Running with the Pack

by Mark Rowlands

  I entered myself in the 2011 ING Miami Marathon the next day, and embarked on a strict training regime — part of a new policy of showing my failing body who was boss. A few months later, around the time my calf was making its protestations known, I received the results of the blood work. My uric acid levels were normal. My painful toe was almost certainly not gout. In fact, it seems a far more likely cause was the running I had been doing to keep Hugo happy. So I had apparently upped my running to address a problem that was caused by running. My entry into the world of marathon running was, in this sense, a deeply ironic one.

  But the toe, that is only a symptom — a gentle scratching of the surface of a more global decline. Some horror stories are true. What young person would not be disgusted by their older self? It was a promising start, a few halcyon years of thrusting, burgeoning vitality. But they didn’t last long. Then it was all downhill, physically and intellectually. There is life and there is death. That’s the way people usually think of it. Death is the end of life, and so is not a part of life. Death is not an event in my life, as Wittgenstein once said. I suspect the truth is a little more complex.

  First, instead of thinking of life as one thing and death as another, I tend to think more in terms of a gradual process of disappearing. Life, fundamentally, is a process of erasure. After a promising, but as it turns out essentially disingenuous, first couple of decades or so, I slowly become less and less of what I was. Death is an admittedly significant point in this process — a late and irreversible stage of my disappearance. But erasure doesn’t stop there. Not content with my destruction, the process rumbles on until every trace I might have left, any indication that I was once here, is also obliterated. So, instead of thinking in crude dichotomous terms — life—death — I apparently like to think in crude trichotomous terms instead: decline + death + deletion = disappearance.

  Conversely, it would be an error to think of death as an event safely cordoned off in the future. Death is impatient and insists on putting in little appearances before the curtain goes down; little cameos that gradually increase in their frequency and transparency. As the outstanding, and perhaps for that reason largely forgotten, Hungarian phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai pointed out: the basis of all disgust is death in life. Our decline is really death creeping up on us in various ways, sneaking us various little previews of what lies in store. My apparently gouty toe is a swollen, putrid corpse appendage. The hard body of my twenties slowly becomes soft and slack, like an orange that has sat in the bowl a few days longer than it should. The hairs that sprout from various parts of me, parts from which, I would have thought, they have no business sprouting, these are opportunistic colonies of mould that have made this overripe orange their home. In these ways and others, my death likes to exhibit itself long before the end of the show.

  Perhaps these little cameos should produce in me nothing more than a wry smile. Death does have a sense of humour, I might tell myself. Julian Barnes tells a story of a former soldier, worn down by life, who asked Julius Caesar, his former general, for permission to end his life. Caesar replied: what makes you think that what you have now is life? Caesar also had a sense of humour, just not a good one. No doubt he was being a little harsh, a little premature. But we are all now aware of the idea of a person disappearing before the end of their biological life. This is a recurring horror of mine. I’ve seen the closing years of enough lives to understand the levels of fear and confusion embodied in them. To approach death is gradually, progressively, to become un-homed. ‘I just want to go home now,’ my dying grandmother once said to me from her nursing home. And so I imagine myself in years to come telling some person I do not know that I just want to go home now. But in this future there is no home. Soon, I’ll not even remember what a home is.

  So I am running this marathon, perhaps, because some horror stories are true. There is a part of me that likes this explanation. There is a comforting familiarity — even nostalgia — that accompanies it. Circumstances have seen me live much of my adult life outside Britain, but I’m still enough of a Brit to recognize the age-old tradition of taking an activity that someone does and finding ways to denigrate it — ideally by casting aspersions on the motives or character of the person doing it. I appreciate this tradition for the cultural art form that it is — even when I am the person whose motives or character are thus aspersed. Now I know why I’m running this marathon. It’s a midlife crisis, mate.

  And yet I am far from alone in my new avocation. I’m part of a rapidly growing cultural phenomenon — the forty-something who has become obsessed with testing the limits of his or her endurance. In this respect, my efforts are embarrassingly feeble. Forget marathons: ultra running events — foot races of fifty miles, a hundred miles or more — are springing up everywhere. Possibly the hardest is Badwater. This is a 135-mile foot race that incorporates a significant chunk of California: beginning in Death Valley, at 282 feet below sea level, and finishing 8642 feet higher, at Whitney Portal — the trailhead of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the state. In the early parts of the run, temperatures can reach 130oF. If you take bread into the open air at that temperature, it begins to toast. The tarmac is so hot your shoes will start to melt, and so you have to run on the white line at the side of the road — cooler because it reflects heat. Then there is the Marathon des Sables, a six-day 151-mile foot race across the Sahara Desert. Runners have to carry anti-venom syringes with them, because of the numerous snakes that litter the route. Or, if you are tired of the heat, there’s the Hardrock — 100 miles run at altitudes of over 14,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies — a slow and difficult race that involves scrambling up and down improbably steep hills, and where the principal medical problems include high-altitude cerebral oedema. Many of the finishers take over forty-eight hours to complete this race, which means — given that the start is just before dawn — that they will see the sun rise three times during their time spent running. Then there is Leadville — another Colorado Rockies 14,000-feet, 100-mile offering, centred on the USA’s highest city — where the completion rate is lower than the Hardrock.

  I must admit: I have been bitten by the bug. Those races are monsters that may always be beyond me. But if I can get my calf right, I do have my beady little eye on some softer fifty-milers for later in the year. Are we endurance freaks all suffering from our own midlife crises? Did it use to be — as caricature would suggest, at least for men — inappropriately young women and sports cars, whereas now it’s the Badwater or Marathon des Sables?

  I suppose, if this interpretation is correct, we would have to expand the idea of a midlife crisis, make it more inclusive and gender-neutral. This ‘crisis’ is far from an exclusively male thing. As many women as men have been bitten by the endurance bug. And in their resulting avocation, they can compete with men on a more or less equal footing. Apparently, no woman is going to give Usain Bolt a run for his money. But the longer the distance of the race, the more the gap between men and women narrows. Ann Trason wins 100-mile ultras outright, at least she used to. It is true, I expect, that women have midlife crises too. But the main problem is supposing that the label ‘midlife crisis’ explains anything at all.

  Labelling something is often done to stop thinking about it, just when the hard thinking should be starting. We need to dig deeper. What is a midlife crisis? What is its essence? In particular, does the Hardrock or Marathon des Sables type of midlife crisis have anything in common with the classic but clichéd younger-woman/fast-car midlife crisis? Perhaps there is something that the two alleged crises have in common. But until I can identify precisely what that is, the label ‘midlife crisis’ means nothing.

  There is a way of thinking about a midlife crisis that ties it closely to the idea of achievement. A midlife crisis is the result of the realization that your abilities are on the wane, and consequently that your reach is henceforth condemned to exceed your grasp by an ever-increasing, and perhaps ultimately embarrassing, margin. The younger-woman/fast-ca
r response is an attempt to reassert youth’s authority of grasp over reach. Is this what it is all about?

  Of course, I can only speak for myself. But the reassertion of grasp over reach hypothesis — the idea that running is all about achievement — just doesn’t convince me. I think one of the things I quickly learned from running was the futility of achievement. Most of the running I have done in my life has not been about achievement anyway — not as far as I can see. It was just something I did, for a variety of reasons. Entering this race, I suppose, does introduce an element of achievement into the mix. But, even then, the achievement in question is of a peculiarly self-undermining variety. When I started training for this marathon, six miles in the Miami late-summer heat would nearly kill me. Slowly I built up the distance. I could barely sleep the nights before my long runs, I was so eager to get out on the road to see if I could do the extra distance. But as soon as I did, the immediate feeling of satisfaction was quickly replaced by restlessness. Twelve miles, okay — but next week I’ll do thirteen. Learning to run distance is all about setting reasonable weekly goals — goals you can achieve if you put in the work — and then achieving them. This seems to be hard work followed by achievement: one strand of the American Dream. But, for me at least, I don’t know how it is with others, this is a very special sort of work-achievement cycle. It is a work-achievement cycle that reveals the futility of all work-achievement cycles. Running distance is goal-based achievement that reveals the bankruptcy of goal-based achievement.

  Imagine you are a little kid outside a sweet shop, penniless, staring in at all the sweets you can’t buy. God appears next to you and says:

  ‘You know, kid, one day you’ll be able to buy everything in this shop.’

  ‘Really, God?’

  ‘Yep, and you know what? When you can, you won’t want to anymore. That’s life, kid!’

  Any worthwhile achievement, I suspect, changes you in a way that makes what you achieve no longer important to you. If by some miracle I actually finish this marathon, I’ll have a celebratory late brunch — aka a bucketful of Mojitos — on South Beach. But I guarantee you that by dinner time my initial surge of satisfaction will be replaced by restlessness. The first thing I think will be this: well, after all, I did it, and on the back of a seriously curtailed training regime as well — I mean, how difficult can it be? Then, I’ll start thinking about the Keys 100 — an ultramarathon (with 50- or 100-mile options, take your pick) from Key Largo to Key West that’s happening in May. Then, I’ll start thinking about some altogether more challenging things that are in the pipeline for late 2011 and 2012. But the goal of this is not to achieve things. To think that it is would be to misunderstand everything. I don’t want a stack of race completion certificates I can put on my living-room wall or medals or belt buckles that tell people: I’ve run this, I’ve run that. The sense of satisfaction that goes with knowing I have finished a race? I don’t even want that. Achievement, for me at least, is a process of making the things I achieve not matter any more. I run not to achieve anything — not in this sense of acquiring something — but to be changed by the process of achieving. Of course, I have to achieve things in order to be changed by a process of achieving things. But achieving things is just a means to an end. I run because I want to be changed. The question is of course: how?

  Another way of thinking about the midlife crisis is as an attempt to reclaim the freedom of youth. This I think is partly right, but also wrong in at least one crucial respect. Running distance is about freedom — I’m convinced of that — but it’s not the same sort as the freedom of youth. Both the traditional midlife crisis and the endurance-based alternative are, in their own ways, about freedom. But where they differ — and they do differ crucially — is that they have a very different conception of what freedom is.

  In the high-velocity sports of my youth — rugby, cricket, boxing and tennis — the distinction between body and mind was at its most attenuated. In those endeavours, where missiles or hands or entire human bodies were hurtling towards me intent on mischief, there was no distinction between mind and body. In those days, in those sports, I was my lived body. Sometimes I wouldn’t even know I was doing something until after I had done it. I remember the best cricket shot I ever played. I was facing a quick bowler of the Lansdown Cricket Club in Bristol. It looked like he had sent one down the leg side. I drew my feet together, looking to clip it off my legs down to the fine-leg area. But it was a full-length ball and swung late to the off side. I opened up — I still don’t know whether I went forward with my leading leg or backward with my trailing one — and hit cleanly through the ball, which went like a bullet to the mid-on boundary. I think it may have been the only time I ever successfully executed a perfect on-drive — the most difficult shot in the book of cricket. And it was more or less an accident. I had no idea what I was doing until after it was all over. At that moment, there was no distinction between what I was and what I did: I was embodied mind in action.

  According to Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, to be free is to act in accordance with necessity. In a similar vein, Taoism identifies freedom with wu wei: acting without acting. In a high-velocity sport, when you’re ‘in the zone’, you act without acting. What you do is a perfect match with what the situation requires. Your actions are in accordance with necessity; you do what must be done. This almost accidental shot I played when I was fifteen years old, that is the most free I’ve ever been on the cricket pitch. If Spinoza is right, perhaps I have never been freer than at that moment.

  The classic midlife crisis is about freedom, but of a specific sort. Certainly, it is about escaping the cares of an adult life, a life that may be slowly grinding you into a fine dust. But the form this escape takes attempts to replicate the freedom of youth. It is all about youth, in the form of a younger woman, and speed in the form of a sports car. This freedom is about running from old age: it is about reproducing the high-velocity freedom of youth — the freedom of a life that is flying at you intent on mischief. This is the freedom of Spinoza, the freedom that comes from acting in accordance with necessity. The freedom embodied in running distance is very different — it is not the freedom of Spinoza, not the freedom of youth.

  The freedom of Spinoza collapses the distinction between mind and body. Indeed, Spinoza thought of mind and body as merely two aspects of the same thing. But in the freedom of running distance, the distinction between mind and body is likely to be augmented rather than effaced. This, at least for me, always starts the same way. When I was training for this race, the early part of the long run would take me up Old Cutler Road, from SW 152nd Street to SW 104th Street. By the time I’d reached 120th, I would be having a little conversation with myself: ‘Just get me to the corner of 104th — then you can walk for a while.’ But who or what is this ‘me’ and who or what is this ‘you’? Who is giving permission to whom? It is my body that is suffering, not my mind. The mind might proffer a little encouragement every now and then, supply a little pep talk or two, but fundamentally it is my body that will get me to 104th, not my mind. It certainly seems as if my mind is giving permission to my body — and how can this be unless my mind is distinct from my body? This is the intuition that set the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, ‘the father of modern philosophy’, on his way.

  According to Descartes, the body, which for his purposes incorporates the brain, is a physical object, differing only in the details of its organization from other physical objects. But the mind — or soul, or spirit, or self, Descartes was comfortable thinking of these interchangeably — is very different. The mind is a non-physical thing, composed of a different substance and obeying different laws and principles of operation than physical things. The resulting view — Cartesian dualism — sees each one of us as an amalgam of two very different things: a physical body and a non-physical mind. It is very unlikely that Descartes’ view of the mind is correct. Nevertheless, the most obvious f
reedom of the long run is the sort of freedom envisaged by Descartes rather than Spinoza. It is the flesh that is weak. The key to building distance in the long run is the ability of the mind to lie to the body — and be convincing. When we reach 104th Street, we must continue on. I must make sure my body is still putting one foot in front of the other at the steady pace I have set. The successful running spirit is sometimes, of necessity, a mendacious one. Self-deception lies at the heart of endurance.

  There is so much more to the freedom of running than this. This Cartesian phase, where one lies to one’s body and so seemingly — but presumably erroneously — demonstrates one’s distinctness from it, is just the first phase, the first face, of freedom. There is another, entirely more interesting face to unveil: an old friend of mine whom I shall meet again today, assuming I last long enough. But without wishing to endorse Descartes’ more general views of the relation between mind and body, it still seems true that whereas the freedom of youth effaces the difference between mind and body, the freedom of running distance accentuates it. The freedom of Spinoza is the freedom of youth. What do we say of the freedom of Descartes? How do we characterize it? Cicero, the ancient Roman philosopher, once said that to be a philosopher is to learn how to die. Cicero was a dualist in roughly the same sense as Descartes. The mind or spirit is a non-physical substance, and it survives the death of the body. According to Cicero, a philosopher is someone who knows how to die to the extent that he or she is someone who knows how to spend time with the mind — the part that, Cicero thought, survives death. A distance runner knows how to spend time with the mind — whether it does or, more likely, does not survive death. To run distance is not to run from old age; it is to run towards it. Far from a crisis, it is an acceptance of the point one has reached in life. And so the freedom of running distance is, it seems, the freedom of age. Far from reclaiming the freedom of youth, the freedom of distance running involves claiming, perhaps for the first time, an entirely different sort of freedom.