14 APRIL3, 2022at the finish line felt like some kind of triumph).
As I got better at pacing myself through a marathon, I found that
I was less and less torn up the next day, and that I perversely missed
the tender obliteration that obliged me to go backward down
staircases and turned a hot bath into a masochistic pleasure cruise.
One reason I stopped running marathons was that I could no
longer force myself to go so hard that I felt entirely used up the next
day. Feeling merely sore wasn’t worth the bother of all the
thinking-about-running entailed by training, and all the not-run-
ning forced on me by tapering before the race and taking time off
after it to recover. If the ultimate point of running is simply the
feeling of making headway under my own power along the rise and
fall of the land — a heady blend of physical pleasure and space-ex-
ploration high that feels like concentrated essence of the joy of
being alive — it was better to just listen to a book and go for my usual
run almost every day, happily covering ground without thinking or
planning or looking at my watch.
What does it mean that I got slower as I got more educated? In
retrospect, my refusal to think about the first marathon before I ran
it looks to me like an unconscious scheme to short-circuit a fail-safe
mechanism that would have stopped me from going all-out. Had I
trained, I would have felt free to think about the race. But once it
became clear that I wouldn’t be ready, my mind shied from
considering the consequences. If I had known what I would feel like
for the last six miles or so, I would have abandoned any idea of
keeping pace with Charles and run a slower, more sensible race
from the outset. I couldn’t know what bonking would feel like, but I
suspect that my body had an inkling. I’d come close enough to see
that feeling on the horizon in those Thanksgiving runs out to my
mother-in-law’s house, and during the all-day pickup basketball
epics in which I’d indulged before I had kids. My guess is that my
body could extrapolate from those experiences and had at least a
suspicion of what lay on the other side of the depletion frontier, and
ordered my mind not to think about it so that it wouldn’t take steps
to head off the disaster.
The more I learned about marathoning, the more reliable
became the fail-safe mechanism that prevented me from going
all-out. I spend time around boxers, and I’ve seen something
similar happen as they gain in experience (though the stakes are
exponentially higher in boxing). Take Hector “Macho” Camacho.
One of the most abundantly gifted fighters of his era, he was elegant
and ring-smart and preeningly untouchable at the age of 24,
already 28-0 and in possession of a lightweight champion’s belt
when Edwin Rosario nailed him with a left hook in the fifth round
of a bout in Madison Square Garden in 1986. The punch didn’t even
put Camacho down, and he moved and jabbed enough to survive
the round and salvage a split-decision victory to remain unbeaten,
but in the moments after absorbing that hook Camacho shifted
from predatory virtuosity to belt-and-suspenders actuarial cau-
tion, and he never switched all the way back. He became a
safety-first fighter, and, though he showed flashes of inspired
greatness in bouts over the next quarter-century, that tended to
occur only when he was sure the other guy couldn’t hurt him. He
had a fine, long career, but he never became the all-timer he was
shaping up to be before he fought Rosario.
Badly shaken by Rosario’s hook after suffering a cut in the
corner of his left eye — he was pawing at the blood with his glove just
before Rosario drilled him — Camacho had arrived at a fresh
understanding of himself and the world. From then on, whether he
was winning or losing, he held back from letting a fight reach the
all-out state in which everybody has all their chips in the pot and it’s
plain that nobody will ever be the same again. Call it fear, wisdom orrip open the packets and suck out their gaggingly sweet contents
when a water station came into view so that I could wash down the
mouth-clogging crap. I also learned how to crimp a paper cup so I
could drink while running without spilling, and I learned that in
the final miles of a race I had to plot a shallow angle into a water
station to pick up a cup and then a shallow angle back out again to
compensate for getting so stiff that it became difficult to change
direction. I got used to living with how it felt to be deep into a
marathon, within view of bonking but not bonking, and I got better
at functioning in that state.
I ran a marathon in Lowell in a sleety October nor’easter, and
another in Boston on an April day so freakishly hot — 90 degrees,
after a winter and early spring of training in the cold — that over
2,000 runners were treated for heatstroke and more than 4,
entrants decided not to run at all. Usually I have nothing to do with
spectators along the route, since I regard running a marathon as a
shamefully self-regarding indulgence best carried out in private
and I tend to assume that a significant percentage of the people
lining the route are latter-day Merry Pranksters bent on expanding
runners’ consciousness by dosing them with psychedelics. But on
that dangerously hot day I gladly accepted ice, pretzels and
garden-hose spray-downs from strangers. I crushed the melting ice
onto my stove-hot scalp and sucked the salt off the pretzels before
tossing aside the doughy, denuded remains.
I fell into a rhythm of running the nearby Lowell marathon in
the fall to qualify for Boston in the spring, and I got better at setting
a fast-enough pace I could sustain while leaving enough in reserve
to finish with some dignity. I learned that this was considerably less
awful than banking faster miles at the beginning by running at a
speed I couldn’t keep up and then staggering home on empty. I
never did run the famously slow, hilly and crowded Boston course
to my satisfaction, but Lowell is fast and flat and not too crowded,
and I got pretty good at orchestrating a run on it to finish just under
the slowest possible time that would qualify me to run in Boston.
Once, in Lowell, I overdid the moderation in the early and
middle stages and therefore had enough energy left for an actual
kick down the homestretch. I passed scores, even hundreds of
runners in the final couple of miles, and it felt as if I was just
bounding along without a care in the world while they were borne
back past me on a conveyor belt to which they were pinned like
dying insects. The route finished with a lap around the field at a
minor league baseball park, during which I fell into tandem with a
Lycra-encased, raven-haired amazon. We tore around the warning
track, parting to either side to pass solo runners and groups, then
surging back together to return to our stride-for-stride intimacy.
After we crossed the finish line at home plate, we grew mutually
embarrassed by the sudden unplanned breathlessness of our
encounter and contrived to drift off in opposite directions, strang-
ers again.S
o I staged an education for myself and got a lot smarter about
running marathons. But here’s the lesson inside the lessons:
That cataclysmically stupid first marathon in Burlington in
2008 was the fastest one I ever ran. My time that day was 3:24:42,
an average of 7:49 per mile, good enough for 256th place out of
2,379 finishers. When I ran the Lowell marathon in the years that
followed, I tended to come in a lot closer to my age group’s 3:
cutoff for qualifying for Boston. A couple of times I missed the
cutoff, which also happened each of the three times I ran the Boston
Marathon — twice by a minute or two and once by a lot more than
that (though, because that was the 90-degree day, just getting
through it in my slowest time ever and ending up in the medical tent