THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 15something else, but when he was informed after taking the decision
over Rosario that his own face resembled that of a Cabbage Patch
Kids doll, Camacho said, “Hey, if this is macho, I don’t want no part
of it.”
This kind of resistance to going all the way can show up not just
in boxers who get hurt but also in boxers who badly hurt or kill an
opponent in the ring — and indeed in all sorts of athletes, artists,
party animals, teachers, parents, spouses. Not going all the way
shields you from what’s down at the bottom of things, which in
some cases can be enabling as well as disabling. Getting a good look
over the brink and stepping back from it can prevent you from
finding out what you’re capable of, but it can also save a career, a
liver, a marriage, a life. My friend Charles averaged a 6:52-per-mile
pace in Burlington, exactly as planned, and finished in just under
three hours, in 2:59:41, exactly as planned. I had secretly, unrea-
sonably hoped to run shoulder-to-shoulder with him the whole
way, and I was jealous of his triumph. But he was never the same
again. He’d always had trouble with tight, balky tendons and
ligaments, and in the course of willing himself to go all-out all the
way in Burlington he did something to his hips and Achilles’
tendons from which they never fully recovered. He could no longer
run whenever he felt like it or as far as he felt like going, and he went
through long periods when he couldn’t run at all. He tells me he
tried one more marathon several years later, but his parts rebelled,
he had to walk part of the time, and he realized that he couldn’t force
his body to do it anymore.
I
know that there are all kinds of serious long-haul runners out
there — competitive marathoners, ultramarathoners, back-to-
back serial marathoners, triathletes — who scoff at the notion
that running a marathon, especially at my pokey pace, would be a
big, draining traumatic deal at all. But I’m not one of those people.
I’m a casual runner who came to it in middle age, and I’m not fast,
and it was always a big deal for me to get through a marathon and to
qualify for Boston.
Non-elite marathoning is a middle-aged person’s game. The
average age of official entrants in the Boston Marathon is over 42,
and I’m surprised it isn’t higher. Young men and women do, of
course, run marathons, and as a group they’re overrepresented
among the faster runners, but when I would look around at the
starting line of a marathon I saw a whole lot of people who, like me,
were somewhere between post-young and pre-old. That impres-
The more I
learned about
marathoning,
the more reliable
became the fail-
safe mechanism
that prevented
me from going
all-out.
sion was even stronger at the finish line, where even the youngest
runners looked older than they did at the start. And the virtues on
display in a marathon are the virtues of middle age: endurance,
persistence, self-knowledge, an ability to see a task whole and pace
yourself through it, an acute awareness of capability and limits.
When we passed Wellesley College at Mile 13 of the Boston
Marathon and Boston College at Mile 21, I’d take in the spectacle of
thousands of young people, many of them having worked up a
respectable Saturday-night buzz on a Monday morning, watching
thousands of people who used to be young derive satisfaction from
laboring through a difficult and not particularly exciting ordeal.
That, to me, suggested one essence of the event. The spectators who
were college seniors, a few short weeks away from leaving campus
and figuratively joining the trudging flow, ought to have been
paying special attention.
At Mile 23 the Boston Marathon route passes a block from my
house. My daughters were still little girls in the years that I ran
Boston, and they would come out to Beacon Street to try to spot me
in the herd of suffering commuters. This was usually just about the
worst moment of the race for me, the peak of hating myself for
getting into a situation in which I wanted to quit but had to keep
going because I knew myself well enough to know that I would hate
myself even more if I quit. There were still three miles to go, which
seemed like a lot, and I would be tempted by a vivid awareness that
the sweet surcease of my own couch and bathtub were within a
short limping walk of the course, were I to suddenly turn off to my
right at this point. But that’s when my kids would spot me, and
they’d shout and jump up and down and scuttle through the legs of
the crowd to keep up with me for a bit, and I would feel obliged to
smile and wave to let them know I was all right, and by the time I
was done with that charade I would have to admit to myself that I
couldn’t quit now and might as well finish butchering this thing.
Parenthood in a nutshell, at least the part of it that requires
endurance.
The whole business of marathoning reeks of allegory. The idea is
to go through the course at a pace slow-and-steady enough to be
sustainable but fast enough to qualify to do it all over again, and the
rewards of such self-discipline are entirely, even pathologically,
personal and internal. Having a couple of marathons a year to
prepare for put an extra edge of purpose on every run, even if I never
did train hard enough, and the necessity of qualifying for Boston
supercharged even the tiniest details of my routine. There’s no
functional difference between running 26.2 miles in 3:29:59 or in
3:30:01, but the distinction mattered a great deal to me. I have no
use for bluster about sports and character, but I do think it’s true
that doing one difficult thing equips you to do another.
When I finished a marathon, I’d lie around for the rest of the day
and then go on about my business, sore and satisfied, secure in the
knowledge that nothing significant had been achieved and that my
efforts had no effect at all on the world. Still, as is true of life itself,
you start here and you end up there, and it’s not always easy, and you
keep going anyway. You don’t have to be middle-aged to recognize
such persistence as sweet victory, but it helps.
And I try not to forget the lesson compressed into the fact that
my first and most incompetent marathon was my fastest one. Age
brings a measure of expertise and even wisdom, but also a careful
self-control that can put out of reach what you were capable of
when you were younger, dumber and more willing to make a
revelatory mistake.Carlo Rotella’s most recent book is “The World Is Always Coming to an
End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood.”