Running with the Pack

by Mark Rowlands

  The rehab times for this injury have been getting longer and longer. I say ‘rehab’, but it is not as if I have actually done any, unless lounging around the house feeling sorry for myself, muttering about how unfair it all is, counts as rehab. When this problem first occurred, I was running again in two weeks. The last time it happened, it was more like six. I really should get it properly rehabbed this time — have someone dig out the scar tissue or whatever it is they do. In the meantime, I suppose I might as well try to be ‘philosophical’ about the whole thing. At my age — striding the highways and byways of these dangerous heart-attack years — of all the ways in which a run might end abruptly, a grade II tear of the calf is far from the worst.

  R-I-C-E: Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation. All the things I am not doing now, but should be. I limped home from the run this morning to find there was an immediate demand for my services. There will be no more running for quite some time, I suspect. But walking, limping, hobbling and shuffling — these are things I am going to have to do anyway. Serious illness, the loss of a limb: that might have bought me a day or two … but this is all very familiar. My boys need to run. ‘Come on, Daddy, we want to go to the beach.’ And so I find myself limping heavily, perhaps a little theatrically I admit, along the 700 yards or so of path that leads to the sea. A few yards in front of me is Brenin, my older son. He’s just turned three years old and sits proudly upon his first bike, peddling furiously and thankfully getting nowhere fast. Emma is up ahead, on a rented bicycle, and on the back of this is a seat that contains Macsen, my younger son, who was one year old last month. The flamingos, the flamant roses, have arrived early this year. When I first came to this part of the world, not much older than my sons are now, my jaw used to drop at what I thought of as these ridiculously exotic birds. But Brenin and Macsen are Miamians. ‘They’re not very bright, Daddy,’ Brenin informs me. He’s right; compared to the gleaming, orange Caribbean flamingos he sees in Miami, they are distinctly pallid.

  The icy blast of the sea is a welcome relief, for a change. Brenin’s lips will be blue within minutes, but he isn’t going to be dragged out of there without a fight. We must play an important game — lifting him over the waves whilst simultaneously chanting the liturgy, ‘UP-AND-OVER.’ ‘You didn’t say it, Daddy: you’ve got to say it!’ Then sandcastles — surrounded by a system of moats that would not have embarrassed Pierre-Paul Riquet, filled with water fetched from the Mediterranean by me, shuffling and shambling — their sole purpose to be destroyed at some subsequent time to be determined by the boys. Running from a distance, they perform graceless belly flops on the castles, hitting the sand hard, yipping like hyenas over and over again, aided and abetted by Hugo who bounds along beside them barking and frothing like a dog in the grip of la rage. I might have played this game once. But then I got old and didn’t understand it any more. Perhaps I am beginning to understand it again.

  I suspect children, and the dogs of children, understand what is important in life far better than adults. When I build the sandcastles, it is work: I do it for the enjoyment of my sons. When they destroy those castles, it is play: they do this for no other reason than to do it. As the castles die the death of a thousand belly flops, I can think of no more emphatic affirmation of the value of play over work. There is a joy that goes with this — the joy of giving yourself over wholly to the activity and not the outcome, the deed and not the goal. Perhaps I can no longer understand the game; but I can see the joy, I can feel it. I can hear it echoing out across the water towards Africa. And yet: we are not far away. I can see it. We’re no more than a few metres away from the place where I once sat with a dying wolf, and watched the cold winter sun set slowly on his life.

  This joy echoes out across the water but also back through the days of my life. An earlier time — Brenin had been dead two short months, and Nina, Tess and I had resumed our runs together. It was a bright, cold spring day, and we had journeyed up into the Cévennes, the mountains of the southern Massif Central. ‘Col’ is the French word for a mountain pass. Today we were going to do a thirty-kilometre run through the Col du Minier — ‘the pass of miners’. I had brought a small backpack, with a little food and water, and a map. I wasn’t going to push. It had been a long time since I had run the long run. If it took all day, so be it.

  The sun danced brightly on the cold blue waters of a mountain lake. We had run only six kilometres, the map told me, but already I was starting to feel it. When one has been living at sea level, performance tends to start to decline at around 3000 feet. We were at nearly 4000 feet, so altitude may have played some role. But I suspect I was the main problem. I was very, very out of shape, and the few 10k runs I had put in back on the digue had not really kicked in yet. Every time I returned to running after a lay-off, the pain was worse than before. The run went on, and while my snarling Achilles tendon had gone temporarily dormant — no doubt it would wake up again later on — I was struggling badly. Nina and Tess, too, were finding things far from easy. They were also getting older, and the year’s hiatus we had taken from running had taken its toll. Nothing much was happening for me — there were no dancing thoughts that day. It was just a slog.

  I remember this run for one reason only. At around ten kilometres or so we stopped for a sit down and a quick bite to eat. The open mountaintop had given way to woodland a few kilometres back and we sat in a little clearing by the side of the trail. Nina and Tess collapsed, exhausted. Then, after a few minutes, a little food, a little water, Tess rose to her feet, moved away a few yards, and then charged at Nina and performed the play bow. Nina leapt to her feet, as if she had spent the last few days resting, and they tore up and down the trail, play-growling, play-snapping at each other’s shoulders and necks. And I could see the joy. I could see it there, in the exaggerated gape of Nina’s jaw, and the exaggerated bounce of Tess’s stride. Joy is not just an inner feeling. It can be seen, when you know how to look.

  It was cold up in those mountains. The snows had not long departed those hills, and even at midday, clouds still clung stubbornly to the floors of the valleys below us. The sun did not warm that clearing in which I sat, but the joy of those two friends did. I had seen this sort of play many times before, of course. It was an almost daily occurrence. And when they played like this, I knew they were happy — as much as one can ever know anything about what is going on inside the mind of another. But today, it is different. I do not infer their joy: I see it. Some fields are made of grass, and others are made of energy. We walk through the former, and are immersed in the latter. Nina and Tess were fortunate enough to run through many fields of grass — and through Irish fields of barley and French fields of lavender. When they did, their joy would radiate out from them, reverberating across the open space — the clearing between us. Standing there with them, in a clearing in a wood in a mountain pass in France, I was immersed in a field of joy; embraced by it. This joy had permeated my runs down through all these years, although I did not know how to see it. When I run with the pack, joy warms me from the outside in.

  It is here too, today, on this beach. Joy is the recognition of intrinsic value in life, the recognition of what is important for its own sake. I see the joy of my boys of summer; I hear it resonating across the blue water. But not just their joy — mine also. Formerly a feeling curled up inside of me, my joy has relocated to a place outside of me. There have been times in my life — too small in number, too fleeting in duration — when joy is like this. Joy that was a way of feeling now becomes a way of seeing. A few seconds — that is all. This transformation of inner to outer lasts a few seconds and then it is gone. But I’m coming to think they might be the most important seconds of my life. This transformation in joy is love showing herself. Love may last a lifetime, but she shows herself most completely only in moments.

  Many people do not understand decline; they are unfamiliar with its anatomy and physiology. Injuries play the role of the waves of time. An injury washes over you, and you never
quite come back as strong as you were before. Perhaps you won’t notice this initially. Maybe you feel fine. But there’s a weakness that has set up home in your muscle or joint — no amount of rehab will change that — and sooner or later its time will come again. First there’s a little niggle, then another, then there are more. There are days when you are not quite a hundred per cent, but you go out running anyway. And that’s fine: that’s what you have to do — because these days will become more and more frequent. Before you know it, you are never quite a hundred per cent. But you keep on going, because that is what you have to do. First you are running at 95 per cent, then it’s 90; and then in a heartbeat you are down to 75 per cent. Your distances are going down just as your times are going up. And you do not know how it happened. You think, if I can just stay injury-free for a while, clear up these niggles, if I can just get a good run at it, then I can get back to what I was doing before; get back to the distances and times I was doing before this run of bad luck started. But this misses the point entirely. Decline is a run of bad luck of just this sort. You will never get a good run at it again. The niggles, the aches, the weaknesses build up; and in the end you are just a tissue of niggles, aches and weaknesses woven together. No amount of rest will change this. You come back and feel good for a while, but it’s so short, and before you know it you will be back to exactly where you were before the break. This is the face of decline, of erasure, of gradual disappearance. This is what it looks like. Running has many faces. One of these is the digue, a way of trying to hold back the storm surges of winter. Maybe it will hold for a while. But, in the end, we all return to the maïre.

  It is common to think of life as a process of development. In growing older, we will come to understand what is important in life. With age comes wisdom, and if we are sufficiently assiduous and skilled in the use of this wisdom, perhaps even the meaning of our lives will reveal itself to us. Youth, on the other hand, is the time of immaturity: an existential prequel whose importance lies only in equipping us for the adult life to come. It is paradoxical then, as Moritz Schlick once remarked, that ‘the time of preparation appears as the sweetest portion of existence, while the time of fulfilment seems the most toilsome’.

  This paradox is, perhaps, a sign that we have misunderstood youth. It is a sign that what is important in life is not a destination towards which we are heading, but is scattered around a person’s life, and exists most fundamentally in these moments when joy warms us from the outside in — moments of dedication to the activity and not the outcome, to the deed and not the goal. Joy is the recognition of something that is worth doing for its own sake; it is the recognition of intrinsic value as it makes itself known in a person’s life. It is true that these moments of joy cluster together most noticeably in youth. Children and their dogs are much better at knowing what is important in life. They understand that the most important things in life are the things that are worth doing for their own sake. And the things not worth doing for their own sake are not worth doing at all. They know intrinsic value instinctively, effortlessly. For me, it was hard work. It has taken me half a lifetime to rediscover what I once must have known. Even now, there are times when I find it difficult to understand this joy, let alone feel it. In these times, I understand my fall from Grace, my exile from Eden.

  Nevertheless, there are also times when my exile is temporarily rescinded. ‘The meaning of life is youth,’ Schlick once wrote. But youth, in the relevant sense, is not a matter of chronology, of one’s biological age. The lines on one’s face do not necessarily banish a person from the garden of youth. Youth exists wherever action has become play. Youth exists whenever there is doing for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. Youth exists whenever there is dedication to the deed and not the goal. With this dedication comes joy, because joy is nothing more than the recognition of intrinsic value in life. This is a life where we all return to the maïre. And what redeems this life is the intrinsic value we find in it, if we know how to look.

  7

  The Borderlands of Freedom

  2011

  The race started around eight minutes ago, and I’m just crossing the starting line. I was about ten thousand back in a field of 20,000 plus — at least, that was the rumoured figure circulating in starting corral G — and there are still plenty of people behind me. I hope it stays that way. As they say: there’s always someone slower than you — but they might not have shown up today. The shuffling walk turns to a scuffling jog, I cross the starting line and then … I have to quickly make my way across to a strip of grass at the side of Biscayne Boulevard. It’s not the calf- so far, so good with that — it’s my bladder. Dehydration increases the risk of cramp, which increases the risk of a muscle tear, so I made sure I drank numerous bottles of Gatorade between my 4 a.m. train ride and the 6.15 a.m. start. So far, everything was going precisely as planned, and as a consequence I was beginning to feel quite sanguine about my prospects today. On my final prerace visit to the Port-a-Loo, at a time when I was supposed to be in the starting corral, the queues were so deep and were moving so slowly I had to relieve myself in Bayfront Park, in full view of Metro-Dade cops who would have, at the very least, Tasered me if I had done this in any other circumstances. I am far from alone on this little patch of grass by the starting line — there’re probably around a hundred or so men and women. We were all hanging around in the starting corrals for more than thirty minutes, and many people seem to have had the same problem as me.

  With the necessaries taken care of, I get back in the race and begin the gentle ascent of the slip road up onto the MacArthur Causeway. I’ve more or less reached my planned full marathon pace by now — I would estimate it to be a dizzying five and a half miles per hour — and, so far, the calf has held together: now for the first tricky bit. The first part of the MacArthur Causeway provides the biggest gradient on the entire course. Some people decide to walk up it — which makes perfect sense: the small amount of time you save by running is more than offset by the extra energy you expend, energy that might be crucial from, say, twenty miles and beyond. I’m quite happy to run up it. My problem is different. I don’t want to run down the other side. The calves have to bear more weight during a descent. That, of course, was how my long history of calf issues began. No one could compare the gentle gradient on the MacArthur Causeway with the hills of Kinsale, of course. But my most recent calf affliction announced itself when I was running down a tiny, barely discernible, slope where the road had passed over a canal. So I am taking no chances. I knew this was coming — I have studied the course video obsessively since I picked up my registration package on Friday — and I’ve always planned to walk down it. And that’s what I do. When I get to the bottom, calf still in one piece, it feels like victory. I’m starting to believe that everything is going to be okay, at least as far as my calf is concerned. My general fitness and ability to run 26.2 miles — that’s an entirely different matter.

  As I see it, I have two strikes against me at this point. First, my training was severely truncated — I have about half of the recommended first-time marathoner’s training under my belt, and I have been able to do nothing for the last two months. Second, I am not a good runner. I have no natural aptitude to fall back on. All I can do, therefore, is be smart, in other words ultra conservative, at least for the first half of the race. So I tuck in behind the 2.30 pace runners. This was not planned: before the race, I didn’t even know there were such things as pace runners, let alone that they were kind enough to hold up signs for the entire race indicating the times they were running. What a wonderful idea — whoever first had it deserves canonization. I make myself as comfortable as I can behind the signs that read ‘2.30’: the plan is now to stay there for the first 13.1. I lose them for a while at the other end of the MacArthur — there is another descent there, as we cross over into South Beach, and I walk that too. But after that, I speed up a little until I find them again, then just keep my nose down, drink four cups of wate
r or Gatorade at every aid station — there is roughly one every mile from the three-mile mark on — and just generally relax and enjoy myself. As we enter South Beach, the new sun hangs low like a golden promise over the towered skyline. I am relieved, excited and happy.

  I have lived in Miami for four years, but rarely ventured to South Beach, with its bars, restaurants and nightclubs — that’s what happens when you have two young children and you are the sort of parent who has an unyieldingly authoritarian attitude towards their 6 p.m. bedtime. In fact, as I run up Ocean Drive at around 7 a.m. on this cold — by Miami standards, it’s around 18oC — but bright morning, it occurs to me that this is probably only the third time I’ve been here. Here, there are lots of smiling faces lining the streets, shouting and hooting at everyone — me included! Apparently, it’s encouragement. Americans like being encouraged and the louder the better. Me — not so much. No doubt it is a British thing. What am I supposed to do? I could ignore them — but that just seems rude and ungrateful. I could flash an appreciative smile at each of these shrill supporters, perhaps proffer some small waves or even high-fives; but that just seems distracting and onerous. I have enough to contend with already. I’m tempted to speed up a little, to get through this part of the race as fast as I can — increase the cadence to escape the stridence. But I know that would bring disaster later on. And so I take the first option: rudely and ungratefully onwards I puff and thud.