The Longest Race

by Ed Ayres

  I know we now regard our “nature-loving” likes and dislikes as mainly aesthetic preferences. We like the smell of pine forests and the sound of birds on a summer morning but don’t consider them critical to our ability to thrive or survive. Once, though, they were. In 1964, the psychologist Erich Fromm coined the phrase biophilia to refer to the human “love of life” or “love of living systems.” Twenty years later, the biologist Edward O. Wilson collaborated with Stephen Kellert on a book called The Biophilia Hypothesis, in which they argued that the human love of nature is in fact hardwired, an artifact of our evolution in an environment where trees, flowers, waterfalls, other animals, and the sun and moon were matters of survival, not just enjoyable to look at. Our contact with nature was what kept us alive. And more pertinent to our present condition, this contact was also critical to our capacity to think—to make observations, inferences, projections, and plans that could successfully compensate for our lack of physical speed, power, and sharp claws or teeth.

  A lot of animals evolved mainly through blind adaptation. We didn’t. When we felt the breeze pass across our nostrils and chests, we were already envisioning what awaited us far ahead on the trail or over the horizon. And now, when some of us enjoy visiting a wild place with a spectacular vista, or living in a house with a great view, we may be reconnecting with that evolutionary journey we took from vision on the trail to envisioning what was around the bend ahead to becoming the visionary species that can actually choose the course of its own future.

  The guy up ahead of me, bare chest to the chill wind, might have looked a little crazy to a casual passerby—though on this part of the trail there was really no one to notice. If he was still shirtless when we hit the road after Dam Number 4, people in passing cars would probably shake their heads. The temperature now felt like low-fifties, and the windchill felt lower. On the other hand, it also seemed to me that half of the runners I’d seen since we came off the AT were overdressed—still wearing the windbreakers or long-sleeve shirts they’d started out with at dawn.

  Temperature management is one of the trickiest skills a runner can learn. I learned when I was younger that if you’re running fairly fast, the body generates so much heat that to keep at optimal strength you often need to be more lightly clad than you expected when you stepped out the door. And I still recalled, though it now seemed hard for my aging body to believe, that when I was running marathons in the 1960s and ’70s, I decided that the perfect temperature for running a marathon (assuming you’re wearing shorts and a singlet) was about forty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. Years later, the US Army Research Institute of Medicine would do a study of energy efficiency in runners over a range of temperatures and conclude that the ideal temperature is forty-one degrees Fahrenheit. Of course, that’s an average. A very lean runner with a higher-than-average surface-to-volume ratio (more skin area per pound, and less distance for the blood to carry heat to the skin) is more efficient at cooling, and may have a slightly higher ideal temperature, while a bigger person might do better when it’s cooler. That guy up ahead might actually be right on target. And the rest of us might be a little too desensitized by the same cultural separation from our world that was making us unresponsive to the steadily thickening blanket of carbon dioxide over our warming earth.

  I thought of the story ecologists tell, about the frog and the pot of water. Drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, they say, and it will jump out. Put it in a pot of cold water and then gradually heat it to a boil, and it will remain in the pot until it is dead. I’d never actually tried that and didn’t plan to. But I did wonder, at times when I began to feel the heat building up under my shirt, whether I wouldn’t really rather be running naked, the way our persistence-hunting ancestors did. And I wondered how long we humans will let ourselves cook before we do wake up and jump.

  I recalled an article I’d written for Running Times in 1980. For some reason, I could still remember the first line: “The last weekend of Henry Kronlage’s life was, until very near the end, a happy one.”2

  Henry Kronlage was a forty-five-year-old, moderately experienced road runner who in August of that year signed up to run the Herndon 10 Mile run in the Washington, DC, suburb of Herndon, Virginia. The previous month had been the hottest month in a hundred years in that region. On the day of the race, the air at the start had been stifling. But Kronlage was in a jubilant mood, as his whole family was together that weekend and two of his kids—fifteen-year-old Lynn and thirteen-year-old Karl—were entered in the race, too. A few days before, Henry had kidded his son, “The first time you stop for water, I’ll pass you!”3

  Lynn later recalled that during the run she struggled with the heat, and in the last mile she felt dizzy and began to wobble. At the finish she was close to collapsing. She slumped to the ground, and fortunately someone poured cold water on her. In a previous race, she had not been happy to reach the finish and find that her dad had finished ahead of her (he was waiting there to cheer her), but now, when she really needed him, he wasn’t there. After the race, no one knew where he was. Another man was also missing. It wasn’t until two days later that the body of Henry Kronlage was found in some bushes a short distance from the finish line. The course had taken a right-angle turn a few hundred yards from the finish, marked by a chalk arrow on the pavement, but there was no sentry, and Kronlage—dizzied by heatstroke—missed the turn. Finding no finish line or relief, he apparently went into the bushes seeking shade, and no one was there to pour cold water on him.

  As it happened, the other missing man died in that race, too. My story focused on Kronlage but also became an inquiry into what went wrong when 500 runners went to the starting line and only 498 reached the finish alive. If I thought there was a simple answer, though, I was soon disabused. Henry Kronlage had taken off his shirt at the start, so he wasn’t overdressed. But a lot of other factors came into play. The runners had to walk half a mile from the parking area to the starting line on hot pavement in full sun. The race started at 9:15 AM with the temperature at ninety-five degrees. The entire ten miles was on heat-radiating pavement with no shade. The stricken runners were both in their forties, the significance of which was suggested to me by Dale Hruby, an officer at the nearby National War College at Fort McNair. Hruby was a veteran runner whose job was to prepare senior military officers and government officials—mostly men between thirty-five and forty-five—to take on higher levels of responsibility, including responsibility for their own physical condition. He told me he had become “acutely conscious of how intensely competitive men in their 30s and 40s often become, especially when matched up with younger rivals.”4

  That race, and its aftermath, became a turning point in the management of long-distance races in America. Phil Stewart, one of my partners at the magazine, had photographed the race and later launched a spinoff publication, Road Race Management, which would help to build critical expertise in the planning of running events. Courses would rarely, thereafter, go over unshaded roads in summer heat; summer races would start at 6:00 or 7:00 AM or in the evening, instead of at mid-morning; medical personnel would be on hand; race officials would be trained to recognize the symptoms of heat exhaustion or stroke; right-angle turns would have sentries. And the management of running events needed to be handled by people who were, themselves, experienced runners.

  About a month after the Herndon race, we received a letter from a man who’d been watching the Tennessee state high school cross-country championship in which his son was competing. He’d overheard someone saying something about “a runner staggering around,” and at first thought nothing of it. But then, he wrote, he remembered the article we’d published on “The Herndon Tragedy,” and particularly the statement that “we are a fellowship responsible to each other.” So he and a photographer friend began searching, and persisted at it, longer than they normally might have. Eventually, they found a boy lying in an out-of-the-way ditch, “comatose with dry hot skin exhibiting papillary signs, etc.—a victim of h
eat stroke.”5 The writer wanted us to know that that reminder about the fellowship of runners and their supporters had helped save the boy’s life.

  Decades later, I came across that letter again, by then long forgotten, and from the perspective of a now-older man it seemed to me that “searching” is really what endurance running has been about from the beginning. Hunter-gatherers searched for food, whether it was growing in the forest or running on four legs across the savanna. As climate changed, they migrated and searched for better hunting grounds. And as the neurology of envisioning developed, they searched for ways of not just adapting to their environment but reshaping it.

  And now, I thought, we need to search for ways of restoring some of the balances we have upset. In the late stages of a race, it is clarifying to know that the quest for balance, even more than for speed, is my guide. If an athlete gets complacent in the late stages of a competition, it can all collapse. Whether I’m a sixty-year-old man contemplating the last stage of his life or an ultrarunner in the last stage of a race, it’s critical to keep searching. You never know what you’ll find around the next bend and what help from the fellowship you might need.

  11

  Taylor’s Landing

  Negotiating with Fatigue—and Turning Long Hours into Moments

  A couple of hours ago, I had managed to find the slow-the-game wormhole and calm the turmoil within. And periodically, I had replenished enough carbs to keep even the fat of an ectomorphic sixty-year-old burning. But now a new challenge—the kind of fatigue that even smart fueling and a Zen state of equanimity can’t dispel—was making itself known. I didn’t even need Sheehan’s mantra to hear the message my body was telling me now: This is getting old. A part of it, inexorably, was that I myself was getting old. I’d been running for forty-four years, and it felt like that entire span had been today, and I had maybe another twenty years to run before the day would be over.

  I also had to pee, which seemed to be happening more often as I grew older. In my own variant of that getting-older joke about climbing stairs (“Have you noticed that stairs are getting steeper?”), I thought, “Have you noticed that they put the porta-johns much farther apart now than they used to?” So, with no official facility in sight, I stopped and stepped off the towpath right where I was, which is what ultrarunners do in most races anyway. It doesn’t matter whether other runners pass by as you do. They’ll have to take their turns, too. Out on the trail, those kinds of inhibitions no longer matter.

  My pee wasn’t quite the hue of a sunset yet, which meant at least I wasn’t dangerously dehydrated. If the urine is fairly clear, let’s say lemonade color or lighter, you are probably getting enough water. If it’s dark, you really need to drink. I stepped back to the path, ready to resume running, but unfortunately the fatigue was still with me. Fatigue holds you in its grip and doesn’t get pissed off. In fact, it’s quite friendly and only wants you to be more comfortable. It wants you to stop and lie down, for God’s sake. So what should I do?

  If I had come to an impasse like this a few decades ago, I might well have considered stopping at Taylor’s Landing, not far from here now, and waiting for the sweeper truck that picks up every runner who doesn’t reach a designated checkpoint by the cutoff time for that point. I was still hours ahead of the cutoff for Taylor’s, but fatigue doesn’t care what time it is—and it won’t hesitate to tell you that, if you would like, you can always just tell yourself this is stupid, sit down, and close your eyes until the hours pass, which will be quickly enough.

  But experience at least gave me a way to escape the grim sweeper. The most useful thing for a competitive runner to know about fatigue is that it is fundamental to nature. Fatigue is not an enemy, and if you fight it as if it were, you squander what little energy you still have. Better to think of fatigue the way you might think of evaporation if you were on a long trek across the Kalahari Desert. The evaporation of your sweat dehydrates you, and if you ignore it you can die. But evaporation is also what cools you enough to keep you alive, if you work with it. It’s a very big part of what made you human to begin with. It’s what made your ancestors able to catch bison and eat grass-fed steak.

  Needless to say, by this point in my life I’d had a fairly costly education not only in fuels and efficiency, but in the nature of fatigue itself. That education had come via some arduous experiences with marathons and ultras, but also via my editing work on the fragility of ecosystems. In the larger world, everything wears out in time. If it were true, as biologists like Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson had calculated, that 99.9 percent of all the species that had ever lived on the earth had gone extinct, one could think of those extinctions as a form of terminal fatigue on the Darwinian field of battle. And if that was true, then our own species’ rush to seek risky shortcuts in our civilization’s progress could only cause our collective exhaustion to come faster. We replace highly complex ecosystems with monoculture, for example. Ecological balances are quickly upset; the soil is depleted; crops fail; the empire falls. It’s like a runner taking a shortcut in a race, which defeats the whole meaning of having a race. In an evolutionary eyeblink, we have discovered—as Ted Taylor and some of his Los Alamos colleagues did when they grew a little older and wiser—that it’s not smart to try to out-create our own Creator, at least not when, as a species, we are still in our adolescence.

  But did any of this rather fatalistic view help me cope with my own very immediate fatigue? In one respect, it did. In pondering the histories of human institutions, I had seen a common, almost predictable, pattern: As our institutions grow older, they become more fixed in their ways—less flexible (like the calves or quads of an aging athlete), less resilient, less responsive to the kinds of creative inspiration that led to their founding and early growth. The fresh spirit of a young Jesus, with his message of compassion and forgiveness and outrage at the moneylenders in the temple, had somehow transmogrified, over the centuries, into the punitive doctrines of a rich and powerful global church. The fresh spirit of a young nation with its declaration of equal opportunity for all had transmogrified into an intercontinental enterprise that trafficked in slaves, killed hundreds of thousands of natives, and incarcerated its Japanese citizens. And as institutions became more rigid, they also became more vulnerable to cracking and breaking up—whether via religious schisms or civil wars. It occurred to me that maybe the most effective way to fend off institutional fatigue or collapse, and to bring rejuvenating life and energy, is not to further tighten the grip of an institution on the hardened rules and ideologies that define it now, but to regenerate some of the creative spirit that formed it in the beginning. And if that can work, then maybe the greatest function of idealism is not to guide the way to a utopian outcome, as we habitually assume, but to help us reinvigorate or re-create our institutions when they have grown weary. Utopias never happen, but revolutions and rebirths sometimes do.

  The implications for my running—for that one realm of life where I had some real control of outcomes and opportunity to build strength and spirit—had been an epiphany. An important part of my training experience—maybe the quintessential part—had been the very occasional times when I would hit a stretch of running that felt magical. I called these my “forever” runs, because any sense of gradually tiring was gone; I was in a timeless zone, experiencing a sense that I could run like this forever. I had always assumed that the value of these rare moments was to help prepare me for the day when I could run like that in a race. But now I understood—this was the revelation—that the real value of these in-the-zone moments was in practicing the kind of feeling I’d need to bring into play not when I’m headed for a fantastic performance but when I’m struggling with deep fatigue or discouragement.

  I had learned enough about physiology to be aware that feelings have powerful biochemical impacts. We’ve all heard stories about the ninety-eight-pound woman who sees her child pinned under a car and in a surge of primal emotion lifts the rear end of the car clear off the groun
d to save the child. Maybe those stories are urban myths, but I believe it has happened. I don’t know whether it’s epinephrine or endorphins or the sudden bushwhacking of new neural pathways or what, but something happens.

  I was in the no-man’s-land between Snyder’s Landing and Taylor’s Landing, still with over a half-marathon to go, and I needed something to happen. The “forever” feeling, if I could conjure it up, might be that something. I have never given much credence to the cliché of the “runner’s high” because it seems backward to me—like magical thinking. The real high doesn’t pop up like a quick, assured consequence of running. It isn’t like effortlessly popping Prozac or smoking marijuana. Rather, going out to run, day after day, if you did it long enough, would very occasionally produce that high like a hard-earned reward. You had to really work for it. And it was paradoxical, because while I called it a “forever” feeling, it was in truth only a moment in time.

  The idea of a “moment in time” has become fairly central to my understanding of endurance running—what it really is and how it works. It fascinates me that nonrunners so often seem to think that running long distances must be intolerably boring. “What do you think about when you’re running?” they ask. In a way, this question is quite understandable, because we’ve been conditioned by our culture to be more and more dependent on distraction, as if we are constitutionally unable to entertain ourselves. Doctors’ waiting rooms have to have the TV on constantly, because otherwise the patients would have no idea what to do with themselves. The doctors would have to add “cabin fever” to everyone’s chart! And, of course, we have that culturally manufactured demand for quick reward. I’ve noticed that for most of my lifetime, TV coverage of the Olympics has given a lot of attention to the sprints, but very little to the distance events. Viewers can watch the 100 meters and get a thrill in just ten seconds, and the 400 meters in well under a minute—although that seems to be about as long as the producers want to go without a break. But the longer events make the producers balk. John Parker, who was assigned by a New York magazine to review the TV coverage of the 1984 Olympics, later recalled in his book Runners & Other Dreamers that ABC gave plenty of attention to the sprinter Carl Lewis (“There was a tendency to ‘Lewis’ us to death”), but that the 5,000 meters, which was run at 7:30 PM that Saturday night, and which the great miler Marty Liquori would later call “the greatest 5,000 ever run,” was not aired by the network until about 2:00 AM Eastern time. Rather than show that distance event when people might still be awake, they showed a handball game between Yugoslavia and West Germany. Anything but ask a primetime American audience to watch an event that might drag on for thirteen whole minutes! And as for the 10,000 meters—Parker watched in vain and eventually suspected that the network had managed not to show that event at all.1