by Ed Ayres
Benoit, Running Tide, 27.
Chapter 9
American Council on Exercise, Lifestyle & Weight Management Consultant Manual.
Ed Ayres, “What Happened at Herndon,” Running Times, November 1980, 10–16.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 12.
John F. Rocket, “After Herndon: How a Boy’s Life Was Saved” (letter to the editor), Running Times, February 1981, 10.
Chapter 11
John L. Parker Jr., “The Tee Vee Olympics,” in Runners & Other Dreamers (Tallahassee: Cedarwinds, 1989), 17.
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Annals of the Fine Arts 15 (January 1820).
Maria A. I. Aberg, Nancy L. Pederson, Kjell Toren, Magnus Svartengren, Björn Bäckstrand, Tommy Johnsson, Christina M. Cooper-Kuhn, N. David Åberg, Michael Nilsson, and H. Georg Kuhn, “Cardiovascular Fitness Is Associated with Cognition in Young Adulthood,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 99 (December 8, 2009).
Chapter 12
John Parker Jr., “To Imagine Victory,” in Runners & Other Dreamers (Tallahassee: Cedarwinds, 1989), 106.
Henry Kendall, “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Union of Concerned Scientists [UCS], November 18, 1992). Signed by 1,700 senior scientists including 104 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences.
American Museum of Natural History, “National Survey Reveals Biodiversity Crisis—Scientific Experts Believe We Are in Midst of Fastest Mass Extinction in Earth’s History—Crisis Poses Major Threat to Human Survival; Public Unaware of Danger” (press release), (New York: American Museum of Natural History: April 20, 1998).
Chapter 13
DeMar, Marathon, 59.
Benoit, Running Tide, 19.
José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting, translated by Howard Wescott (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972).
David Meggyesy, personal communications with author including emails on June 11, 2010, and February 13 and 15, 2011.
Chapter 14
Jim Ferstle, Phil Stewart, and Ed Ayres, “New York’s Epic Race,” and Steve Kelly, “A TV Viewer Loses All Control,” Running Times, January 1984, 22–28.
Chapter 15
David Meggyesy, email messages to author, February 13 and 15, 2011.
Postscript
John F. Kennedy, “The Soft American.”
Ibid.
Emily Dickinson, “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed,” Selected Poems (New York: Dover Publications, 1990), 3.
Acknowledgments
I could never have reached the finish line for this book without the extraordinary serendipity that brought me to my literary agent Stephany Evans and, through her, to my publisher Matthew Lore. Both she and he went far beyond the normal call of duty for their professions to help make this book happen—as did the extraordinary teams who work for them.
Fellow runners who have helped prepare me for this project over the years—some of them without even knowing it—include the kids I coached at the George School and Swarthmore College in the 1960s (these “kids” now in their late sixties) and my teammates with the Central Jersey Track Club and Washington Sports Club in the 1970s. Thanks to Bob Harper, my DC neighbor and frequent running partner, who introduced me to ultrarunning—and to the mystique of the JFK 50 Mile.
I’ll always appreciate the support I got from my partners in the founding of Running Times, Phil Stewart and Rick Platt, both of whom ran faster marathons than I and taught me a lot about endurance not only on the road but in our epic, all-night efforts to get the magazine to the printer each month. Thanks to my brothers Gene and Alex, both of them writers, who have given me the kinds of unflagging sympathy and support we writers sometimes urgently need. Alex joined our little staff at Running Times soon after our launch, fresh from a stint as editor of the Harvard Lampoon, and his influence helped me appreciate the value of punctuating serious discourse with good humor. This book tackles a subject of potentially tragic and universal consequence, yet sometimes there’s only a fine line between tragedy and farce. Will civilization triumph, or will it fall on its face?
And then there’s my older brother Bob, who first brought me into the world of environmental research and introduced me to the concept of industrial metabolism, a concept he originated in the 1970s and which had an epiphanic impact on my thinking about human endurance.
In recounting events that may better prepare us for the future by clarifying our long-forgotten past, I’ve been inspired by some of the pathbreaking scientists of human evolution—David Carrier and Dennis Bramble at the University of Utah and Daniel Lieberman at Harvard. Any mistakes in my many speculations about our evolutionary past are mine, not theirs.
Several progressive communities, in particular, have inspired me during the half-century I spent preparing my feet, legs, cerebrum, hippocampus, and carotid artery, among other parts, for the one-day adventure of a lifetime this book recounts:
Early trackers of the links between endurance and sustainability—people who could think on their feet and think with their feet: Bill McKibben, Lester R. Brown, Roger Brown, Bernd Heinrich, David Kayser, Tony Rossmann, and Curtis Runyan, to name a few.
Runners who have especially inspired me over the years: Ruth Anderson, Joan Benoit, Fred Best, Ted Corbitt, John Creighton, Ron Delany, Clarence deMar, Scott Jurek, Yiannis Kouros, Carlos Lopes, George Sheehan, and Ann Trason.
Visionary groups: Buddhists, Quakers, Universalist Unitarians, anti-war activists, environmental activists, Athletes for Peace, the Road Runners Club of America, the Society for Ecological Economics, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Good friends who have supported and encouraged me through the thick and thin of this trek: Leslie Ayres, Trude Blomso, David Gottlieb, Jim Hall, Ken Lee, Ann Parker, Anne and Jim Parker, David Meggyesy and Carolyn Silk, and, most enduringly and endearingly, my wife Sharon and daughter Elizabeth.
Last but just as easily first, my thanks to Mike Spinnler, the long-time JFK race director and former JFK champion whose tremendous enthusiasm has kept the torch of President Kennedy’s hopes for a more physically, mentally, and morally fit country—and the legacy of America’s most iconic ultramarathon—burning so brightly all these years.
About the Author
Ed Ayres has been running competitively for fifty-five consecutive years, and he enjoys it as much now as he did when he joined his high school cross-country team in 1956. Ayres placed third in the first New York Marathon in 1970, and he is the only runner of that race still competing today. Having participated in the early growth of American interest in road-running, trail-running, and marathons, he also became one of the pioneers of ultrarunning. He placed third in the US 50 Mile championship in 1976 (in 5:46:52); first in the JFK 50 Mile in 1977; and first in four US national age-division championships at 50K road, 50K trail, and fifty miles. He was the founding editor and publisher of Running Times magazine, and he also worked for thirteen years as the editorial director of the Worldwatch Institute.