Running with the Pack Read online

  There were still two months to go until the race, and so I did what I usually do in these situations: I broke my own cardinal rule. When I first decided to run this race, I told myself in no uncertain terms that I was not going to even think about times. This was my first marathon, and my goal was simply to negotiate the 26.2 miles without dying. Whatever you do, Mark, I told myself, just focus on that. You’re not young any more — less than two years to the big five-o in fact. Your goal is simply to finish. Don’t get caught up in anything else. But then December arrived, I was running twenty miles without too much difficulty and I started thinking. I could fit in another five or six of these long runs before race day, even allowing for the tapering-down in the final few weeks of training. I could really work on getting the times down. I could not only run this race, I could run a respectable time. Maybe not four hours, but 4.30 is definitely on; even 4.15 is not beyond the bounds of possibility. And so, a recurring theme of many of the best tragedies, it was my unseemly ambition that brought me down. My body threw in the towel when I started asking it to do this extra distance in less time.

  When it happens, a grade-two tear of the calf muscle feels like someone has whacked you across the back of the leg with a stick. But I knew that already. Grade-two calf tears and I go back a long way — back to the mid-1990s, I seem to remember. The typical rehab for this sort of calf tear, for someone of my age, is six weeks plus. If the patient turns out not to be patient at all — and I am a very impatient patient — then that period extends accordingly. I treated this particular tear with more than usual deference, at least initially. I did my rehab, got the scar tissue broken down and did all the exercises my PT told me to do. Then, just as I started getting better, I lost all patience, tried to run, my calf broke down again after a few hundred yards and I was back to square one. This happened several times. So eventually I just did nothing: complete rest. The tear occurred on 4 December 2010. It is now 30 January 2011. I am standing at the starting line of the Miami Marathon — and, more significantly for me, my first marathon — and I haven’t been able to run for the two months leading up to it.

  I am therefore, as they say, a little ‘undercooked’ — and that’s probably putting it mildly. Until Friday lunchtime, if you had asked me whether I was going to run, I would have told you ‘no’ — or some more emphatic variation on that theme. And I think I would have almost been sincere. This was the official position that I used not only in my dealings with others but also, more importantly, with the rational part of my mind. But there was a small, sneaky, irrational but enormously influential part of me that always knew that I was going to find myself standing at the starting line of this race. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to find myself driving over to the Miami Beach Convention Center on Friday afternoon to pick up my race packet. I still had to deal with the rational part of me, of course. Just keeping our options open, I told it. Indeed, my rational self replied, is that why you also purchased a calf sleeve, and interrogated just about every runner you met at the Center about how to approach running a marathon when in a seriously under-trained state? That’s the rational part of me — he can occasionally be a little snide. But despite the abundance of countervailing evidence, I think I was still spouting the ‘just keeping my options open’ line when I crawled onto the train at 4 a.m. this morning. But now, it seems, the time for options is over. Perhaps I should have listened a little more to the rational part of me. This was all very preventable.

  The most likely scenario, given the events of recent weeks, is that my calf immediately breaks down again and I don’t even make it as far as the MacArthur Causeway. I suppose that would be a little humiliating — my abject failure on display to the thousands who run past me. But suppose it doesn’t happen like that: suppose my calf pulls itself together. Then the question is: how long will it be before I am wishing that it had gone? I’m not entirely sure what sort of shape I’m going to be in, but I suspect it’s not going to be good. Just how far am I going to be able to go? I could always call it a day at the half-marathon mark. But will I even get that far? Just how painful is this going to be?

  Then there is the question of time. Suppose I do make it around the course. Just how long is that going to take me? This has nothing to do with pride. Well, if I am being honest, I suppose it may have something to do with it but, vanity aside, the one thing you absolutely, positively don’t want to do in the Miami Marathon is take your own sweet time about it. There is, as in most city marathons, a graduated reopening of the roads. You want to stay ahead of these reopenings if you can. After six hours, all the roads are open again. Having to finish the race weaving my way in and out of traffic would not only be somewhat mortifying — it would be positively dangerous. I’ve been in many countries where the drivers are clearly insane. Greece and France spring to mind. But in those countries the vehicular psychosis is more or less predictable. After you’ve been there a while, you can more or less predict which senseless gambit is going to occur in what situation. After a while, it all seems wearyingly quotidian. But in Miami, nothing that has to do with the roads is predictable. There is no public transport in Miami worth speaking of. The city’s elevated monorail has, as the writer Dave Barry once put it, about as much significance in the life of the average Miamian as a shooting star occasionally glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. Everyone drives. And so the demographic runs from boy racers to boozed-up businessmen to heavily medicated centenarians, even the occasional heavily-medicated-boozed-up-centenarian-boy-racer. No one really has a clue what’s going to happen at any given junction. And since a significant percentage of them are armed — the medicated centenarians, especially, seem to like to drive a little ‘heavy’ — remonstration is a dangerous game to play.

  On YouTube yesterday, while I was ‘researching’ my run, I found a video record of last year’s race entitled, unfortunately not inaccurately: ‘Scumbag Miami drivers honk marathon runners.’ The humiliation of immediate calf breakdown, a protracted and painful run, or mortality by vehicular means: disappointment, pain or death — Zatopek may have had a point. This is certainly going to be ugly. I feel a strange tingling, something I haven’t felt for quite some time. Is it fear? Perhaps that is a little aggrandizing. Let’s just say I’m nervous. And it is not entirely unpleasant.

  Why am I doing this? It’s not an easy question to answer, and to avoid trying to do so, when people ask me this, I am more than happy to resort to platitudes. I could say, ‘Because I enjoy it.’ In some sense of the word, I enjoyed the training — while it lasted — and I am enjoying the trepidation of these pre-race minutes. I am enjoying the feeling that I may have bitten off more than I can chew; I am enjoying the uncertainty — the not knowing what is going to happen next. In some sense of ‘enjoy’, I might even enjoy what is going to happen next. So there would be a modicum of truth in this ‘enjoyment’ answer. But it’s not a particularly illuminating modicum — it is not the sort of truth that advances understanding, but merely invites the further question: why do I enjoy these things? I could add: I’ll soon be fifty, and if I don’t do it now, I’ll probably never do it. And it would be a shame to have lived a whole life and never run a marathon. I am sure that’s part of the reason; but it is still just a stock answer, and vulnerable to the same sort of objection as the original response. After all, why do I think it would be a shame to have lived a whole life and never run a marathon? The real reasons, I suspect, are more difficult to identify, let alone explain. But it is an interesting sociological fact that (a) many people seem to have opinions on what my reasons are, and (b) the content of these opinions depends on where — specifically which side of the Atlantic — those people live.

  There is, I think, a distinctively American way of thinking about running and, by extension, about what I am doing today. Books written by Americans about running almost always revolve around certain recognizable themes. In saying this, I don’t mean in any way to disparage them. I’ve read quite a few of these books — f
rom Dean Karnazes’s inspiring Ultramarathon Man, to Christopher McDougall’s astonishing Born to Run, to Bernd Heinrich’s (whom I shall regard as an honorary American since he has lived in the US most of his life) engaging Why We Run, and many more. But even in these thoroughly admirable books, the shared themes are evident, and this is what makes these books quintessentially American.

  One theme is an unflinching pioneer optimism. You can do great things. Everyone has this capacity. Every day, you can be better than you were yesterday; and there is nothing that exceeds your grasp if you put your mind to it. This sort of optimism is, of course, a semi-ubiquitous mantra of American life. I love this belief, and I find its profession, by large swathes of the American population, touching and sincere. The only problem is that I’m pretty sure it’s not true. Most things lie outside the grasp of most people. And the one unbreakable truth of life is that we get worse. Maybe you could do great things. Maybe you still can. Maybe you successfully completed an unspeakably brutal ultramarathon yesterday — Badwater, Leadville, the Marathon des Sables or something like that. I don’t know. But I do know that you will get worse. If you can do great things, then the time is coming when you won’t be able to do them any more.

  Another theme is the emphasis on faith. Faith is what gets you through the inevitable dark times you will face on the run. Faith is, it goes without saying, a cornerstone of American life. Faith makes us strong; we are at our best when we have faith. But I — a European of shadowed soul, skulking in the middle of the starting pack — suspect that, on the contrary, we are at our best when we have lost our faith. In fact, this was, arguably, the principal message of my earlier book, The Philosopher and the Wolf. The loss of faith is, precisely, an opportunity to grow stronger. In the end, I believe the only attitude we can bring to bear on life that is worth anything at all is defiance. Not that it makes any difference in the end, of course: it is going to end badly for us, whatever we do — if not, our defiance would of course be singularly misplaced. Compared to the sprightly sales figures in Europe and other parts of the world, sales of the US edition of The Philosopher and the Wolf were, I think it is fair to say, ‘sluggish’ — a term which will also almost certainly be applicable to any progress I make in today’s race. I have absolutely no faith that I will finish this race or even get very far in it — and, for me, this is part of the attraction. What’s the point in trying something if you know or strongly suspect — whether it is through faith or any other means — you will succeed? In fact, I suspect it is precisely my suspicion that I haven’t a hope of finishing that is one of the primary attractions for me today.

  Finally, American running books will emphasize the positive value of work. Two different strands of this idea can be distinguished. Some seem to think that work is inherently ennobling. Others tie the value of work to the dreams it allows you to grasp (see the first ‘optimism’ strand). But my murky European spirit tells me that work is not inherently ennobling at all: to work when you do not have to is stupid rather than ennobling. And there is no evidence of any reliable connection between hard work and realization of dreams. Nothing good comes of work, I tell myself. At its best, and its most valuable, running is play not work. This is one of the things I actually learned through running.

  Optimism, faith and work: I want nothing of these things. Apparently, I am a faithless pessimist who thinks that hard work is worthless. It is a little surprising they gave me a Green Card.

  I am running this marathon because I have lost my faith. Perhaps that is a step in the direction of the truth? Imagine a toothless crocodile with Alzheimer’s looking for a hat that is already on his head. This was my brother’s classic 1993 ‘Fossil of the Week’ birthday card to my father; perhaps the apotheosis of a family tradition of sending each other insulting, and preferably cruel, birthday cards. We put a lot of time, effort and ingenuity into finding exactly the right one. It’s the thought that counts.

  Perhaps my most telling contribution to this tradition was the 2007 triumph on the occasion of my brother’s fortieth birthday. That card comprised a group of boy scouts on a camping trip. A boy is telling a scary story illuminated, as tradition dictates, by a torch pressed under his chin. The faces of his audience express terror and disbelief. This is the snippet of the story to which we are privy: ‘And then hair starts growing out of your nose and ears!’ The card’s message: some horror stories are true.

  A few days before my forty-eighth birthday, and a few months before finding myself at this starting line of a marathon, I received a worthy riposte. Two bats are hanging upside down (that is the card’s salient visual fact). One says to the other:

  ‘You know what frightens me most about old age?’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘Incontinence.’

  The function of religion is to make us feel better, by peddling a lie. The function of philosophy, and a carefully chosen birthday card, is to make us feel worse, by telling the truth. And the truth is of course: we get worse.

  Around the time this card was winging its way to me over the Atlantic, I found myself asking my GP a question: ‘What do you mean, gout?’

  About a week before, I had woken in the middle of the night and noticed that the big toe on my left foot had stiffened up. The next morning, walking was painful. And then it just got more and more painful. In a few days time, my entire foot had swollen up and was far too painful for me to wear shoes. I hobbled barefoot into the doctor’s office to see what was up. If my question was a simple one, its answer was deceptively revealing; not so much in what it said, but in what it showed.

  ‘Well, it does look like gout. We can’t be sure without a blood test to find out your uric acid levels.’

  ‘I don’t have gout. Old, overweight people get gout.’

  ‘Well, it is true that obesity and hypertension raise your risk of gout, but they’re not prerequisites.’

  ‘But gout! That’s Henry VIII — a diet of goose legs and gallons of wine, that sort of thing. I’m a vegetarian you know.’

  ‘Well, yes, a diet that is high in purines, like meat and fish, increases the risk of gout. It’s interesting that you’re a vegetarian. Do you drink much?’

  ‘Drink much, me? Well … you know, a little dry sherry at Christmas time. Look I’m a writer; I think I’m contractually obligated to drink. I’ll be honest. In my formative years, yes, I could put it away; but not any more, not since the boys came along. They show no mercy, you know. If I wake up a little fuzzy-headed, they can smell weakness, like sharks smelling blood. It’s going to be a long, long day for me. It’s just not worth it. I might have a glass or two of wine with dinner, after the boys have gone to bed, but that’s it. Occasionally three, occasionally one: never more than three, though.’

  ‘Ah, aversion therapy: interesting. Would this be every night?’

  ‘Well … you know, most nights. Unless I’m going out or something — then I have to drive, so I don’t drink, of course. But I don’t go out much.’

  ‘Alcohol consumption is shown to be implicated in gout attacks nearly half the time.’

  ‘So I need to give up?’

  ‘No, nothing drastic like that. But you might want to take a night or two off, every now and then. Give your kidneys a break.’

  ‘Okay, that certainly doesn’t sound unreasonable, doctor. But, you really think it is gout?’

  ‘Well, it might be something else. Have you ever damaged this toe, broken it, dislocated it?’

  ‘Actually, now you mention it, I seem to remember dislocating it years ago, back in my karate days.’

  ‘Oh, that’s unfortunate. If there’s joint damage, there’s a possibility of it being osteo-arthritis. You wouldn’t want that. It’s nasty. Gout is much easier to manage. The other thing it might be is a stress fracture. You said you run?’

  ‘Yes, but not so much lately. There were times when I would run forty miles a week, a long run of twenty miles, stuff like that. But those days are gone — well, at least in Miami.
I hate running here: too hot, too humid, too flat, and you’re under permanent assault from mosquitoes. But I do have a young dog that needs a lot of exercise. So we do a few miles most days. Nothing drastic, though. I don’t run marathons or anything like that.’

  ‘I suppose there’s an outside chance that it’s a stress fracture, which would be very unfortunate — difficult to get rid of. But I really don’t think so. It’s usually the twenty-somethings that come in here with stress fractures. And it does look like gout. So, what I’m going to do is give you a cortisone shot in the joint. That’ll kill it dead.

  ‘Will it hurt?’

  He smiles: ‘It’ll hurt like hell.’

  And it did. But it certainly did the trick. Cortisone is good shit.

  So gout, Wikipedia tells me, is the result of a build-up of uric acid crystals in the joints. Uric acid comes from urea, a by-product of protein breakdown. If your kidneys are not doing their job properly, then urea will not be eliminated from the blood quickly enough and will form into crystals of uric acid. These collect in the joints — the joint at the base of the big toe is typical — and will be treated as foreign bodies by the immune system. The resulting melee causes a gouty attack.

  But that is not important. The truly revealing part of this little chapter in the book of my general demise is the background of assumptions it reveals. I’ve reached that point in life where gout is the best-case scenario; gout is what I should be hoping for. And so, in my primary care physician’s office, the monstrous nature of life was illuminated for me once again. As if I needed it. One day you are running twenty miles for fun. The next, you are keeping your fingers crossed for gout.