12 APRIL 3, 2022cause novices to be nervous. There were placards on poles showing
expected finishing times — faster as you approached the start line
— and you were supposed to find the one that represented your
likely pace and start there.
Charles, who knew e xactly what h e was doing a nd had trained to
do it, was looking for the three-hour sign, which was way up near
the front. He had never run a marathon before, either, but he
thought he could get in under three hours. That meant averaging 6
minutes 52 seconds per mile. There was no reason to believe I could
keep up with him. I’d taken up running a few years before, when my
daughters arrived, because running at night when the girls were
asleep was more f easible t han h anging a round a basketball court all
afternoon. I could run eight-minute miles without any special
effort, and, though I’d strung together no more than 18 of them at
one time — out to my mother-in-law’s house on Thanksgiving as a
prelude to heroic displays of trenchermanship — running 26.2 of
them didn’t seem impossible to imagine. An eight-minute pace,
which would produce a 3-hour 30-minute finish, was what I
naturally fell into when I was listening to a book on my iPod and
didn’t pay attention to what I was doing. I took off the headphones
and paid attention only when I ran with Charles, who always forced
me to go faster, an effort that wore on my mind more than on my
body. Moving through space may be joy, but thinking about it in
any systematically intentional way is drudgery.
Music cranked from big speakers near the start line, and a voice
came on periodically, talking over the music: 10 minutes until start
time ... five minutes ... one minute. They w ere p laying the usual j ock
rock, which typically slides off me with no effect, but on this
occasion it got through. Lenny Kravitz’s “Fly Away” was playing
when the starting gun went off, and the rising A-B-C-G-D groove
caused a feeling to swell within me that I could run much faster
than usual for a very long time and would feel mountingly greater
and g reater until I f elt great forever and c ouldn’t feel anything other
than great. I knew this was stupid, but I still felt this way.
Charles took off, and I took off with him. Charles, who at the
time did something James Bond villain-like in the energy business
and n ow does something similarly fate-of-the-planet-y but c arbon-
neutral, is a natural-born pusher of systems to failure. When you
play poker with him, he bets like a bebop drummer dropping
bombs off the beat, a jaggedly unpredictable presence forcing
everybody at the table to constantly evaluate whether they’re just in
the game to hang out with t heir p als or are, in f act, r eady to go all t he
way right now. If a dog chases us when we’re out running together,
he charges at the dog, and once when the owner was in sight he
faked at the dog and charged the owner instead.
It was hard for me to keep up with him, even over the first few
hundred yards of the marathon course. I am relatively quick — I
have quick hands, and when I play ball my first step usually shakes
me free of my defender for at least a moment — but I’m not at all
fast. I pretty much just have the one running speed, so there’s not
much difference between what it looks like when I’m poking along
and w hen I’m g oing a s fast as I can. I t felt to me, trying to s tay almost
even with Charles’s shoulder, that I was running f lat-out, as I would
if I were fleeing an e nraged m ob. It couldn’t possibly b e sustainable,
but I let Lenny Kravitz’s A-B-C-G-D crunch clear all that from my
head and just ran.
After a while, I couldn’t keep up with Charles anymore, and
gradually he disappeared from view. This was no more than a mile
or two into the marathon, and I was already winded and disap-
pointed. We came upon a big hill, and I ran up it as fast as I could,
then down the other side, also as fast as I could, which was faster.
Whatever the many p otential failings of running as fast as I could allT
hirty thousand people will run the Boston Marathon
on April 18, and I’m not going to be one of them. So no
obsessive pre-race monitoring o f food and w ater intake
for me this year, and no exquisite timing of the crucial
final visit to the bathroom. No dawn bus ride out to
Hopkinton and non-nap on the grass and long walk to the starting
corrals at an energy-conserving slow pace that’s hard to maintain
when my body wants to start going fast right now. No starting gun,
and no crystalline sense of setting out to do a difficult thing with
many others and yet all alone, the pure joy of moving through the
world u nder m y own p ower rising inside me to e clipse both the d eep
confidence that comes of capability and the shallower but sharper
worry that I’m going to screw up the race somehow.
Runners talking about their injuries are even more tedious than
tech zillionaires talking about the future, so suffice it to say that I’ve
been injured lately and haven’t been able to run much. But even if I
wasn’t hurt, I still wouldn’t be running Boston this year. I took up
and then put down marathoning in middle age, and along the way I
learned something not only about myself and life but about the
nature of lessons.T
he first marathon I ran was in Burlington, Vt., in 2008. I was
43, and I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was getting
into. I n the months l eading up to the race, I had continued t o
run my usual leisurely few miles on most days, and I had tried a
couple of longer runs and a couple of sessions at the track, but I had
not done anything like the concentrated distance-extending and
speed-building training routine a marathoner should pursue. I had
intended to prepare in a more urgent and systematic way, but I was
busy with work, and this and that other thing came up, and then a
few weeks before the race I got a giant splinter from sliding in my
socks on an old hardwood floor. The barbed hunk of wood
disappeared so deep into my heel that my doctor decided he
couldn’t dig i t out. I had to stay off t he foot u ntil it worked i ts w ay out
on its own, which happened not long before race day.
I had apparently decided not to think about how unready I was
to run a marathon. My mind shied violently from the subject
whenever I tried to force it to focus on what would happen during
the race. This wasn’t like me — I can usually face up to whatever’s
coming, especially if it’s bad — but part of avoiding thinking about
the marathon was avoiding thinking about why I was avoiding
thinking about it. My instincts seemed to be telling my reasoning
mind to stay away. To the extent I let myself think about it at all, I
settled for a general sense that I had done a lot of cross-training,
broadly defined. When I took my daughters for a bike ride, walking
or jogging while they pedaled in crazed spirals around me, I usually
came home carrying at least one girl and at least one bike. When I
had a lot of work to do, I couldn’t think of a way to get out of it that
wouldn’t be humiliating, so I did it.
I had lost what little speed I’d had when I was younger, but I had
gotten s tronger and more sure o f what m y body could d o. If running
a marathon was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, I
assumed I could probably handle whatever came up.
I went up to Burlington from Boston, where I live, with Charles,
an old friend who had persuaded me to run a marathon with him.
We walked toward the starting line on a bright late-spring morning
through an army of runners doing their getting-ready routines:
stretching, standing in line at the porta-potties, sipping from water
bottles, staring into space with headphones on, pacing aimlessly,
greeting each other and making too-loud jargon-intensive small
talk in the way t hat p eople will d o when t hey’re trying to convey that
they know the score and are totally at h ome i n a situation that might