by Ed Ayres
The intervening experience was not just the scouting and tracking of the hunt itself. Our ape ancestors did not just step out of the forest and go forth in search of a mammoth. The transition took tens of thousands and perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years, and before we killed anything big we probably spent a long time watching other, more experienced, animals kill. Perhaps for many millennia we ate leftovers after lions ate the prime cuts, but waiting for the lion to leave his dinner may have been another key part of the early development of our observational and anticipatory powers.
Before that long period of flirtation with the lion’s domain, where we were on the verge of trying our own hand at the big kill, there may have been an even longer period of more mundane food-gathering, hunting smaller animals, gathering worms or snails, collecting berries and tubers and seeds. And those skills, too, we still bring into the world hardwired into us. When I was a kid, I went through two periods of Indian-like hunting and stalking that I didn’t learn from anyone. Around age ten, I became fascinated with reptiles and spent long summer afternoons trying to find them. When I caught a turtle or garter snake, it was a great thrill. I didn’t want to kill it, though; I just wanted to catch it.
Often, I crouched at the bank of a pond watching for a species called the Eastern painted turtle (so named for the yellow and red markings around the rim of its bottom shell, or plastron—somehow, as a ten-year-old, I knew what a “plastron” was, as well as what a “carapace” was). I learned that I could spot a turtle by just the small black tip of its nose above the pond’s surface. A water turtle has to come up for air, even when it’s being stalked, but evolution has given it excellent camouflage; when it floats in a murky pond with only its nose poking up, all you can see from above the pond is what looks like the end of a waterlogged stick. But I could tell the difference, even if the water was too muddy or the reflection of the sky too bright on the surface to reveal anything submerged. One time, in a moment of preadolescent impulsiveness that might well have won me a Darwin Award (given to those who have contributed to the future of humanity by doing something stupid enough to remove them from the gene pool before they can reproduce), I saw a turtle’s nose and dove into the water having no idea what invisible tree stumps or rocks might await me, but guessing well enough where the turtle would dive. The thrill of catching it was exquisite. Submerged tree stump-wise, I lucked out.
Maybe I lucked out in another way, as well. I grew up just a few years before TV got its clutches on kids. My family didn’t own a TV, and my boyhood pursuits around the woods and ponds may have allowed me to become more attuned to my inner hunter and to the slow pace of life in the natural world than would be the experience of kids a few years later. For the children of the mid-1950s and later, the innate patience of the persistence hunter may have been overridden and buried by the high-suspense, quick-draw gunfights of TV Westerns and the even more high-speed dramas that would follow.
I was far from alone in this sort of sublimation. Decades later, around the area where we lived in Manassas, Virginia, I’d often see men prowling construction sites with metal detectors, looking for Civil War relics—bullets, belt buckles, buttons. These people were not amateur archeologists or anthropologists any more than I was an amateur herpetologist or mineralogist. It’s the discovery they wanted, I’m pretty sure. I see signs that this is a widespread kind of urge among humans.
In reading the accounts of paleoanthropologists, we can easily oversimplify the lives of early humans, because the artifacts that survive now are relatively few—the ones that survive millennia of organic decay, or at least can be carbon-dated. There may have been many hundreds of varieties of flora and fauna that our ancestors knew and sought for purposes we know nothing about—and most traces of which have disappeared. The excitement they evoked when found would have been reinforced by evolution, because the more exciting it was, the longer you’d persist in the search and the more likely you’d find what was needed to cure an illness or meet a nutritional need. There’s not much trace of that thrill in the remains dug up by paleontologists, unless it’s in the rare fragment of glacier-frozen DNA or in the paintings of running animals found on cave walls. But there’s more than a trace in the living descendants of those early humans—in us.
Whether it’s in the endurance of a single individual or the sustainability of a whole society, the real story is not the quick excitements, like the dramatic last few yards of a race, but the long and quiet endeavor that leads up to it. Of course, with our short-circuited attention spans and addiction to climactic moments, we love dramatic finishes. They’re what our media watch for on those rare occasions when they actually cover a running event. I admire a gutsy finish as much as anyone, without reservation. For me, those kids who crawled across the finish line rank right up there with the last-second touchdown runs that have won Super Bowls. But those kids never would have qualified for their respective state championships to begin with, without many hours of training they did over the preceding months. And then there was that hard three miles they all ran before they fell. If 95 percent of the runner’s success is achieved before he or she even goes to the starting line, then 99.9 percent is done before the finish line is even within sight. A dramatic finish excites us because it evokes the primordial thrill of the kill and takes only a minute, but it tells us nothing of the long journey—the months of training and then the full length of the race itself—that preceded it.
What is lost in our perception of sustained endurance activity is the huge role that that quiet activity (as distinguished from the actual pursuit of prey) played in the development of awareness. The long hours of tracking game or gathering wild plants were not periods of dull-witted wandering in the wild, but of keenly observant reading and interpreting of signs to which most twenty-first century people would be quite oblivious. Ecologists have noted, with chagrin, that many children and teens today can recognize hundreds of commercial products by brand name, but can identify only a few trees, birds, or plants. We’ve become increasingly blind to the complex, wild world in which we developed our perceptive capacities, while tragically convincing ourselves that what really matters is the much-improved artificial world we have invented to replace it. Products that will purportedly give us ever greater time-saving, effort-saving convenience and safety surround us, while the world that is actually our only ultimate security fades from our sight.
One of the most primal of all human experiences—having a baby—gave me and my family a revealing sense of just how separated from our origins we have become. When a baby was born in Paleolithic times, we can only speculate about what means the parents may have found to keep the baby alive and safe, and then to help it grow and learn. Infant and child mortality was probably very high. But those who survived infancy had to become very fit and acutely observant at an early age. And of course, fitness and perceptivity in turn provided a survival advantage that continued to develop over thousands of generations. Just as the persistence hunt required physical endurance and patience, tracking and gathering required acute observation and patience. The patience of the hunter-gatherers can still be seen—or felt—in the satisfactions of gardening, the “slow food” movement, meditation, hiking, fishing, bird-watching, and quiet walks in the park, as well as long-distance running. And young children seem to take very naturally to those quiet pursuits, if given a chance.
By the time my daughter was born, there were hundreds of products available—none of which had been available to the hunter-gatherers—to make the baby safer and the mother more comfortable. Thirty years later, when her baby was due, I accompanied her to a store that sells nothing but baby products. I was overwhelmed. I asked the store manager how many different products the store carried, and he cheerfully told me: eighty thousand. He knew them all. But I wondered if he could have identified one-thousandth as many of the plants and animals on which his life—or my grandchild’s life—actually depends. Most of those invented products will make babies safer and
more comfortable, and even more sedated, but not—as far as I could see—more prepared to undertake a toughening and vigilant journey through life. And as Paul Shepard noted, the kind of high-risk hunt that was both the hunter’s greatest danger and his greatest reward will no longer be an option. The “thrill of the kill” already has a barbaric ring, even though it was what kept us going for a hundred times as long as civilization has so far.
The excitement of the finish, then, is not so much a recognition of what has been achieved through the quiet process of training, as it is a primal and ritual responsiveness we feel to the climactic captured moments of those long-forgotten, epic hunts that let us live another day. They are among the most archetypal, hormone-rousing reminders we have that the cycle of life goes on. For a long-distance runner, the end of the race is when you pause for rest before beginning a long and patient preparation for the next race and that sense of rebirth it will bring.
At about a mile and a half to go, the road went up what I think was an overpass—though by now I was too fixated on the middle distance ahead of me to really look—then curved right onto a highway, with a lane along the left marked off for the runners with orange cones. Then, up ahead—could it be?—there was the Marine, Tom Hethcoat! He had to have been at least four or five minutes ahead of me a few miles back. But now, suddenly, I was gaining on him, and on another runner just behind him. I let myself, finally, begin to think about the final minutes of the race. Until then, it had seemed too risky. Envisioning the final surge is enormously powerful, but that surge is a bit like the rocket an astronaut uses to return to Earth through heavy gravity—he (or the guy at the controls in Houston) doesn’t dare ignite it too soon. It means going anaerobic for the first time in eight hours. The finish is something you’ve envisioned a thousand times, but now you’re girding for the real thing. The real thing is both intense and surprisingly ephemeral. You’ll finally have that moment you’ve dreamed of for months or years, but it will in fact be only a moment.
At about five hundred yards out, officials waved me into a right-hand turn up a short hill. I’d closed further on Hethcoat and the other guy, but wasn’t going to catch them. In just a few long seconds, I would crest the hill, see the finish-line banner, and hear the loudspeaker a quarter-mile away. I glanced at my watch, and while it was now a struggle to do even the simplest arithmetic, I could see that this wasn’t like the inevitable scene in a movie where the protagonist barely defuses the bomb as the clock ticks down, “3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .” or where the winning touchdown is scored just as the clock runs out. This was real, and I was going to beat the age-group record by about twenty minutes. The record was somewhere around 8:16, and I was about to break eight hours with minutes to spare. Over the last few hundred yards, I summoned up neural memories of the exhilarating last laps of my one-mile runs in high school, over four decades ago, and finally went anaerobic. I sprinted (or at least it felt like that) past the big finish-line clock at 7:55-something. Mike Spinnler, the race director, put a medal around my neck, shouted something exuberant to my unhearing ear, and then it was over. There would be a couple of hours of afterglow and then, like a morning dew, it would be gone.
15
Late Afternoon
The Fading Light
The moment I’d dreamed of had come . . . and minutes later had passed. At 2:55:46 in the afternoon, I had broken the age-division record. Five minutes later, I could hear Mike Spinnler back on the PA mike, heralding the approach of another runner: “Mich-ael War-di-an!” Years later I would hear that name again, as Michael Wardian would come back to win the JFK and then go on to place third in the 2009 World 50-kilometer championship in Gibraltar—and then lead the US ultra team to its first world 100K championship in the Netherlands, in 2011—and that year be named the world’s Ultrarunner of the Year. By then, I would be hours behind him. In 2001, the arc of his life was rising even as mine was falling, and for this one brief moment our paths had crossed. But right now, I couldn’t know that. The sun was still in the sky. I found Sharon and Elizabeth, and this time got hugs I could linger gratefully for.
Later, what I would remember was not just that fleeting satisfaction of the finish, but a reel of moments across the whole experience—the last year of training; the chill of the predawn morning in Boonsboro; the thousands of bare shoulders, arms, and legs of men and women crowding together before the start; the sound of shoes shuffling through leaves on the Appalachian Trail; the sudden fall and crack of knee and elbow on rock; the young Marine who passed me on the towpath an hour or two later and said to me, “You’re bleeding, sir”; the unhappy realization that at some point later I must have passed him back and not recognized him and said nothing; the glint of the November sun on the river; the enveloping peace; the ghosts of Americans killing each other in a corn field; the cheering of friendly spectators at Antietam; the creeping fatigue and internal struggle and wandering thoughts and rescuing epiphanies—and then the raucous sound of the finish-line PA and that one final minute of validation: seeing the clock and claiming the record, then being swallowed by the finish chute and standing spent as an official collected my ID tag.
A few days after the race, I studied the results on the JFK 50 Mile website and found that, of the 818 runners who had completed the distance before the cut-off, I had finished 49th. I’d finished ahead of four of the seven runners on the top Marines team (the “All-Marines”), five of the seven on the Quantico Marines team, five of the seven on the US Naval Academy team, all seven of the second navy team, and all seven of the army’s 82nd Airborne team. Overall, I had outrun 28 of the 35 military runners and had come within a minute and a half of catching one more of the Marines—Tom Hethcoat. I’d finished ahead of 83 of the 104 runners in the race who were under the age of thirty. Among the forty finishers who were sixty or older (about twenty more hadn’t made the cutoff), I had finished first and beat the second-place guy by an hour and fifteen minutes.
Then I did a kind of double-take. What I saw on the website was page after page of numbers—the “splits” for each runner (times at Weverton, Antietam, and other aid stations), pace (minutes per mile) at each of those splits, and final times for each runner, plus a plethora of miscellaneous statistics. There were no anecdotes, photos of the runners, videos, or records of what we’d said to each other on the trail. I’d been poring over the numbers for an hour—and it struck me that I’d been tracking pages like these all my life. Suddenly, it seemed that there was something both comical and sad about how seriously I had regarded all these abstract numbers—the sub-eight-hour JFK for the past year, but also the sub-three-hour marathon decades ago, or the 65-second quarter-mile intervals before that, or when I was a kid reading the newspaper and daydreaming, the four-minute mile. The procession of numbers I’d tracked or pursued through the years was like the bones and skeletons sought by anthropologists—provocative relics, suggestive of something momentous, but still only dry relics. I thought abruptly of the Marine telling me back on the towpath that I was bleeding—and my laughing in appreciation. I was alive!
In reading over all those stats, I did encounter one small mystery: The runner who finished just ahead of me, right between Tom Hethcoat and me, was listed as Frank Probst. I stared at the list. It wasn’t what I remembered at all. I went back and studied the splits, and according to those, I’d been five minutes ahead of Frank at the Dam 4 turnoff onto the road. But mysterious Frank, who could dodge a Boeing 757 and evidently could run like a stealth bomber, had apparently passed me somewhere on the road. I remembered Hethcoat racing past me around eight miles out; maybe Probst had been running in his shadow.
But then, what difference did it make? And anyway, Frank was still in the fifty to fifty-nine age group. All I could do was smile. When I was younger, I had to have answers. Now I knew I could do no more than pursue them. The older I get and the more I learn, the less I know with certainty. And that actually feels right, although I really can’t say exactly why.
And
that was it: What had happened in this race had been a flesh-and-blood, microcosmic experience of what it is for a tribe of highly evolved humans to be fully functioning on a sheltering planet. It was not a scientific investigation of the persistence-hunting theory, because even modern science, with its painstaking methodologies, is too slow, now, to keep up with the complexity and speed of what is happening in our endurance runners’ hearts and lungs—and feet. A supercomputer might be able to beat a grandmaster at chess, but what happens when a man or woman runs across the earth’s variegated landscape is a billion times more complex than any chess game. As the physicist Michio Kaku might have assured me on that day he pointed out the limitations of Moore’s Law, we humans are “still the man.”
In running this race, I was responding to the conundrum that—as our best scientists have tried to make clear—we humans are also no longer thinking on our feet. In some respects, the scientists are to blame for the confusion; their reductionist insistence on a methodology that analyzes complex processes by isolating one factor at a time has put us in a position where we are being overwhelmed by the unforeseen and now cascading consequences of our own inventions. When advocates of greater creativity and innovation in the management of our industries and institutions say we need to “think outside the box,” they may not question whether the kind of thinking they advocate is still contained by a larger box—the unexamined assumption that inventiveness is always to be found in the future. But if the Industrial Revolution and subsequent telecommunications and biotech revolutions have all happened in just the most recent one-tenth of 1 percent of our evolution, it stands to reason that the our species’ capacity to do all that inventing developed before civilization ever began. Stone-age humans and their predecessors didn’t have smartphones, but they were smart on their feet, for far longer than we post-industrial people have been, and in ways that we have only begun to grasp.
