it’s the “zone.” It happens, for example, when two evenly matched basketball teams meet and one of them goes on a run of eighteen points during which the other team scores zero. “We were in the zone,” say the guys who did the run and then won. Asked to explain what happens to allow that, the athletes often speak of everything “slowing down.”

  By getting their mental and physical systems into synch, athletes heighten the capacity of their senses to seize the moment and own it. If you’re a baseball player at bat watching a fastball approach at ninety-seven miles per hour, or a football quarterback trying to track your receivers amidst the mayhem of colliding bodies, you need to slow the scene perceptually in order to take control of it. If you’re a cop on the side of the road and a driver speeds past, the driver will be a blur, but if you pursue and pull alongside, matching your speed to his, you’ll see him almost as clearly as in a still photo. For the athlete, meshing mental perception with the physical scene unfolding is like matching the cop’s car to that of the speeder—speeding up the perception to slow down the scene. A guide for high-level quarterbacks at the Alamo City Quarterback Camp in Texas explains: “As the quarterback gets more and more reps [practice repetitions], the picture he sees will become clearer and clearer . . . and the opponent’s movement seems to slow down while the quarterback’s speeds up.”2 Athletes and coaches in a wide range of sports have alluded to this paradox:

  “He is at the point in this game that the game has slowed down for him.”

  —Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy, referring to quarterback Aaron Rodgers after Rodgers led the Packers to victory in the 2011 Super Bowl3

  “[English soccer star] George Best and former basketball player Michael Jordan are among those to have remarked on how time seemed to slow down when they were ‘in the zone.’”

  —Steve Taylor, author of Making Time4

  “Great athletes . . . say the game ‘slows down’ for them, particularly at critical moments. That’s why a baseball player or tennis player can read the spin of a baseball or tennis ball when it looks like a blur to the rest of us. . . . The fastest way to your goal isn’t always fast.”

  —Roy S. Johnson, Editor-in-Chief, Men’s Fitness5

  For me, in a slow-twitch event that didn’t demand lightning reflexes (except maybe when I was running downhill over rocks), the need wasn’t so much to slow down a blur of motion around me as to slow down the commotion inside. I am as prone to anxiety as I am to falling, and too often in my competitive life I’ve found myself racing another runner as if we were in the last mile instead of in the middle of the race with many miles yet to go. Now, in my anxiety, I was running too turbulently within myself, like the industries of the sprint economy in my larger world. And just as that larger world can move toward a far longer-thriving existence if it can adopt more of the attitudes of slow food, meditation, carefully considered decisions, and what Buddhists call mindful living, I would ultimately run this race faster if I could slow down!

  7

  Antietam Aqueduct

  Redemption: A Recovering Strength for the Human Runner—and for the Human Race

  Anyone who dreams of one day running the JFK should be cautioned about the weather. And with climate scientists now preparing us for a time of intensified weather events, it’s true of any extended outdoor adventure. If a Santa Ana wind in Southern California could flip eighteen-wheelers over on their sides, as was happening more often now, you can imagine what it might do to a long-distance bicycle race like the popular Tour de California. Cross-country skiers have to be alert to anomalous snow-melt, hikers to high-water stream crossings, farmers and gardeners to untimely budding in mid-winter. In the years to come, the weather will be more and more in our face.

  The JFK 50 Mile, though, had a weather history that predated our awareness of human-caused climate disruption. The first race was held on March 30, 1963, eight months before JFK’s assassination. The next twelve runs were also held in the spring, but spring weather in the western Maryland hills can be brutal. The 1974 race was hit by a late-winter storm so devastating that a majority of the entrants were unable to finish, knocked out by hypothermia, frostbite, the pleadings of frozen support crew
s, and existential questioning about what in the world they were doing there.

  Race organizers subsequently moved the race to November, but the tradeoff was that November brings a chill wind down the Potomac, and when you emerge from the relatively sheltering forest of the Appalachian Trail at Weverton and start up the towpath, more often than not you’ll hit a cold headwind. It might happen the moment you make the right turn at Keep Tryst and then pound you for the whole twenty-six miles to Dam Number 4, or it might just smack you with gusts.

  This time around, the weather was kind. Given my hope of breaking the age-division record, I felt lucky. There’d been no noticeable headwind as I turned onto the towpath. Somewhere north of Harpers Ferry, though, I came around a long bend—I think they call it Dargan Bend—and the wind was suddenly there like a cold hand pushing against my chest. I was trying to run north; the wind wanted to push me south. What I felt was in no sense a complaint—difficult wind comes with the territory, and many ultrarunners revel in difficulty. The more impossible the conditions, the more they love the challenge. But it threw an elemental new anxiety into my run.

  It’s a curious thing, how the weather outside our skins can so powerfully evoke our emotions. In the literature of the human journey, weather is an omnipresent metaphor, a periodic reminder of how absolutely linked we are to our world. The physical tension of running against the wind was almost literally a slap in the face; it attuned me to other, deeper, tensions I was now feeling. It struck me that a big part of the push-and-pull this course had on me was the sense of unresolved questions it confronted me with—and they weren’t trivial questions, but true matters of life and death.

  First, there was the lingering presence of a war that had been fought all along this course over grievances that had never been entirely resolved, even by now, two or three generations later; yet, the space occupied by that haunting presence was simultaneously occupied by crowds of friendly, life-loving descendants from both sides. I knew perfectly well that the conflicting economic and social views that had torn the country in the 1860s still tore at us now—the details different, but the divisions still present. In my own lifetime, I’d seen the manifestations—in the civil-rights conflicts that raged during my college years, a century after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and punctuated by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in that tumultuous year of 1968. It was the year when I fled from teaching to run road races in the Bronx and Yonkers and study exercise physiology at Columbia—the year I found myself wondering how we could know so much about the body and so little about our own minds. I’d seen the rifts again in the Vietnam War protests . . . and then, in just the past nine weeks, in the tense debate about whether the nation’s response to 9/11 should properly be outright revenge or something that might require a tougher, less impulsive, and more far-seeing stance.

  Just a few miles up the towpath, I would come to Antietam, where the contradiction in the air would be most acute. Antietam Battlefield was the site of the bloodiest single day in the military history of our country, but when I got there a big crowd of friends and spectators in a festive mood would welcome me. I knew, from what I’d experienced at Weverton, that what I passed through at Antietam would be nothing less than a celebration of life at its very best, as we were living it right now, by descendants not only of the armies that had fought there, but also of the more ancient humans who’d gone out on hunting excursions together—hunting game and not other humans. As far as I knew, no primates or other mammals in their natural state mounted massive warfare against their own species.

  Up ahead, I could still see Frank Probst, his head askew like a fire hydrant that had been hit by a truck. I had always been a good judge of running form, and if I hadn’t known Frank’s running as well as I did, I’d have sworn he was in trouble and was coming back to me. But I knew, from past encounters, that Frank would be a lot harder to catch than he looked. I recalled, with chagrin, the time a few years ago when we had done the Bull Run Run, a fifty miler in northern Virginia, and around halfway through the race I spotted Frank up ahead of me looking very much like an old man on his last legs. I passed him easily, going up a short hill, and said something friendly to him as I went by. A couple of hours later, I hit the wall, stopped at an aid station exhausted, and sat down to gather myself for the final ten miles. As I sat there, old Frank came staggering by, still looking like he was on his last legs. After a minute or two I got to my feet and went after him, but never caught up. This time, I knew better. He might look slow, but this was a guy who nine weeks ago had dodged a 757.

  Frank Probst also represented an enigma that had been a part of my fascination with this race as long as I’d known of it—the relationship between war and sport. Both were about physical competition—about striving for dominance or victory. At least historically, both had been about men trained to defeat other men by means of superior physical fitness and martial skill. I wondered if one of the roots of JFK’s vision of a strong nation—though he publicly denied it—really had been the model of ancient Sparta, which trained its young men to be warriors from boyhood. In modern America, sports coaches often employed the language and skills of military officers or drill sergeants. Nazi bombing raids on London were called the Blitz, and so are football tacklers’ attacks on a quarterback. Both warriors and athletes, at least in modern spectator sports, put great emphasis on the wielding of power and speed to prevail.

  And yet, for all these similarities, the differences between sport and war were as large as life and death—and in my mind were about life and death. How could these two realms, each engaging millions of men and women with intense dedication, be so closely allied and yet so opposite in their effects? That question added another dimension to my competition with Probst. Frank was the old soldier in running shoes. I was the old Quaker in running shoes. The question still remained: What was the connection? It must have been another of those tensions kicked up by the cold wind off the Potomac. In a couple of miles, we’d reach that hallowed place, and for the spectators there—and for Frank and me as well—it would be only a day of sport, with no trace of the rage that had once swept across the land.

  A possible explanation for the strange connection between sport and war was suggested by the Claremont College anthropologist Paul Shepard, who noted that while hominid hunters benefited from cooperation within the hunting party, they also survived and evolved through competition with other groups. If our species was going to win out over the lions and hyenas in the long run, we had to have not only that critical advantage in our evolving ability to envision dinner around a bend, but the shorter-term advantage of using that ability in competition with our fellow hominids. Competitiveness in the Darwinian sense had to be very much in our blood as we moved from hanging out around the fruits and nuts to chasing the mammoth. But with the advent of civilization, wrote Shepard, some of that inborn drive to prevail in the hunt may have been frustrated and redirected in ways that have had tragic consequences.

  Shepard surmised that the advent of agriculture, which allowed one man to produce enough food for ten or twenty, meant that most men no longer had to hunt, or—in a world of fixed settlements and guarded territories—even could hunt. Yet the hunting instincts continued to be activated by our DNA as generations of boys became men. Shepard theorized that that instinct, stymied by a lack of actual hunting opportunity (we now had domesticated cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, and pigs we could kill without chasing), was transmogrified into an appetite for hunting other men—transforming us from hunters to warriors.

  Shepard’s discussion of the agricultural revolution echoed much of what I learned from Lester Brown at Worldwatch—and then heard further articulated by virtually all of the pioneers of the environmental movement. Agriculture—the domestication of plants and animals—had made it possible for people to live in permanent settlements and not have to wander the earth in search of food, and those settlements had given rise to cities and new occupations and civilization. Bu
t they had also separated people from the environments they had become adapted to over hundreds of millennia. That separation, Shepard suggested, had played havoc with long-established patterns of human behavior. In addition to resulting in ecological monstrosities such as soil-depleting crops, it had short-circuited the long-evolved mental wiring of many men.

  “War is the state’s expression of social pathology,” Shepard wrote in his book The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. “Ecologically, it is a breakdown in the distinction that a healthy species makes between inter-species and intra-species behavior, and in the use of organized predation. It occurs where men cannot regularly hunt and where population densities are too high. In a Frankensteinian fashion, it fuses elements of the primate rank-order system with the cooperative yet lethal talents of the human social carnivore.”1

  Shepard was suggesting, in effect, that war is a consequence of separation from our origins. I wasn’t very knowledgeable about the Bible, but it seemed to me from what I recalled of the Quaker Sunday school I attended as a kid that that was also the story of Adam and Eve being cast out of the garden of Eden. The ultimate separation from the creation is hell. And of course, war is hell. A species that has experienced virtually endless war over the past ten thousand years is, more than anything else, a species that has become separated from its origins and lost its way.

  “Cut off from hunting reindeer, horse, and elephant, men lost both the models and means by which personal integrity was achieved and measured within the group by peaceful means,” Shepard wrote. “They found a substitute in the biggest and most dangerous potential prey remaining—men themselves. . . . The collapse of an ecology that kept men scarce and attuned to the mystery and diversity of all life led as though by some devilish Fall to the hunting and herding of man by man.”2