The Longest Race

by Ed Ayres

  I knew I wasn’t alone in this preoccupation. If I imagined myself looking back at twenty-first century America from the future, I saw a culture deeply preoccupied with explosions and crashes. Wasn’t that what most captivated us in our daily news? If a plane crashed—not just like those four a few weeks ago, but any plane, anywhere in America—it topped the news even if it directly affected no more than a few hundred people, whereas a piece of legislation passed the same day might have life-or-death consequences for a thousand times that many, yet go unmentioned. I know, of course, that the news is selected for its capacity to boost viewer ratings, or entertainment value, more than for its social significance. And this fixation applies equally to the kinds of entertainment that have no pretense of being news. Sitting through a few minutes of previews before a movie, I am subjected to an ear-blasting orgy of exploding cars, buildings, and bodies. And in sports, the moments fans seem to anticipate most are explosive in physical and psychological impact, if not in chemical reaction. During one Super Bowl, a TV commercial for the NASCAR auto-racing circuit highlighted six scenes of car crashes in its thirty seconds of action. This was a putative ad for a racing sport, but in fact it was an ad for a sort of vicarious Roman gladiatorial spectacle, in which—if you watched with any regularity—you might see a car crash with a live driver inside.

  In my work at Worldwatch, I had gotten into a somewhat compulsive habit of tracking phenomena that I thought might be clues to what was really happening to us. A couple of weeks ago, after the attack, I had pored through microfilms of the Washington Post to see how much space that paper had devoted in the past year to crashes and explosions other than 9/11. While stories about the basketball superstar Michael Jordan (Had he slowed a step?—Or would he change his mind about retiring?) had greatly overshadowed news of global warming that year, both of those subjects had been dwarfed by the attention given to various crashes and their aftermaths. We got news of a US submarine crashing into a Japanese fishing boat and sinking it (twelve front-page stories about the crash and its aftermath); racing driver Dale Earnhardt crashing his car and dying; 128 cars crashing in a single, three-mile-long pileup on Interstate 95; a school exploding in China; a Chinese war plane crashing into an American spy plane; an airplane carrying American missionaries crashing in Peru; a truck crashing into a street sweeper; and a Russian plane exploding over the Black Sea, among many others. All told, the Post’s coverage for that year, while ignoring most ordinary car crashes, included—as measured in column-inches of text—6,840 inches on crashes and explosions, versus 90 inches on expected impacts of climate change.

  The crashes figure didn’t include the paper’s coverage of 9/11, which had filled the front pages (and many inside pages) ever since the attack. And it only counted physical crashes, although physical instabilities quickly translated into social and economic instabilities as well. The Enron Corporation, a colossus of the energy trade, would soon become the World Trade Center’s institutional equivalent. Earlier, when Enron officials were meeting secretly with Vice President Dick Cheney to plan a US energy policy that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, the mainstream media had taken no notice. The oil men came and went incognito. But when Enron collapsed, reporters leaped into action and a galvanizing thrill ran through the nation—not a thrill in the joyride sense meant by theme park publicists when they invite us to “experience the thrill” of their newest and fastest rollercoaster, but in the nerve-shocking sense used by nineteenth-century writers describing, say, the experience of stepping on a rattlesnake with bare feet.

  As a trail runner on the AT, I had a visceral sense of what that thrill might be about. The Appalachian Trail undulates endlessly when it’s not steeply climbing or descending. There are places where you hit a forty- or fifty-foot-long downhill stretch and, instead of putting on the brakes just a little—contracting the quads as you would have to if that stretch went any farther—you just let yourself go. The gravity accelerates you, and by the time you hit the bottom of the dip you’re flying as fast as you can without braking or falling, and then the upturn slows you just in time. But while you’re still going downhill, if you’re flying over rocks, that’s a bit of a thrill. I suppose it’s at least a hint of what kids feel when they jump off cliffs into lakes, or what adults do when they bungee jump or skydive. But the familiarity of that feeling doesn’t really explain why it’s so seductive. Why would anyone deliberately jump off a cliff and risk dying? Why would I, at age sixty, risk breaking a leg? OK, maybe that question is a little disingenuous, because I can’t recall ever hearing of an ultrarunner actually breaking a leg. And I didn’t really fear it. In the scores of trail races I’d run over the years—the Pueblo 50 Mile in Arizona, the Pacific Crest Trail Run in California, the Massanutten Mountain Massacre in Virginia, the Western States 100 in the Sierras, the Rattlesnake 50K in West Virginia, and others—I’d never heard of such a thing, except in one high school cross-country race I only read about, which I’ll get back to later. I know it has happened, but it must be rare. There’s something uncanny about our ability to avoid it, but that too is another story. What I did fear was a face-plant.

  About a mile up the trail, a sentry directed us onto that narrow service road—the one that presumably led to an old missile silo. At the top, I scanned the woods, and there it was: another relic, perhaps, of the defensive systems we’d built, whether to protect ourselves from the forces of nature or to fend off forces we’ve unleashed. All Nike silos, I had read, had long been either abandoned or converted to other uses. But, of course, our leaders were now building newer, more powerful—hopefully less apocalyptic—defenses, fumbling through the same search for balance between security and sustainability as runners choosing footwear for a very treacherous trail.

  Here the service road ended and another sentry directed us back onto the trail, which quickly got rougher. Again, I was glad to have my sturdy thirteen-ounce shoes. But it had never left my mind, in the twenty-four years since I’d launched Running Times on the third floor of a run-down townhouse in Washington, DC, that our prehistoric ancestors had probably gone their whole lives without shoes. And evidently, our anatomy today was still capable of that. In the third issue of the magazine, in 1977, we published the first of three articles about the Tarahumara natives of Mexico’s remote Copper Canyon—a tribe that lived much like our Neolithic ancestors and ran amazing distances over notoriously rough terrain with bare feet. Those native peoples were literally more in touch with the earth than we were. Their society was also clearly more sustainable (they had not participated in the escalating of nuclear risks or destabilizing of climate), and I wondered if that was more than just coincidence.

  At about nine miles, the trail began dropping down to a pass at Crampton’s Gap, where the biggest of the Civil War’s South Mountain fights had occurred. The AT hadn’t yet been blazed, and I tried to imagine the soldiers in their boots and heavy gear running over these rocks under fire. Men then were lighter and leaner than today’s well-fed, gym-buffed guys, but they must have been very tough. I thought of the story of Lawrence of Arabia, whose men lacked the brute force and fortifications of the Turks, but who had the advantage of great physical endurance and mobility—they could walk or run great distances, striking at railroads or forts and then disappearing into the desert. They had won convincingly. Most modern warfare had evolved from the practices of wielding weapons with our arms—spears, swords, longbows, and then guns and artillery, and the controls of tanks or fighter jets—so, not surprisingly, the tools of war are called “arms.” But the eighteenth-century French general Maurice de Saxe said the art of war is about legs, not arms. As Lawrence knew, the legs are both the conduit of information transmitted from feet to brain and the main means by which the body makes its way in the world.

  If that was true, I was amazed by how little I really knew about my own feet, after all they’d done. For years, I hadn’t even known for sure whether to land on the front or back ends of them! I
recalled an encounter I’d had thirty-six years ago when I ran my first marathon—the Cherry Tree Marathon in New York City, several years before the first New York Marathon—that had changed my relationship with my feet forever. I’d been competing in long-distance races for ten years at that point and had always run the way my high school cross-country coach had taught—on my toes, or the front halves of my feet. “Run on your toes!” the coach shouted the first time he saw me run. It felt awkward when I tried it (my natural tendency was to land on my heels), but he pointed out to me that that was what the school’s fastest 100-yard and 220-yard sprinters (who were also the star running backs on our football team) did, so I accepted that that’s what I should do, too.

  At about seventeen miles into that first marathon, I found myself catching up with a man I knew to be a legend in the New York running community—Ted Corbitt. Ted had run the marathon for the US in the 1952 Olympics and had been the national champion in 1954. He’d also been the founding president of the New York Road Runners Club and third president of the Road Runners Club of America. He was older now and not as fast as he’d once been, but I could hardly believe I was catching him. As I pulled alongside, Ted glanced at my feet and smiled, and said, “You know, you might run easier if you let yourself land on your heels.” It was as if I’d been spoken to by God. I took what he said to heart, and over the next several months, I let myself gradually return to the way I’d landed on my feet before that first day of cross-country in high school. My feet, ankles, legs, and back all became more relaxed, and ever since that day, I had felt more in touch—well, I was more in touch—with the ground I was running on. Years later, I would surmise that Ted Corbitt’s quiet suggestion had added twenty years to my running longevity.

  A few years after this JFK, I would hear about a study that found that over a four-year span, Harvard University cross-country runners who landed on their heels had higher rates of injury than those who landed on their forefeet—the very opposite of what my own experience had suggested. The result seemed counterintuitive, because in short events, from 100 meters to the mile or even 5,000 meters, where most top runners do land on their forefeet, the greater speed and longer strides required for those races requires greater biomechanical force, which puts greater stress on the legs and feet. In the slower, longer distance events, more of us land on our heels—exerting less force, and therefore presumably making ourselves less vulnerable to injury than we’d be if we ran like sprinters or 800-meter runners.

  The Harvard study seemed to belie my Ted Corbitt epiphany, but I thought I might have an explanation. The study’s results were for cross-country, which is run at neither very short (primarily forefoot) nor very long (primarily heel-strike) distances. At the college level, the races are run at in-between distances, around 10,000 meters, where both heel strikers and forefoot strikers can be competitive—and of course both were represented on the Harvard teams. But the training for cross-country requires a lot of interval work or other high-speed running. Those of the Harvard runners who were naturally inclined to run on their heels may therefore have been farther out of their element—pushing the envelope, biomechanically—than were the natural forefoot strikers. The stresses on feet and knees were therefore relatively greater for the heel strikers than for their forefoot-striking teammates, so their vulnerability to injury at these speeds was greater. If the same groups of runners had been training for marathons or ultras, with much less speed work but greater mileage, it would have been the forefoot strikers who were more out of their element—and the injury results would probably have been reversed.

  That explanation might beg the question of why long-distance runners shouldn’t take advantage of the greater power that can be deployed by running on their forefeet, just as sprinters or milers (or about a third of the Harvard cross-country runners) do. The answer was suggested by another study of the heel-versus-forefoot question (reported by David Carrier, the University of Utah persistence-running theorist), which found that while heel striking is slower, it is about 53 percent more energy efficient than running on the forefeet. In short-distance footraces, just as in short-distance car races, energy efficiency offers no advantage in performance. If a drag-race driver knew he had the fastest car, it wouldn’t matter to him if the car were so energy-squandering that it got only two miles to the gallon. Only its power and speed would matter. Similarly, if a sprinter or 800-meter runner gets only two-thirds the distance per one hundred calories of fuel that a heel striker gets, it doesn’t matter. But for an ultra-distance runner, it matters hugely. Sprinters have to run on their forefeet to maximize their power. Most ultrarunners land on their heels to maximize their staying power. I had been a successful cross-country runner in high school and college, but at the Cherry Tree Marathon, in my first attempt at a much longer distance, I was a prime candidate to learn how much more easily I could run this distance—and eventually run even farther—by reducing the force of my foot plant. Ted Corbitt, who a few years earlier had been the best ultrarunner in the country, knew that at a glance.

  Now, just short of ten miles into the JFK, touching down on my heels helped me keep my footing on the loose stones as I came down the hill into Crampton’s Gap. I passed the aid station without stopping and headed back up the other side of the pass, bracing myself psychologically for the rocky six-mile haul to Weverton Cliff.

  4

  Weverton Cliff

  The Art of Breathing and the Music of Motion: Do My Feet Have Eyes of Their Own?

  Two hours earlier, as we ran single-file up the trail from the National Road, there’d been a lot of that peculiar trail runner’s practice of carrying on conversation with the person right behind you—like what a not-fully-attentive bus driver might do with a garrulous passenger in the seat directly behind him. At the same time, though, like the bus driver watching out for a suddenly braking car ahead, you have to take care not to step on the heels of the runner just in front of you. I’d once inadvertently stepped on the heel of my main rival in a two-mile college track championship just before passing him on the last turn and going on to win by a couple of seconds, and while his shoe didn’t come off, I felt guilty about it ever after.

  By now, though, the field had stretched out so far that in some places I couldn’t see anyone ahead, and we were starting to feel the effort, so the chatting had stopped. I liked the silence. But there was also something disquieting about the leafy quiet of these woods. Nothing was visibly wrong, but I knew from my work at Worldwatch that the world’s forest cover—including large swaths of this very ecosystem—was disappearing at a rate that in evolutionary time is just a blink of the eye. I wondered, Will my grandchildren be able to run in these woods?

  I knew that soon, thank God, we would begin the descent to Weverton. It was a relief being able to know that—and not just a relief but, from an evolutionary standpoint, a gift. If measured not in brute power or speed but in ability to adapt to the enormous complexity of the physical world, we biped walkers and runners are still far more advanced than the sometimes catastrophically flawed systems of military security, food security, or communications security we’ve built. Humans, thanks to several million years of biological debugging, can anticipate the moments ahead—the trail ahead—in ways none of our inventions can. Our aircraft may be able to carry us hundreds of times faster than our legs can, but the planes can’t plan their own journeys. We are still their controllers.

  The AT here was up-and-down—no more big-hill climbing, since we were now on the spine of South Mountain, but a lot of smaller hills of a few hundred feet as the ridge undulated. I was breathing harder on these stretches, but also knew that over the years I’d learned to use breathing to gain competitive advantage, the way a Tour de France bicyclist would use his gears. A racing bike’s gears are more limited than the runner’s limitless repertory—indeed, all human technologies are still relatively crude simplifications of what evolution took thousands of centuries to perfect—but the principle is the same. One
of our most basic adaptations, in our journey through the millennia, has been to get as much distance per breath as we comfortably can. On some of the downhills, I fell into a spontaneous pattern of six strides per breath. Interestingly, five of the six steps would coast me through a single exhalation, in five little pumps in synch with the steps, followed by a single big in-breath:

  Out-out-out-out-out, In,

  Out-out-out-out-out, In,

  and so on, six steps for each full breath out and in. Then, as the downhill ended and the path swung back up, I needed more oxygen and shifted from a five-to-one to a two-to-one ratio:

  Out-out, In,

  Out-out, In.

  But of course, the undulations of the trail were not at all like a theme-park rollercoaster, where our modern engineers have made every circuit exactly the same. To begin with, this wasn’t a ride! But more important, the trail was endlessly irregular, no ten feet of it the same as any another. It was like life itself—no two ten-minute spans ever exactly the same. The runner has to adapt to continuous new experiences. And being at my best on the irregular terrain of the trail called for subtle adaptations of breathing. I might find that five-to-one downhill pattern shifting instead to one in which, while the exhalation still stretched over five steps, the inhalation broke into two quick intakes on a single step:

  Out-out-out-out-out, InIn,