by Ed Ayres
At forty-two miles, with just a little over an hour to go, was this any time to be feeling ambivalence about competition? Experienced athletes and coaches all know that emotional hesitancy is an invitation to failure. And military officers know that it can be fatal. And maybe that’s a valid observation for twenty-year-old athletes or soldiers. But for a sixty-year-old man balancing the emotional pulls of family, country, and world, as well as the management of his own body and soul, ambivalence goes with the territory. I knew that even as a youth I’d probably have been a disaster as a soldier because I’d have asked too many questions and wanted to discuss the societal ramifications of too many of the orders I was given. As an older man, I was chronically in danger of being a disaster on every front I cared about. Here I was, closing in on the biggest goal of my life, daring to question what it really meant.
When our little Elizabeth was eight or nine, she played on a junior soccer team one summer, and when the girls lost five or six straight games and started feeling like losers, and then their coach quit because he said they weren’t winners, it broke my heart. Maybe that kind of reaction, shared by others, helped account for the now popular practice, by road and trail race organizers, of saying that in a running race, everyone is a winner. Yet, that didn’t feel quite right to me either. Giving a medal to everyone who ran a race, as was now common practice, seemed to me to devalue the symbol. In the 1950s and ’60s, medals had generally been awarded in running events only at championships, and only three medals were awarded for each event. The first time I won a medal, in my junior year of high school, it was an indescribable thrill—and now I still had that medal in a cabinet, even though almost everything else from high school, including my diploma, had long since been lost. Today and tonight, everyone who finished the JFK would get a medal, and it would be a big mother, five times the size of that little bronze memento of a forgotten high school mile, but it just wouldn’t be the same.
The difference between getting that third medal and finishing “out of the running” in fourth could be gut-wrenching. There’d been that memorable time when I’d gotten the third place medal at the national 50-Mile in 1976. And I vividly recalled what happened to Don Kardong, one of the great marathoners of the time, that same year. Don had experienced both sides of that excruciating third-versus-fourth place divide, in the most epic way one could imagine. First was the US Olympic marathon trial for the 1976 games. The trials race was staged in America’s distance-running mecca, Eugene, Oregon, and forty-nine men who had qualified for the trial were entered. By the last few miles, four were still in contention. Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers were out in front, matching stride for stride. Don Kardong and Tony Sandoval, who happened to be close friends, were running stride for stride in the race for third. It seemed clear by now that Shorter and Rodgers had a lock on the first two places, which meant one of the two friends running third and fourth would make the team and the other would not. There was probably nothing that either of these guys could want more for his friend than to see him make the Olympic team—and nothing more that he could want for himself. I can only imagine what a remote MRI of Don Kardong’s brain would have displayed as he realized that he was the stronger of the two that day and was going to leave his friend behind and go get that third place. What that scan would have registered—the storm of simultaneous realization, ambivalence, thrill, regret, and unhesitating resolve—might have blown the circuits in the machine! Don made the Olympic team. His friend went home. And yet, fate was not finished with Don. In the Montreal Olympics, he went on to run the race of his life—and finished fourth. I don’t think even God had a laugh that day. That was also the day that the iconic runner Steve Prefontaine, whose dreams of Olympic gold in Munich had been upset by the tragedy of the Israeli athlete massacre, and whose disappointment there had been transformed into an even more compelling resolve to win the 10,000 meters in Montreal, was conspicuously absent from that city—having died in a car accident.
My awe at Don Kardong’s epic battles for the bronze might seem inconsistent with my distress at seeing a group of young girls feeling like losers. I don’t claim to be consistent. But I also see a significant difference between a competition that always ends with a binary win-or-lose outcome, and one that offers many degrees of success. A fourth-place finish in the Olympic marathon is bittersweet at worst, and in most eyes it is a tremendous success. Maybe my problem is not that I’m inconsistent about competitiveness, but that I really am ambivalent. Competition, like technology—to paraphrase that long-ago mission statement from the scientists at IR&T—can enrich our life or poison it; it can bring great feelings of achievement, but can also make young girls feel like dorks.
I should mention that after the sore-loser coach of Elizabeth’s soccer team quit, a couple of the players’ fathers stepped in, and the girls began winning and went all the way to the league’s championship game. They lost that last game but went home with great feelings of achievement. In the end, it wasn’t winning that had been necessary for success, but the satisfaction of having survived and bounced back from a thoughtless put-down.
We Americans have been exposed to an almost-never-challenged doctrine of competition as the key to success in all things. Whether it’s in school, business, sport, or the pursuit of national supremacy, we’re taught that the goal is to win. I wondered how many times I’d heard a political or business leader quote football coach Vince Lombardi’s revered doctrine, “winning isn’t everything . . . it’s the only thing.” I’d never heard anyone challenge that, except maybe the parents of Joan Benoit, who recalled in her book Running Tide that, when she was a young girl, her parents did not want their children to be consumed by competitiveness: “Winning was neither everything nor the only thing. It was one of many things,” Joan wrote of her parents’ perspective. “None of us viewed life through a tunnel formed by a single, all-consuming passion.”2 Diversity of interests in her early development must have served Joan well. Evidently in accord with the elder Benoits, I think Lombardi was mistaken. What troubled me was that if the only goal is to win, it is also to make other people lose. But for most runners, I doubt that “winning” or “losing” is even relevant. That may be why that question “Did you win?” can be so disconcerting. Most of the participants in a road or trail race do not expect to either win or lose. Some runners and coaches have gotten around the win-lose problem by suggesting that what you’re doing in a footrace is “competing with yourself.” I don’t like that phrase, which sounds slightly schizophrenic, but for thousands of runners, I think it’s closer to what’s really happening, because one of the legacies of our evolution has been internal tugs-of-war between different drives. Back in the days when troubled people who could afford it went to see psychoanalysts, it was said that our ids, egos, and superegos were all competing for control of our behavior. Psychoanalysis has since been left in the dustbin of obsolescent science, but evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists have confirmed that different parts of the brain developed at different stages of our evolution and sometimes really do have conflicting holds on us. Traits that were valuable at an earlier time (such as accumulating fat to get through the winter, for example) don’t serve the same function now and can cause a lot of trouble.
In popular media and culture (the sports news, business news, cooking shows, American Idol, college admissions, presidential politics, spelling bees, the Oscars), competitiveness is uncritically regarded as a virtue, and especially an American virtue. For a lot of conservatives, it’s an ideology. For economists, it’s a virtual religion. If you are insanely competitive, rather than be urged to seek counseling, you will be admired and sought out—by coaches, political strategists, and executive search committees.
When the embrace of competitiveness is that absolute, though, I think a little ambivalence is actually healthier—and may, paradoxically, provide a competitive advantage! The secret is that 95 percent of what happens in the competition was already determined by the time you went t
o the starting line—some of it over years, some over the last eight months. And how successfully you lay the groundwork for that 95 percent depends very much on your mental and emotional flexibility. If you’re so fanatical that you can never take a day off—say, when you’re grieving a loss, or job searching, or sick—you’re not likely to even last through the years. And if you’re so rigidly adherent to a particular method of training that you’re not open to fresh ideas, you’re not only at the top of your learning curve but probably over the hill. A big test of how well you can do at age sixty depends on how well you can keep experimenting and discovering as if you were sixteen.
By the time of the 2001 JFK, I firmly believed that living with ambivalence—often feeling torn, and always asking new questions—is, in fact, an essential part of being an enduring individual or society. It begins with how we evolved. Our Paleolithic ancestors, to survive in a hot African or Asian environment, had to develop a cardiovascular system that could enable them to go long distances in the heat while meeting competing demands on the available blood supply within their own bodies. The muscles needed the blood to stay fueled and oxygenated for as long as it took to run a wild horse to exhaustion, which could be hours. But because the sun was radiating heat and the body was generating even more heat by metabolizing the meat of the last horse the hunting party had killed, some of the same blood supply serving the muscles was also being called on to carry excess heat to the skin, to be dumped off into the air. It was a routine internal tug-of-war, like the tension between a man sitting on a couch during the football post-season with beer cans and empty chip bags piled up around him, and his wife or girlfriend asking him in the middle of a critical fourth-quarter drive to please take out the trash. Can you watch a touchdown and take out the trash at the same time? The Paleolithic runner could hunt and get rid of waste at the same time.
An orange signboard on the shoulder of the road ahead indicated five miles to go in the race. It was past two o’clock, at this time of year only a little over two hours before it would start to get dark, and it felt like the temperature had dropped several degrees since I left the towpath. I felt a chill but reminded myself that I was lucky it wasn’t hot. I recalled the time when, as a spring chicken of forty-nine, I ran the Badwater 137—a 137-mile midsummer race across Death Valley and up Mt. Whitney. The rules required that each runner have a support vehicle, which was prohibited from moving along with the runner, but could leapfrog every three miles or so and stop for the crew to provide ice water or sustenance as the runner went by. In those days, I still hadn’t quite figured out how to fuel for an ultra. I really don’t know what I was thinking, but at one of the stops I decided to eat a slice of bread. When I reached the crew again three miles later, I still had almost the entire slice uneaten in my hand, and it had turned to toast.
Yet, in a whole day of running steadily across a desert in temperatures over 120 degrees and no shade, miraculously I didn’t turn to toast. The human body, if properly cared for, is astonishingly proficient at maintaining ecological balances—between fueling and waste, between oxygen delivery to the muscles and heat-transfer to the skin, or between resting very tired legs and remaining upright. At least I knew that homeostasis—the maintaining of balances between competing physiological demands—is basic to optimal performance, whether you’re asleep, watching TV, running slowly across a desert, or heading for the finish of a fifty-mile race. Whether it’s the work of the blood, hormones, left and right brains, or new and old neural pathways, competing demands are a part of us from birth to death.
Socially, as well, those tugs-of-war and the resulting sense of being conflicted, or ambivalent, are a part of our inherited nature. The Darwinian proclivity of the human male to disseminate his genes competes with the female’s instinct to hold a mate who is committed to bringing home food and protecting the family. Archetypal tensions, between male and female, young and old, individual and community, play out in the never-ending dynamics of society at large.
How well a society manages its inherently competing forces is a major determinant of how successfully—or how long—it will endure. If competing factions take inflexible positions, the result can be pervasive dysfunction or war. I thought of Paul Shepard’s theory about the frustrated instinct to hunt and its transmogrification into the hunting down of other men. In the history of civilization, as Jared Diamond and others have argued, the most inflexible position humanity ever took was its adoption of domestication and consequent abandonment of the wild. It was not just animals and plants that were domesticated and tamed, but ourselves. I recalled a comment the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset made: that because hunting is a “deep and permanent yearning in the human condition,” there is a chronic fury in all people to whom it is denied.3 To run well—and replay that hunt—is to quell that fury.
And more to the point, in these last few miles, to quell the fury would be to run well. I needed, again, to slow the turbulence.
I was old enough to know that there are very few ways that an older athlete can compete on even terms, not to say advantageous terms, with a younger one. In a sprint or a leap or other anaerobic feat, there are none. And in an endurance event, almost none. There are two ways, though, that it can sometimes happen. First, the older runner can take advantage of having had more opportunity to review the evolutionary and cultural history of our kind, and thereby to recognize what the competing impulses within us are, and how to manage them for optimal results. As I pulled even with another runner, who as of that moment had run forty-six miles in exactly the same time as I had, I thought that what could make the small difference that decides our competition in the end is my ability to look at this younger runner—whom I didn’t know, but now had a uniquely shared experience with—not as an adversary but as a companion in adventure. It seemed counterintuitive, but what my experience told me was that in its impact on blood chemistry, it could be the difference. Adrenaline would not be helpful now.
Possibly more important was that, while most of the miles I had run in my life had been solitary, some of the most enjoyable and memorable times had been training runs with companions: the kids I’d coached at the George School, teammates at Swarthmore, and my DC neighbor Bob Harper, the guy who first told me about the JFK. Bob and I had even done a practice run on the AT from South Mountain to Weverton once, and—sure enough—I had fallen on the rocks! But particularly significant, from this standpoint, were my runs with a fellow Swarthmore alum, Bob Zoellick, who was a grad student in Washington when I was working with Ted Taylor at IR&T. Bob Z. and I had a little rivalry going with our respective marathon times, and sometimes ran workouts together in Rock Creek Park in the early evening. Years later, I would realize that Bob and I were political adversaries (he’d been appointed president of the World Bank, while I published commentaries sharply critical of the World Bank’s impacts on the global environment), and that if we had talked politics as we ran, we’d have clashed. But instead we just ran, leaping over fallen logs and enjoying the cooling air of the early evening, and whatever tensions our respective work days brought were dispelled.
The second advantage I felt an older runner might have—perhaps counter to conventional young/old stereotypes— was his greater experience in adapting to change, especially given a world that had changed much more rapidly than in any earlier era. I was born two months before Pearl Harbor and lived through World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, the Kosovo War, Desert Storm, the Rwanda Genocide, and now Afghanistan, and what would be next? More wars and more bitter divisions would follow, of course. And being able to roll with the punches, the way Muhammad Ali did, was an on-the-run skill, both physical and psychological.
For example, we were now past the part of the road that had been closed off by the police. Orange cones marked off a couple of feet of pavement for the runners, but cars were passing with increasing frequency as we came to the outskirts of the town. A lot of the cars slowed as they passed, and their occupa
nts called out words of encouragement (“Good job! Good job! Not far, now!”), which gave me a big kick. Would a younger runner get the same lift from hearing such friendly voices from cars? Maybe a little, but I suspected that a lot of it would go under a younger person’s radar. People in cars are rarely hostile to runners these days, since runners are now everywhere and are part of the background drivers pass—as are cars for runners. For someone who’d been running as long as I had, though, that hadn’t always been the case. In the 1960s, a guy running along the side of the road was an unusual sight, and it often seemed to trigger provocative comments from male drivers and their passengers. Once, a half-full can of beer flew out of a passenger’s window and splatted on the pavement at my feet. Other times, cars swerved close enough to drive me off the road. More than once (before the days of bright, techie apparel, when we wore grey or white cotton gym shorts), I heard the taunt, “What are you running in your underwear for?” followed by raucous laughter. But by now, that hadn’t happened in many years, and friendly reactions from cars actually made me grin, even if my face was tired. It was another small thing (like not regarding other runners as adversaries and not regarding fatigue as an enemy), but small things—especially in the final miles of a race where 95 percent of what you accomplish was determined before the day began—do make a difference. When you’re sixty and not sixteen, you need to be not only tough, but savvy in perhaps unexpected ways.