The Longest Race

by Ed Ayres

  So I now had to call on a mental trick I’d learned, a sort of new application of the Sheehan mantra: to regard any situation that tempts me to abandon my patience as a new beginning. Listen again. The impulse to get anxious or frustrated or angry, or to quit, is a thing that happens when you feel you should be very close to the end of something—like the long haul to this dam!—and not being there yet can lead to panicky or reckless decisions. I’d once read that prisoners are more likely to attempt an escape when their scheduled release is only days away than when they have many years left. The trick is to change the perspective and see the moment not as near-the-end but as a new beginning, like the moment when you’re standing still at the starting line of a new race. Patience is rebirth.

  I know this might sound like pop psychology, a trick of words. But the fact is, it was now past one o’clock in the afternoon and I’d been running for over six hours straight and hadn’t yet fallen on my face (well okay, there’d been that one time on the AT, but I’d gotten back up), and arguably I couldn’t still be out here, still truckin’, as we used to say in the ’60s, if I hadn’t actually had quite a few new beginnings. You can’t just put the human body on cruise control and drift into a half-sentient state as if you were driving on I-78 at 3:00 AM. You have to be attentive, like that boy I once was, looking with wide-eyed wonder at that endangered jack-in-the-pulpit, or like a Buddhist or Quaker in meditation, who is very still and might even look asleep, but is deeply aware.

  I had experienced new beginnings each time I passed a landmark on the course—at the South Mountain trailhead, at the turn from the unexplained service road back to the Appalachian Trail, at the start down the Weverton switchbacks, and each time I had departed from an aid station, reinvigorated by a good swig of water or electrolyte drink. Each time, it was a reminder to compose myself, quiet the turmoil, relax, get into rhythm, find perfect balance. That’s work! But it’s efficient work, consuming minimal mental or physical fuel. If done well, it leaves no idle hands, no energy to be squandered on anxiety.

  Now, as I watched for the dam, I could see another dimension of patience as well—or maybe it was just the same dimension in another light. A few weeks prior to the race, I’d had a phone conversation with Bernd Heinrich, whose book Racing the Antelope had just been published. I don’t recall Heinrich’s exact words, but it was undoubtedly the memory of that conversation that had provoked the fantasy I’d had back on the AT about wondering if I might spot Heinrich himself, around one of the next bends on the trail. What I did recall was my realization that one of the signal attributes of the early persistence hunter had to have been his capacity to pursue an animal even when it had temporarily disappeared from sight. It also gave me an instant sense of recognition: When I’m competing in a trail race, an essential part of what sustains my motivation is the knowledge that when I go around the next bend into a long straightaway, I’ll again catch sight of the guys I’m trying to catch. I can’t see them right now, but I know they’re there. Whereas a big cat might give up the chase fairly quickly after the quarry is no longer visible, the human would keep pursuing. This “out-of-sight but not out-of-mind” idea seemed to add a critical consideration to the running-man theory of our species’ origins.

  As a careful empirical scientist, Heinrich hesitated to speculate about what may have been in the minds of those persistence hunters. But it seems to me, as a latter-day hominid who has run several times the circumference of our planet and had ample time to let my mind run ahead of me, that what must have kept the early hunter pursuing when his eyes no longer saw the prey was some form of mental construct that temporarily substituted for the optical one—like the digital file of a photo. The first such constructs may have been faint and short-lived, like some mutant form of the dreaming we know other mammals do—incipient daydreams-on-the-run that proved over a thousand generations to offer a distinct survival advantage. The hunters who kept chasing sometimes brought home the meat that the less persistent ones could not. This mental surrogate for optical guidance could well have become the basis of the cognitive envisioning that characterized the emergence of human consciousness.

  Top athletes often say that one of the keys to success in sport is “visualization”—imagining, as you practice, the performance you aspire to achieve when the real test comes. Coaches try to teach this technique, but in truth it’s largely instinctive. I have watched young boys, who have no coach, playing basketball on a playground: “I’m Kobe! I look LeBron in the eye . . . I blow past him, I score!” When I was that age, before Kobe or LeBron or even Michael Jordan was born, I stood in my back yard in Westfield and declared, “I’m Billy Pierce, and I’m on the mound with a one-run lead against the Yankees! Whoever wins this game wins the pennant! Bases are loaded, bottom of the ninth! Mickey Mantle at bat! Two out, three balls, two strikes! I look at Lollar! He wants the curve! I shake it off! I’m going with my fast ball! Lollar is shaking his head, No! No! I wind up, I feel the power in my arm, I deliver, Mantle swings . . . HE’S OUT!”

  It’s not just kids who do this, but athletes at the highest level. John Parker recalled that Bill Rodgers, who won the New York Marathon and the Boston Marathon four times each, could still benefit by envisioning a runner who in sheer leg speed was even faster than he—such as Henry Rono, the Kenyan who in 1978 broke the world records for the 10,000 meters, 5,000 meters, and 3,000 meters. “I can remember doing interval workouts and thinking of Henry Rono’s spectacular speed doing quarter miles or halves,” Rodgers told Parker.1

  At some point in a young athlete’s growth, the fantasy may shift from imitating an already accomplished star to envisioning himself or herself as a star-to-be; it may move from an imaginary present to an anticipated future—from playing to planning. When this happens, the athlete is reenacting the experience of the persistence hunter. Somewhere out there becomes sometime. And eventually, someday. As a global society, we sometimes seem to have forgotten all about the someday that environmentalists called the “seventh generation,” or simply “the human future.” Maybe this is an area where our leaders really could learn from our athletes—not in showing how tough they are at “fighting” crime or terrorism or bloated government, but in how capable they are of envisioning the real threats we face and opportunities we may still have.

  If the persistence hunter had an evolving ability to “see” around the bend in physical space, and therefore in time, then a critical part of looking ahead in time, and ultimately of successful envisioning and planning, is patience. Impatience meant trying to jump ahead to the end-game, when spotting the bend ahead was just the beginning. For the early hominid, to jump ahead would have required a technology he didn’t have—a helicopter or Humvee—and he wasn’t wired for the consequences of that jump. And neither are we, his descendants, even if we do have the technological means.

  For us, jumping to the prey without engaging in the hunt meant missing a million critical signs on the trail. It meant building nuclear power plants without first finding long-term, earthquake-proof storage for radioactive waste that will remain deadly for centuries. It meant producing electricity without first grasping the impacts of the carbon dioxide emitted from coal-burning power plants. Coal wasn’t just overheating the planet; it was killing people directly. A few years after this 2001 race, the American Lung Association would report that emissions from coal-burning power plants were killing thirteen thousand Americans each year. And now I recalled that on that steep descent to Weverton, there were signs on the switchbacks—placed by the Forest Service—warning hikers not to take shortcuts because shortcutting triggers destructive erosion. On the scale of our civilization, we were ignoring or not noticing such signs. Our ability to build shortcut technologies had never given us sanction to destroy the terrain we were shortcutting.

  I’ve discerned an intriguing irony in the capacities we have given ourselves to rush, take shortcuts, leap the bends—and miss the signs of what lies ahead. As our technological capabilities expand t
he powers of our legs with wheels or wings—or of our eyes with telescopes, our balance with gyroscopes, our arms with artillery, our ears with radio and TV, our memories with smartphones—the avalanche of poorly digested or undigested or contaminated data is blinding us to any integrated picture of our surroundings. The hunter-gatherer observed a thousand signs in every kilometer of the territory he was traversing, and to survive he had to know his role in it. We, overwhelmed with artificial distraction—spectator sports, celebrity, political posturing, gossip, scandal, soap operas, sitcoms, newscasts of the latest shootings and crashes, mindless text messages, and incessant deceptive advertising—are more and more blinded to what lies ahead.

  For me, thanks to what I learned in my work with the environmental scientists and futurists, the signs of that blindness were staggering. The most memorable sign had come almost exactly nine years ago, on November 18, 1992, although it didn’t hit me until several days later, when someone at my Worldwatch office gave me a copy of a press release. “A Threat to Human Survival,” read the headline, and news editors around the world evidently must have rolled their eyes. The release had been issued by an organization called the Union of Concerned Scientists, under the title World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. For those who bothered to read it, the document stated: “We, the undersigned senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in the stewardship of the earth and life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated. . . . Humans and the natural world are on a collision course.”2

  The document described a deterioration of life systems that was rapidly worsening—as manifested by collapsing ocean fish populations, freshwater shortages in at least eighty countries, and the then-incipient prospect of global warming—a prospect that many of these scientists had already described as likely to raise sea level and bring city-obliterating mega storms in the coming decades. These trends, said the authors, “may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner we know now.”3

  On the day this story was supposed to hit the front pages of the Sunday papers and TV talk shows, I had been out for a long run on the wooded trails of Washington, DC’s Rock Creek Park. Getting out for a two- or three-hour trail run was still my form of Sunday meditation and reflection, a respite from the tensions and turmoil of the work week. I had seen nothing about this report in the Sunday Washington Post when I sat down to read it after my run.

  To busy news editors, the World Scientists’ Warning might have looked, at a quick glance, like another of those periodic “The End Is Near” prophesies displayed from time to time by bearded old men with hand-lettered signs on street corners. But this statement was quite different: It was a carefully worded document signed by more than 1,575 of the world’s leading biologists, chemists, physicists, ecologists, and earth scientists, including 101 Nobel Prize winners. Among its signers were the renowned astrophysicists Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking; evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O. Wilson; population biologist Paul Ehrlich; economist Wassily Leontief; chemist Linus Pauling; DNA pioneer James Watson (co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA); and astronomer James Van Allen (for whom the earth’s Van Allen Belt is named).

  In its implications for the future of civilization, the World Scientists’ Warning could well have been considered one of the most momentous manifestos ever presented to the public—on a par with Darwin’s Origin of Species, or the American Declaration of Independence, or Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Yet, it was ignored—or perhaps knowingly blacked out—by the major media. The day after the release, it seems not to have been reported in a single US newspaper. A front-page story in the New York Times that day recounted the struggle of a Muslim family to survive in war-torn Sarajevo. But the struggle of all humanity, present and future, to survive on an ecologically torn planet? The Times editors said they had not considered the story “newsworthy.” The same curious response was offered by the Washington Post, the paper of record for every sort of crash. But the possibility that civilization itself might be headed for a crash?

  That hadn’t been an isolated moment of media amnesia, or misplaced press releases in busy news rooms. That same year, the first report of the world’s top climate scientists from more than a hundred nations, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had been largely ignored or pushed to back pages as well. Then, in 1996, there was another momentous press release. This one, from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, announced the results of a national survey of scientists finding that a large majority of American biologists believed we were now in the midst of the largest mass extinction of species since the dinosaurs died out sixty-five million years ago—a staggering wake-up call to the increasingly threatened species Homo sapiens. That story, too, was largely ignored. The following year, when the United States was given an opportunity to provide global leadership in taking a small first step toward coping with the climate threat by endorsing the Kyoto Climate Treaty in 1997, the US Senate voted to oppose it, 95 to zero. If the mainstream media had given that treaty and what it meant just one-tenth of the coverage they’d given to the O. J. Simpson murder trial two years earlier, the ultimate effect might have been to save a hundred million lives in the years to come.

  There were times when it seemed that quite possibly the most important single value of long-distance running for me was the reassurance it gave me that I do not have to be swept up by the systemic madness and myopia that seem to have seized control of my world. This towpath, out here past mile post 83, still had a little wildness, which allowed me to stay connected to a little of my own wildness. I was able at least to keep my balance, at a time when the civilized world seemed to have been blindfolded by thieves and sent speeding toward a wreck.

  For all its loneliness, part of what had given this footpath such a hold on my heart, even now as my legs grew weak, was that no motor vehicles were allowed on it. When I reached the road in a few minutes, there would be cars. But now, as the dam appeared suddenly, far upriver to the left—a little less imposing than I had imagined, the brushstroke a little less impressionistic and more hard-edged—I felt a relief and an uplift. The envisioned goal had finally become an optically visible one—the mental surrogate transformed to a physical reality, and I felt a needed sense of reconnection with what I was hoping to do.

  13

  Country Road

  The Blessing and Curse of Competition: Why Vince Lombardi Was Dead Wrong

  Just before the dam, the course took a hard right off the towpath onto a narrow country road. As I hit the pavement, I could feel my competitiveness intensifying, the low-fuel warning light in my head notwithstanding. Maybe I was a little too much like one of those supply-side zealots who want to “drill, drill, drill!” despite the warnings of both petroleum geologists and climate scientists that we are nearing the economic and ecological limits of oil consumption. It may have been partly because the remaining distance in the race—eight miles once you get to the top of the hill up from the dam—was now in the same range as most of the road races we ran in the 1960s and ’70s, when the Road Runners Club of America was taking hold. So, eight miles now felt like, OK, it’s race time. And partly, the feeling was triggered by going onto pavement, which is faster than dirt or gravel. My feet and legs had a lingering muscle-memory of how fast I can go on asphalt if I really get into the zone. The fastest ultra I had ever run was that one in New York City a quarter-century ago, in which I had captured the moment of the final two hundred yards forever, on the slightly rolling paved loop road through Central Park. This rural Maryland road, if you replaced the buildings around Central Park with open fields (would those apartment and hotel owners mind?), was a little like that.

  Just a couple of minutes up the road, though, I heard footsteps from behind and another Marine went past me, fast. I hadn’t
seen him when I looked back at the dam turnoff, and he must have hit that climb at the start of the road like it was San Juan Hill. It was Tom Hethcoat, one of the guys from Quantico. There were at least fourteen men from the two Marines teams in the race, but, except for the one who’d politely informed me that I was bleeding, I hadn’t seen any of them in the past four hours. Most of them had to be far ahead of me, because they’d gone racing up that first hill from Boonsboro six hours ago, and I hadn’t seen hide or hair of them since. On the other hand, in an ultra you can sometimes pass people at an aid station—or be passed—and not realize it because you’re focused on getting your bottle refilled. Or, you can pass people but be so in the zone that you don’t notice who they are. I had expected to reel in some of those guys eventually, but . . . instead, here was Tom Hethcoat pulling away from me.

  At the same time, I felt a little spunk coming back into me. I grew up in a country where competitiveness is a virtue right up there with godliness. There were countless Horatio Alger–like stories about the kid who didn’t have quite the physical gifts of some other kids, but who became a star because he had such a “fire in his belly.” CEOs love sales or marketing executives who have that fire; it’s how sports heroes become the models for the free-market economy. And on one level, I love it too; I love to race against other guys.

  But on another level, I know that competitiveness takes a heavy toll. What it takes to be a serious competitor consumes a staggering amount of time and energy—a lot of your life. And you don’t really have any choice in the matter; it’s compulsory, even if the compulsion comes from inside your own body and brain. I couldn’t decide not to train and race hard. Clarence DeMar once commented, “Most fans think that I’m as tied up with running as a smoker is with his weed or a drinker with his liquor, and that for me to quit would cause nervous and physical disaster. Unless I lose a leg, become bedridden or go to jail, I never intend to find out whether this is right.”1