by Ed Ayres
So, if minute after minute of running is hard to watch, what about hour after hour? And what about the poor souls who are actually doing it? That question of what we long-distance runners “think about” during those long hours on the road or trail has been occasionally explained as a fundamental difference between what experienced runners do when racing or engaging in training runs expressly intended to practice racing conditions, and the more easygoing runs people do just for fitness or fun, or to build a “base” to prepare your body for more ambitious workouts weeks later. When racing, the runner is like an airplane pilot (before the days of autopilot and drones) who is fully engaged in monitoring and adjusting the controls. In this so-called associative mode, the runner is monitoring and adjusting his breathing, heart rate, core temperature, hydration, perspiration, tempo, gait, available energy, electrolyte level, nutrient intake, flirtation with anaerobic or lactate threshold, and of course the conditions of his ambient environment: air temperature and humidity, precipitation, wind velocity and direction, and terrain—and anticipation of the road ahead. Some of it is done subconsciously and some with deep attentiveness.
On a more easygoing (or dissociative) run, he might think about his work or family, or replay a recent conversation in his head, or imagine what he’d like to have said in that conversation—or he might notice the wildlife around him with the same appreciation he would when going for a walk in Rock Creek Park or a hike in Yellowstone, or he might chat with a running partner about whether the Cubs will ever win the World Series.
That’s what runners think about on a long run: sometimes a continuous stream of data about the running itself, and other times a stream of anything from profundity to trivia about whatever.
That’s the conventional dichotomy: associative running and dissociative running. But I have another perspective, too—not a contradiction of that conventional dichotomy, but a different perspective on the real question being asked by the nonrunner. When someone asks “What do you think about?” what I think he or she is really getting at is: How do you make the time pass?
The answer, I eventually realized, is that it actually passes in brief, vivid moments. Moments are what make up the character of either a lifetime or a long-distance run, not endless days or hours. I have no idea whether every minute I’ve ever lived—or spent on the road or trail—is actually recorded somewhere deep in my brain. Once in a while, something will pop into my consciousness after decades, and I’m surprised to discover that it was there all along. But I really don’t care whether it’s the tip of a Freudian iceberg or just a random fragment floating in a mostly empty storage space.
What is important to me is a relatively small number of moments that I will always remember, whether in my running or in life at large. The rest is chaff. And what’s truly curious is that these moments add up to only a very small amount of time. If you asked me what I recalled of the past three hours of this run, the truth is that most of it was by now a blank. I recalled my kiss with Sharon at Keep Tryst . . . those few seconds of watching Frank Probst with his head bent over . . . the crowds at Weverton and Antietam (“Good job! Good job!”) and then seeing the cliffs and recalling the story of Killiansburg Cave . . . and looking for a potato at Snyder’s . . . and being passed by the young navy guy and the girl (that one might be a keeper) . . . and the Marine politely telling me I was bleeding (and saying “sir” to an old antiwar Quaker!—that one too a keeper). But all the actual moments I could consciously recall might add up to no more than twenty seconds.
And by the way, where was Frank now?
This reduction of a few hours to twenty seconds wasn’t because I was getting old. My memory now was as good as it had ever been—I was terrible with names, good with mental maps and big-picture views of the world, and really good with musical tunes—and I really didn’t know whether this distillation of time was genetic or cultural. It might have been conditioned by our entertainment media’s emphasis on highlights: sports highlights, news highlights, the high points of someone’s life summarized in a seventy-five-word obituary. Whatever the explanation, I figured that if I made a list of the moments that made up the significant memories of my forty-four years of competitive running until now, I’d be surprised if they added up to more than ten minutes:
High school cross-country, sophomore year, 1956: Riding to a meet in the bus, the guys loudly singing, “Bee-bop, ba-loo-la, She’s my ba-by!” and bouncing around in their seats. Why remember this? Maybe it was my initiation into the ancient adventure of being part of a band of runners who depended on each other for survival and sustenance—the persistence-hunting band.
High school track, same year: Passing Tom Sisko, the school’s ace distance runner, on the last turn of the fourth lap, on the way to a 4:49 mile. Passing Tom Sisko! Actually passing him took about three seconds. That mile took 289 seconds to run, but I can only remember those three.
Swarthmore College cross-country: Flying over a section of the home course in Crum Woods that was treacherously rocky and rooty, but that I felt I knew so well that I could run over it without fear. I broke the course record on that day, but have no memory of the finish—only of flying over those rocks and roots. Ten seconds at most.
Road running, 1970-something: Out in front of that twenty-mile race in a blizzard in Philadelphia, the snow blowing against my face and bare legs, feeling strong. Just a flash of a moment, like a photo.
Mountain trail, California, early summer: On an easy training run along a ridge near the Leona Divide, I came to a very narrow section of trail where dead scrub-oak leaves had accumulated along the edge of the path. My left foot came down almost on top of a rattlesnake, which had been well camouflaged by the leaves. I may even have grazed it. I had always wondered what would happen if I stepped on a rattlesnake on the run. Which would be faster, the strike of the snake or the movement of my striding leg away from its reach? What happened here—my mind slowed the game and although it took only a fraction of a second, I saw it in clear detail—was that the snake, caught by surprise and not coiled, thrashed left and right looking for its assailant, and by then my leg was in the clear. I can still replay that moment and see the snake thrashing and hear its sudden rattling. A fraction of one second.
The US 50 Mile Championship, New York City, 1976: Rounding the last bend of the Central Park loop course, seeing the finish banner a few hundred yards ahead and knowing that if I could hold my place I’d win the bronze medal—a national championship medal! Here, for the first time in twenty years of running and with that banner in sight, I broke a rule I’d always dutifully observed—Don’t look back! Maybe coaches had started hectoring their runners about that after that dramatic moment in the British Empire Games of 1954 when Roger Bannister and John Landy dueled in an epic mile that was heard on radio by a hundred million people worldwide. Track was big that year. Bannister was the first man to break the four-minute barrier, but Landy soon became the second, dramatically breaking Bannister’s world record. On the last turn of the showdown, Landy was ahead by a step. He looked over his left shoulder to see where Bannister was—and as he turned his head, Bannister darted past his blind spot on the right to seize the one-stride lead he needed to win. It was the ambush heard around the world—because Landy had looked back. But for me, what mattered now was not just holding third place but capturing the moment as I did it. I didn’t want to wait until I crossed the finish line to know that I had, incredibly, beaten the guy behind me, Steve Molnar, even though Molnar could probably outsprint me if he was close. Molnar had recently done a 2:22 marathon, nine minutes faster than my PR, and not bad for those days. But on this day I’d passed him right around the marathon point, twenty-three miles back, and I wasn’t going to capitulate to any fear of being taken by surprise, not now! I wanted to feel the thrill the whole last two hundred yards to the finish and have that to keep. So I looked back to see: Was Molnar there? And he wasn’t. It turned out that he was less than two minutes behind me, just out of sight arou
nd the last bend, but that was enough: From around that bend, even Roger Bannister couldn’t have caught me now. And ever after, I would be glad I’d finally broken that rule, because that would prove to be the fastest ultra I ever ran. And on my mental book shelf, it would always have a special place. Out of the five hours and forty-six minutes it took me, what I remembered of it now—easing past Steve Molnar at around twenty-seven miles, then three hours later kicking into an endorphin high and running the final two hundred yards feeling that whole last stretch forever—added up to almost a minute.
There were other moments I’d kept. But out of forty-four years and perhaps twenty thousand hours of training and racing, the moments I carried consciously would probably add up to only a few minutes. I travel light.
That’s not to say there aren’t important categories of experiences in which hundreds of hours of training build judgment and skill. I specifically recalled only a couple of face-plants, the first one during a solo thirty-one miler on a hot summer day in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland—not far from here, actually—where, as my hand instinctively flew forward to break the fall, the water bottle strapped to the hand hit the ground first and the lid popped off, splashing all my water into the dirt. Fortunately I rescued myself by finding a patch of ripe blueberries. The other face-plant was that one back at Weverton, three hours earlier in the race. But I’d had other falls I don’t specifically remember, and hundreds of near-falls, all of which added to my skill.
During the past year of training for this JFK, I had developed a perspective regarding how the time passes that I knew could be useful—maybe even vital—in the final miles. The way I saw it, the hundreds of memorable moments that make up an individual lifetime, and the millions that make up the history of a civilization, constitute the very heart of a vital person or society. These are all moments of what Buddhists call “mindful” experience, in which you are fully in the present. These present moments are slowed or even captured to be with you forever, like that image of runners on an ancient Grecian urn—running and yet still there, at least until someone drops the urn! “When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain,” John Keats wrote of such a captured moment, in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”2
But of course, there are two other broad categories of captured time that pose a great challenge to how mental energy is used. Too often, “dwelling on the past” constitutes a huge waste of energy on regret, resentment, or emotional scarring that refuses to heal. And too often, apprehensions or fears about the future can inhibit or cripple one’s capability to move strongly into the future. To selectively deploy the remembered highlights of past life as instructive inspiration or edification for future action, though, can add great strength to the effort. Likewise, to deploy well-guided anticipation of the course can help us to avert fateful stumbles and falls, the way our eye-brain coordination can look several strides down the trail and direct our feet faster than the conscious mind can decide where to put them.
Somewhere along the way, with still over four miles to go to Dam 4 and about a half-marathon to the finish, I tripped and stumbled briefly before catching my balance. The towpath out here had more fallen leaves on it than I’d seen back around Keep Tryst or Antietam—so maybe I tripped on a root. In a flash, I thought of the incredibly complex set of neurological responses that were put into play in just that one quick rebalancing. Maybe I was being just a bit too dissociative now, but I was reminded again of John Kennedy’s conviction about how closely linked the brain and body must be. To avoid stumbles, whether momentary or monumental, was not just an autonomic physical balancing act, but a critical skill at connecting the mindful present with the remembered past and anticipated future. A few years after this race, I would learn that a major, multi-year study had been undertaken to measure the effects of cardiovascular fitness on intelligence. As reported by Futurity.org, a study of 1.2 million young men, conducted by Maria Alberg of the University of Gothenberg in Sweden and Nancy Pederson of the University of Southern California, found that boys who increased their cardiovascular fitness from ages fifteen to eighteen—by participating in cross-country running or skiing—scored significantly higher on tests of intelligence than those who didn’t. Presumably, the same result would be found for girls. The authors found that “in every measure of cognitive functioning they analyzed—from verbal ability to logical performance to geometrical perception to mechanical skills—average scores increased according to aerobic fitness.” The study was published in the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition in 2009.3
When I eventually learned about that study, I assumed that if it got any media attention at all (it might be a bit too sticky for editors to be comfortable with), the discussion would quickly focus on the implications for schools and standardized tests. But by the time of this JFK race, I was already inclined to suspect that a far more important implication of the body/brain connection relates to how it affects our abilities to recover from stumbles—not just on rocks or roots, but over the barriers we have erected between ourselves and the future we have put in jeopardy. The mental capacities we need most now are more acute and far-reaching skills at seeing what awaits us over the horizon or around the bends ahead.
12
Dam Number 4
Seeing Around Bends: We Came, We Envisioned . . . We Got Disconnected
That last five miles of the towpath is the longest and loneliest five miles of the entire JFK 50—even longer, I guessed, than the last miles on the road were going to seem after leaving the dam, because on the road I would at least sense the finish edging closer. But out here on this remote stretch of the river, I was no longer noticing any bicyclists or hikers around, and the runners were ever farther apart, and the minutes were feeling endless. Instead of the hours turning into moments, they felt like months.
I was now watching vigilantly for the dam. This would be one of the five dams that had been built in the early nineteenth century to divert water from the river to the C&O Canal, and—like the land on either bank—had been fought over in the Civil War. The next dam back down the river, Number 5, if I wasn’t mistaken, was the one that the Confederates had tried to blow up by planting explosives in its base late one night. I had a faint memory of how Number 4 would appear around a long bend in the river, far ahead on the left: a pale blue-grey impressionist brushstroke across the water. Beyond my trick of remembering how good running can feel, two other things kept me going: envisioning that dam, and—well, patience. I know “patience” doesn’t sound so much like a practiced skill as just an absence of urgency. But by now I knew that patience, far from being a willingness to go mentally slack, is in fact a form of deep attentiveness.
That kind of attentiveness could not be passive—it couldn’t be like those half-asleep guards who keep getting ambushed in action movies. If I allowed anxiety to sneak up on me, it would go right to my gut. But if I could clearly identify the causes of the anxiety before it got to me, it would usually retreat—like a bad dream that fades when you open your eyes to the light of morning.
Waking up, to me, always meant a new beginning. So, that’s what an embrace of patience was—a new beginning. It was a childlike look at the world with wide-open receptivity to whatever adventure was coming my way. I still have a memory—one of those moments that make up a lifetime—of kneeling in the woods near my childhood home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, staring in wonder at a jack-in-the-pulpit. I’d been told I must never pick one of those, and I never did. I stared at it for a minute, then ran back to the house to tell my mother what I’d found! Half a century later, I looked that place up on Google Maps and found that the spot where I’d knelt was now the middle of Interstate 78, a main route for trucks carrying cargo from Pennsylvania through the Holland Tunnel into New York. Within my lifetime, the astonishing ecology of those woods, which took hundreds of millennia to evolve, had been obliterated by my species and covered with the exhumed remains (asphalt) of even more ancient forests. My civilization was t
oo impatient, and it was a struggle not to succumb to the urgency. But to get impatient at this point in a race, with a long way yet to go, would be a mistake. I don’t have any quarrel with progress; I like true progress (I am a child of evolution!) and was trying to make good progress down the path, but not in a hell-bent way that would backfire.