by Ed Ayres
There had been times in the past year when the running made me as high as it did when I was 16, just as I suppose there are times when an alcoholic or compulsive gambler or hedge-fund manager feels like the king of the world. But most of the time, now, the burden seemed heavier. I couldn’t tolerate cold as I once had, and on a dreary winter day I could experience quite an internal conflict—one part of me wanting to get out and hit the trail in training for the next race, the other wanting to curl up with a blanket and a good book. Sometimes the trail won, sometimes the book. I knew that if I hadn’t been addicted enough to get out for at least a good many of those gray days, I wouldn’t be in touch with the genetic messages I was receiving from my hunter-gatherer ancestors—about what terrible ordeals they and their ancestors endured, and how the singular strengths they developed to compensate for their mammalian shortcomings enabled modern humans to have the adaptive capabilities we now have. We, the builders of civilization, would not have had the endurance, patience, and ability to envision a thing that still lies out of sight ahead of us (the house, the temple, the city . . . and then the atomic bomb, the moon landing, the Internet, the symphony orchestra) if we didn’t continue to practice these arts.
Sport can be exhausting, painful, and disappointing, but at least it doesn’t leave us raped or dead, like the losers in a resource war. It allows us to compete with others without maiming or murdering them. And if I was still wondering why millions of people who don’t seem as compulsively competitive as I am nonetheless run races, a conversation I had one day with my cousin-in-law David Meggyesy may offer an answer. David played linebacker for the St. Louis Cardinals (now Arizona Cardinals) of the National Football League, but quit at the peak of his career to write the book Out of Their League, exposing the corruption and abuses of college and pro football. He also got involved with a movement to expose the abuses of cutthroat capitalist competition. As a highly competitive pro athlete himself, he had credibility about this subject in a way that some of us amateurs can’t claim to. In his book, so devastating was his criticism that some readers could have made the mistake of thinking he was a disillusioned former player with a grudge. But in fact, David loved playing football and enjoyed knocking ball-carriers off their feet, and in a letter to me he explained the seeming paradox of players beating each other up on the field and being good friends with each other:
We realize we are playing this game together and fundamentally need each other. No opponent, no game. Interestingly, the roots of “competition” are com, which means “with” or “together,” and petere, “to strive.”4
This isn’t a thought that just leaps to mind in every football player, I suspect. It’s a benefit of training—a different kind of training than Vince Lombardi ever directed. David explained that the kind of strength that enables men to strive together takes a kind of training of the spirit, just as much as blocking or tackling strength takes training of the body. I was passing the three-mile orange sign now and felt like I’d been training my spirit for these last three miles for the past three decades.
14
Williamsport
If You Fall, Then You Crawl. What Is It About Finishing?
It was a tough-love reminder of my vulnerability as an aging, half-naked human hoping to survive on a formidable planet, that in these last few miles even a small hill felt like a mountain. Was God grinning? Were the Native Americans right about there being a trickster out there? When I saw the big orange “3” halfway up another small hill, though, I was as hooked as a starving wolf chasing a fat rabbit off the rim of a cliff. I’ve always felt that once I get inside three miles, I can finish no matter what. Passing the sign, for a moment, I actually felt a flicker of strength.
Still, I was wary of the trickster. And in the world of empirical science, where I’d been hanging out for so many years, nothing is ever certain. I recalled one time when I was running the Boston Marathon—not one of my better years there—and made it over Heartbreak Hill, then hit the wall. The glycogen was gone, which is quite a helpless feeling. Reduced to burning fat, long before I’d ever heard of the carbohydrate fire, I entered the purgatory of that dream where you’re being chased by something awful and you can only move in slow motion.
Hitting the wall was a rare experience for me in those days, but when it happened I had a simple strategy for getting through. For me, as for most runners, finishing was the thing. No matter what, I had to finish. My strategy was to take note of the remaining distance, then begin running a quarter-mile at a time, counting down. In an exhausted condition, it’s easier to contemplate distances in yards than in miles. Just 440 yards at a time. Imagine one lap on my old high school track. Then do it again. With each hard-earned quarter-mile, there’s a little reward: another quarter-mile in the bag.
Boston by now was a huge tunnel of spectators, cheering and shouting to us passing strangers: “Go number 512!” “Go Jill’s Dad!” (reading the hand-lettered sign on a man’s jersey). I jogged to the side of the road and asked the sea of faces, “How far to the finish?”
“Three miles!” called out a man.
“Thanks.” I spotted a building I guessed was a quarter-mile down the road and began my countdown: two and three-quarters to go, then run for a while. Then two and a half, and run for a while. Then two and a quarter . . . and so on, and on.
When I’d worked it down to what I figured was just a mile to go, I was utterly exhausted but knew that, come hell or high water, I could drag myself one more mile. Just to confirm my situation, I called out to the crowd, “How far, now?”
“Three miles! You’re almost there!”
I have no doubt that both of my cheery informants meant well. But as I’ve learned over the years since then, people who live in a country where most mobility is automotive often have a very poor sense of distance and sometimes don’t really know where they are.
Another time, in a high-altitude trail race years later, I experienced a Groundhog Day–like repeat of that trickster encounter, but this time with both estimates of the remaining distance offered by aid-station volunteers who’d been carried to their posts over circuitous jeep roads. And this time, the second response, by a worker who was eager to be helpful but apparently not sure which side of the mountain he was on, actually increased the estimated remaining distance by half a mile. By then, though, I was older and wiser. I knew how much God might enjoy having one more good laugh before the day was done.
I had also learned, by that time, of a study of human mental mapping that had serious implications for a society in which new technologies were supplanting more and more of what people once did with their own physical or mental faculties. It wasn’t just SUVs supplanting hiking shoes; it was the GPS in the SUV taking over for your brain. Researchers at McGill University in Canada and the University of London in the UK scanned the brains of hundreds of taxi drivers in London and found that drivers who had relied on GPS devices to find their way around the city for three years or longer had diminished capacity in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that plays a central role in our ability to remember and find our way. In fact, compared with drivers who had relied on their own abilities, the hippocampuses in the GPS group had actually shrunk. A muscle that isn’t used will atrophy, and evidently that can happen with brain functions as well.
We humans are such goofies, as the anthropologist Paul Shepard would put it. Goofies is his word for an animal that has the genes of wild ancestors but has been captured and excessively domesticated—compelled to live in the highly artificial world of civilization. When we modern humans run a race, we run wild for a few hours, but then the run approaches its end. It’s like approaching the end of a wondrous dream and waking up with a powerful yearning. For what?
That yearning begins long before the race begins, in the daydreaming about running a marathon or ultra. It builds intensity in the fantasizing you do over the months of training and comes to a head as you run the race itself and approach its finish. What began months
or years ago as a fantasy escalates into a powerful homing instinct, an almost unstoppable volition to reach completion. Over the years, I’d seen some amazing outcomes of that volition, in which we actually experience the wild hunters that we are. It happened at all long distances, from 5K high school cross-country races to hundred-milers and beyond. The drive to finish the race has become so primal and powerful that it defies logic.
There was the time a man named Bob Bohnke, of Salisbury, Maryland, was running in a half-marathon. Maybe the race director had promised the town officials that the runners would stay on the shoulder. In any case, Bohnke was running on the pavement, half a mile from the finish, when he noticed three police cars parked just ahead. As he approached, an officer ordered him to “get off the road and onto the shoulder, or stand to be arrested!” Bohnke replied, “You can’t be serious!”—and continued running on the edge of the pavement. One of the cops shouted another warning, and Bohnke’s response later raised a question as to whether maybe he’d been “bohnked” on his head as a child.
“Catch me!” he shouted back.
“You’re under arrest!” shouted the three policemen in unison.
Even then, Bob Bohnke was not to be deterred. He ran a hard 800 yards, perhaps imagining that he could outrun a bullet, and he finished. And then he was arrested.
Then there was the case of Dennis Rainear, who did not outrun a bullet—he stopped one cold, but still finished. In 1978, Rainear was in the tenth mile of the Grand Valley Marathon in Colorado when he was shot in the head by a hunter. As reported in Running Times, he kept right on running, completing the last sixteen miles with a .22 caliber slug in his head. The magazine published a photo of the x-ray, showing a bullet stuck in Rainear’s skull like a small carrot in a snowman.
One of the most memorable finishes I’ve ever heard of was that of Geoff Smith in the 1983 New York City Marathon. Smith ran his heart out, leading the race coming into Central Park, but struggling mightily to hang on, with the great New Zealand Olympian Rod Dixon closing in. Marathon runners sometimes joke that “the twenty-six miles isn’t so bad, it’s the last 385 yards that get you.” On this day, that was literally true. For a marathoner, Rod Dixon had exceptional leg speed; he’d won the bronze medal in the Olympic 1,500 meters in Munich. It came down to a dead sprint, and ten yards from the finish, Geoff Smith—after leading one of the world’s greatest footraces for twenty-six miles, 375 yards—tripped and fell. “Dixon was photographed leaping into the air and then kneeling on the pavement in theatrical ecstasy. The photos appeared on magazine covers, and one was nominated for a Pulitzer prize,” we reported.1 In the photos, Smith is off to the side in a very awkward sprawl. But never mind, he got to his feet and finished.
In the years since then, I’ve come to realize that apparently because we humans will do anything in our power to capture that moment yearned for, many runners have fallen in the final yards of a race—and then, if necessary, crawled across the line. Some of the most heroic of these, maybe because when we are young we are still at our wildest, have been in high school cross-country meets.
In California, for example, I would later hear about a young woman named Holland Reynolds, who on the day of this JFK was only seven years old, but who nine years later would be good enough to lead her University High School in San Francisco to a California state championship. On the day of the big meet, she was running in second place, nearing the finish and giving it her all, when she was overcome with what appeared to be heat exhaustion and collapsed. Unable to stand up, she crawled the last ten feet to the finish. It was good enough to win the team title, and her happy teammates crowded into the ambulance with her to celebrate.
In the Massachusetts state championship, Ben Perron of St. John’s High School in Southboro, similarly giving it his all, fell to the ground sixty yards from the finish, got up, and tried continuing but fell over again, backward. He got up again, fell backward again. He finally crawled on all fours to within a yard of the finish, at which point even crawling didn’t work, so he made himself roll over the line.
In the Louisiana state championship, Christian Bergeron of St. Paul’s School in Covington was running in thirteenth place when he went down twenty-five yards from the finish, got up and fell again repeatedly, including twice over backward, but finally dragged himself over the line on hands and knees. He lost twenty-five places in twenty-five yards, but he finished.
And then there was the Ohio state championship, where Claire Markwardt of Berkshire High School was running surprisingly well, considering that she was recovering from a stress fracture in her left leg. When she was just four hundred yards from the finish, however, she heard and felt a sharp crack in that leg. She would later learn that her tibia had snapped. She never thought of stopping, though. At forty-five yards out, she felt another snap and went down hard—this time with her fibula broken in half. She, too, crawled to the finish, with a time of 20:24:07, only eighteen seconds off her personal best.
So, what is it about finishing? If you run a marathon and complete the twenty-six miles, 385 yards, you’ll be memorably satisfied. But if you run a fifty-mile race and have to quit at forty-nine miles, you’ll be deeply disappointed. The distance is arbitrary, but the need to finish—whatever the designated distance—is like the need to eat. Where did we get this? A short answer might be that it comes from the need to eat. More broadly, I sense that it relates to the way we became neurologically organized by our experience of hunger, thirst, and sexual desire, all of which can etch intensely vivid and memorable moments at the point of satisfaction. But I’m also guessing that it has to do with a genetic memory of the end of the long hunt that helped enable those other satisfactions.
For early human hunters, the killing of a larger, faster, stronger animal must have had enormous significance—not only for the tribe’s survival but for the hunter’s evolving sense of individual identity. When it came to going after a dangerous mammoth, the humans almost certainly had to hunt in a pack.
Implicit in the cooperation between the hunter distracting the quarry and his companion rushing in with the rock or spear was an understanding that the long pursuit they had made was not just a mindless rush to see which man could make the fatal thrust and claim all the meat. Some hunters would play supporting roles in exchange for a share of the prize secured by others. That kind of cooperation required being able to envision beyond the kill, to the return to the hearth—to the communal devouring. And if the hunters could look ahead in time, it is likely that they could also look back. At the hearth, the memory of the hunt lingered and, as language developed, was eventually shared just as was the food itself. Recalling which of the individual hunters had actually made the kill would have had a selective benefit, as it helped organize the division of labor for a successful hunt next time. For everyone to simply swarm over the quarry each time like crows over roadkill would have invited an early demise for all. For market-share monopolists and cutthroat competitors: a thing to consider.
So, knowing which hunter had a strong arm, a lethal technique with a rock or spear, or a sense of how the quarry would likely behave had a survival value. Natural selection favored not only the hunters who could make the kill but also those who could recognize the spear-thrower and give him logistic support, which he very much needed to have. If you knew how to provide that support—to skillfully track spoor before the chase begins or help carry the prize back to the cave after the kill—you may have had as much chance of providing meat to your children and mate as the spear-thrower did. Upper-body strength was an essential complement to enduring legs and lungs. The prize-bearers were part of the spear-thrower’s triumph, so his thrill was also theirs. We have inherited that sharing of the kill in such familiar phenomena as the spontaneous exultation of all eleven members of a soccer team when one of them kicks the winning goal. For consciousness to grow, a sense of personal identity—and of your most realistic hopes and best strategies for realizing those hopes—also had to grow. Just as s
ignificantly, your sense of the identities of others, and your relationships with them, had to grow.
It may seem bizarre, to anyone who knows me, to hear me suggest that the experience of killing fellow mammals (or being part of a band that did) was a defining experience in the evolution of human consciousness. I’m not only an old Quaker peacenik, but a vegetarian! But I also could not deny what all the evidence I could marshal was telling me: that our species had advanced by learning to hunt over large territories—the kinds of territories Lawrence of Arabia’s nomad fighters would cover. We didn’t have the teeth, claws, and backhoe jaws of our prey, but somehow we ate them before they could eat us. Our ancestors’ campsites are littered with the bones of the animals they killed—whether for food, fur, horn, bone, hide, hormones, or in self-defense. What was less clear was what role the hunt had played in the development of our ancestors’ awareness. And the murkiness of that question seemed to be made even murkier by the realization that even today, a lot of people are not very aware.
When I read the accounts of Paul Shepard, Bernd Heinrich, and others who have pondered the origins of human consciousness, here’s what comes through most clearly: While the moment of the kill may have lived large in the hominid’s evolving memory, it was only the relatively brief climax to a very long day of quiet tracking. Contrary to our twenty-first century notion of the good life being a procession of titillating climaxes, one after another (how cool is a high-scoring football game, with touchdown after touchdown!), our prehistory had to have been one of long treks, patient observation, and gradually developing mental vision. The climax of the hunt was the culmination of a huge amount of intervening experience. That might explain why the kill loomed so large in myth. It was not just a critical moment for the survival of the tribe; it was also, sometimes, the end of a long journey and the inspiration for a new journey that would require new faith and, again, patience.