Boston Marathon Bombing: the Part the Media Missed

     News of the Boston Marathon bombing came to us as two huge stories and just a hint of a third.  A fourth story, the most important one, was never mentioned.  I followed the news with intense interest, not only because I had friends in that race, but because the Boston Marathon had for years been the holy grail of my dreams when I was a young runner. 
     The first of the big news stories was that of a terrible attack that, unlike the bombings which have killed and maimed Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, was a horror we were actually allowed to see without censorship.  Recall that horrific photo of a man being wheeled away from the carnage with both of his lower legs blown off--the protruding bone and gore right there for us to witness.  That had happened to hundreds of young American men in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the media had never shown us the photos.  This was new.  But while the captions and commentaries from Boston expressed nothing but horror, let's not kid ourselves: the audience ratings got a huge boost.  (If you watch TV, you might be aware that detective and cop shows these days seem to be in a sort of ripped-off-legs-and-arms race, as each show tries to boost its ratings by showing more gore than the next: Witness the episode of the show NCIS that featured scenes of several murder victims who'd been cut and mixed together by some evildoer into a "meat jigsaw puzzle." When my wife and I saw that, we gagged, but apparently that kind of scene titillates enough viewers to keep the producers vying to see how they can make their stories even more gruesome.)  The Boston bombing was a real-life horror show, and behind the genuinely saddened faces of the reporters and news anchors, it was making money for their corporate managers and investors.
     The second Boston story, which perhaps served as a kind of redemption for the unabashed  sensationalism of the first, focused on the public backlash at the cowardace of the bombers, a redemption best expressed by the "Boston Strong" banners that began to appear within days, and by the public rallying of even such passionate Boston rivals as New York Yankee fans to the notion that beneath the rivalries of sports, we are all united in our outrage and determination not to be intimidated by terrorists.  With this story, a wave of sentimentality washed through the country.  I feel compelled to observe, however, that sentimentality is notoriously easy to feel, and it costs nothing to express outrage.  To actually do something about such violations of our civility is much harder.  The media are far more inclined to show the "Boston Strong" signs than to pursue the difficult question of how Boston (or America) can actually get stronger.
     A third story, sketchily touched on, was the disturbing question of why two young men who'd emigrated to America from a more troubled part of the world would be motivated to do such an unthinkable thing to their host country.  Reporters found little or no enlightenment about the suspects' mental state, and quickly came to the all-too-easy conclusion that the brothers had been diabolically influenced by jihadist extremism.  That, of course, didn't address the fact that those two young men were only the latest in a long series of mass murderers (in Newtown, Aurora, Columbine, Oklahoma City, Virginia Tech, and a hundred other places) of whom the majority were home-grown Americans who had nothing to do with jihadist grievances.
     The fourth story, not told at all, is in my view the most important: the story of the marathon runners who were there that day and what their accomplishment can tell us about the current state of our nation and world. Every one of the more than 22,000 men and women who crossed that now infamous finish line had spent hundreds of hours, most of them for years, in fair weather and foul, training for this day with a dedication that could have been an epochal inspiration for the 99.9 percent of Americans who do not practice such discipline.  The trouble, I suppose, is that today's reporters are too lazy or too poorly educated in the skills of serious journalism--or too directed otherwise by their employers--to have seen that possibility.  But the truth, right before our eyes, yet unmentioned by the reporters who flocked to the scene, was that one of the world's greatest assemblages of strong, enduring, and dedicated people had come to Boston to prove to themselves and their friends and families that ordinary humans can achieve far more than most of us ever thought.  In a world (and country) struggling to achieve the goals of a better life we profess to believe in, that Boston Marathon demonstration of human potential and uplift--and its companion demonstrations in the marathons of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington, DC, and a hundred others--should have been big news whether bombers had done their dirty deeds or not. 
      What journalists could have probed is the now voluminous evidence from physiological and neurological science that cardiovascular fitness, along with the kind of mental discipline practiced by the runners who came to Boston has tremendous--potentially world-changing--benefits for both physical and mental health.  That, in itself, isn't news--although the media give far too little attention to it.  But the fact that the number of Americans who have chosen to follow a hard new path to high-level health and capability has grown from a few thousands to more than 50 million since I first ran Boston in the 1960s--that is huge news. The police and FBI moved with admirable swiftness to tackle the immediate emergency, but it was the runners who demonstrated one of the essential a keys to coping successfully with a much more pervasive and long-term threat.
     In the winter of 1960, president-elect John F. Kennedy introduced an idea that  may have seemed too radical at the time to have much immediate impact on the country's course, but which took root and has become what may yet be a critical determinant of the country's future.  Kennedy introduced his idea in an article for Sports Illustrated, titled "The Soft American."  At the time, the United States was facing the very real threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, whose fist-pounding leader Nikita Khruschev had famously told America, "We will bury you!"  Kennedy knew the U.S. would need to heighten its military readiness, but he also knew something that in the long run may prove more important: that even the most powerful military on Earth can't win the day for its people if the people are weak.  Kennedy also knew that the kind of weakness that threatens a society's ability to survive is not just a weakness of body, but of intellect and spirit.  He had been alarmed to learn that American boys who'd been screened for military service over the previous few years had been embarrassingly unfit.  One of every two of them had been rejected by the military as "morally, physically, or mentally unfit."  And that was half a century before the obesity epidemic hit the fan.
     Kennedy was convinced that if America was to survive in dangerous age, its people need to be fit not just for pullups and 1-mile runs, but for the ever more demanding mental and moral challenges of keeping our country secure while also keeping it free.  In his "Soft American" article, he wrote, "if we fail to encourage physical development and prowess, we will undermine our capacity for thought, for work, and for the use of those skills vital to an expanding and complex America."  He knew that building fitness isn't just mindless "jock stuff"--it involves developing the disciplines of long-range planning, dedicated practice, mental toughness, and ability to rebound from injury or setback.  Those are also the qualities it takes to build a strong and resilient society.  The year Kennedy wrote his article, several hundred runners entered the Boston Marathon.  In 2013, a hundred times that many did--and tens of thousands more wished they could.  And while the race volunteers and others near the finish line who rushed to help the bombing victims were heroically rersponding to an immediate crisis, the runners who'd dedicated themselves to reaching that finish line were--whether they thought of it this way or not--responding to an ongoing national crisis, as heroes of another kind.  If a majority of Americans had their kind of dedication and grit, the country would be vastly stronger and more free of fear and insanity than it presently is.  That's the story the media missed.

The Skill of Envisioning

       In my book The Longest Race, while recalling a momentous ultra I ran a few weeks after the 9-11 attacks in 2001, I alluded to a radical theory I have about human progress.  (After all, when you practice long-distance running, you're practicing how to make progress toward a finish line, and I had long since learned that reaching a finish line and reaching other kinds of goals involve a lot of the same factors.)
       My theory was that one of the key factors in human progress--envisioning outcomes--was one of the earlierst skills the human species ever developed, and was key to our ability not only to survive in a world of far more powerful, fleet-footed, sharp-toothed animals, but ultimately to build civilization and dominate all other life.
       I'd been running for many years, and had also experienced some intriguing success in my own ability to envision, but had never particularly connected those disparate skills--until I became familiar with the "Running Man" theory of human evolution first suggested by the biologists David Carrier and Dennis Bramble of the University of Utah and independently by the evolutionary biologist Bernd Heinrich of the University of Vermont and, more recently, by the evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman at Harvard. 
       The Running Man theory is that humans began their epochal evolutionary journey by learning to outrun all those faster, more powerful, and dangerous competitors, not by outsprinting but by outlasting them.  For decades, scientists had been blinded to this possibility by an obvious rhetorical question: How could running be an evolutionary advantage for a species that was slow?  The scientists had been focused on sprinting speed, which of course is what we see emphasized in all of our popular culture and enteertainment: the speed of touchdown runs, fast-breaks, 100-meter dashes in the tradition of Jesse Owens and "Bullet" Bob Hayes, and innumerable cop chases.
       But around a quarter-century ago, this rhetorical question actually got an answer.  It wasn't the early humans' inferior slow-footed sprinting, but their superior endurance running that enabled them to outlast the faster animals they hunted for food.  In articulating this theory (which eventually got a cover story in the top-tier scientific journal Nature), the scientists' focus was on heat buildup and cooling.  If a human hunter (or band of hunters) chased a horse or woolly mammoth, the quarry would easily get away but would have to stop and rest, and if the hunters caught up and the bigger animal would have to sprint away again--and then again--the big animal would eventually become overheated and have to succumb.  The humans, with their bare skin and higher surface-to-volume ratios, would cool more easily and therefore be able to keep up the pursuit (and their strength) much longer.
      While the scientists' focus was on the humans' superior cooling, my own focus--after half a century of competititve running--was on another question: when the prey sprinted out of sight, how did the  hominid hunter know it was still there (just around the bend or over the hill), close enough to keep chasing?  The scientists' knew the Running Man theory wasn't just conjecture; there were several tribes who practiced that kind of hunting--notably in the Kalahari Desert in Africa and in the vast Copper Canyon of Mexico.  The hunters in those places would chase animals for hours before finally running them down.  Other, nonhuman, predators generally give up the chase much more quickly: Out of sign (or smell), out of mind.
       It seemed necessary, then, to hypothesize that early humans were endowed not only with exceptional physical endurance, but with exceptional ability to envision.  One reason our brains grew bigger was to accommodate our developing capacity to envision the outcome (catching the animal being pursued) that had been out of sight not just for a few seconds but for many minutes--or even hours).  My radical theory: Endurance and mental envisioning of distant outcomes developed together.
       Endurance, as we all now know, is not inborn--even if the capacity for it is.  Although the genetic capacity for learning it may vary among individuals (in their percentage of slow-twitch muscle fibers, surface-to-volume ratios at healthy weight, etc.), endurance is primarily a learned skill.  With practice, men or women who have mostly fast-twitch muscles or large frames can still become good endurance athletes.  And a guy with all the ideal endowment for distance running (lean, lightweight, all slow-twitch) still can't run long distances without hitting a wall if he doesn't train.  My inference: If endurance is a learned skill (we're born to run, but only if we practice), then envisioning, too, is a thing that has to be practiced to be effective.
       It may seem a huge leap to see a connection between my personal experience as a runner and my experience in envisioning future outcomes.  But as one of the most experienced runners alive today (I've been running competitively for 56 years without a break), I'd be crazy not to assume those thousands of hours have activated not only the part of my brain that enables the skill of endurance but also have activated the part that enables the skill of envisioning what's around the next bend or over the next hill in the journey of life--whether on the literal trail of a long-distance foot race or the macrocosmic human journey into an increasingly murky future.
       Whatever the answer, I'm aware that over my lifetime, I have envisioned a series of developments to which our culture (and media) at large have been largely blind.  To list them may seem like a kind of bragging, but in this time of growing threats to the human prospect I think it would be a mistake for anyone who has even an inkling of an idea about how to help us find our way out of the growing darkness to hide his light under a bushel.  To be fair, though, I'll point out that the incidents I'll cite are all well documented.  If something momentous happened in 2000 that I envisioned in 1970, I can produce documentation from 1970.  And while the experience of a single individual is what many scientists might dismiss as anecdotal, I'd also suggest that there's too much here to be just a series of coincidences.
       Before I get to the list, one very salient point: If envisioning outcomes is truly a skill for which we humans have extraordinary genetic capability, then the prevailing lack of intelligent envisioning--of the eventual consequences of climate change, overpopulation, declining biodiversity, and protracted war--suggests that our culture, media, and educational institutions have all failed us tragically, whether in America or Afghanistan, red states or blue states.  And now, my list:

1950s: Discovering organic and natural foods:  In the 1950s when I was still a kid, my father and I met a radical doctor who told us of his belief that Americans' health was being dangerously undermined by excessive consumption of highly refined sugars and grains, and by hydrogenated fats (lard, margarine, or Crisco).  The doctor's logic and evidence were persuasive, and in 1954 I adopted his whole-grains, no-preservatives, no-transfats diet--partly for health and partly because I was convinced it would make me a better runner.
       Four decades later, the U.S. government issued its first warnings that excessive consumption of sugar, highly processed foods, and transfat were contributing to heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.

1970:  Envisioning cars that don't pollute:  In the 1960s, the idea of an emissions-free electric car was considered by the American auto industry--and the public--to be a long-failed experiment.  But along with a few others, I envisioned a big future for such cars, as documented in a report I wrote under a contract to the U.S. Department of Transportation, titled "The Economic Impact of Conversion to a Nonpolluting Automobile" (1970).
       Four decades later, the first hybrid-electric cars were introduced, soon followed by the all-electric Chevrolet Volt.

1970s:  Marathon running going big-time in New York City:  In the 1960s, there were a few hundred adult long-distance runners in New York, but I envisioned a time when running would be a liberating passion for city dwellers who lived and worked in confined spaces.  I ran in several obscure marathons staged in the streets of Yonkers and the Bronx in the '60s (there were about 50 participants each year), and when permission was granted to run a marathon in Manhattan, I jumped at the chance.  I thought it might be a watershed moment for urban culture.  The first New York City Marathon was held in 1970, and I ran and finished third.  There were 57 finishers in that first race.
       Four decades later, the New York Marathon has more than 45,000 competitors each year, with tens of thousands more turned away due to limited capacity.

1970s:  Upheaval of the American auto industry:  In the 1950s and '60s, the U.S. auto industry ruled the world--and was careless about quality control.  General Motors (GM) was the largest, wealthiest corporation in the world, and the company shrugged off criticism by Ralph Nader that its cars had far too many defects.  I had reason to believe GM's complacency would come back to haunt it, and in 1969 I wrote a book, What's Good for GM, warning of that outcome.  The publisher placed an ad for that book, along with Daniel Schorr's Don't Get Sick in America--an early warning that America's health-care system was heading for trouble--in the Wall Street Journal.
       Four decades later:  By the turn of the 21st century, the Japanese and Korean auto makers had seized on the opportunity to sell cars with greater emphasis on quality and reliability and had seized about half of the market share formerly held by the American manufacturers.  A few years later, GM was forced to declare bankruptcy.

1970s:  Nuclear threats: By the late 1950s, Americans were worried about the threat of Soviet nuclear attack, to the extent that many people built bomb shelters under their houses, and school children participated in "duck-and-cover" drills--as if that would offer any protection from a bomb that could almost instantly vaporize both us and the desks we were ducking under.  By the 1970s, a new concern was being expressed by a small group of scientists. The Los Alamos physicist Theodore B. Taylor, who had designed the largest fission atomic bomb ever exploded on Earth (detonated on Anawatak Atoll in the Pacific in 1955), began issuing quiet warnings to the U.S. government and international nuclear agencies that the greatest threat was no longer thermonuclear war between the superpowers, but the risks of leaks, thefts, or hijackings of critical nuclear materials, and the growing dangers of nuclear blackmail or terrorist attacks.  In the early '70s, Dr. Taylor wrote a journal outlining those growing dangers and hired me to edit it.  Envisioning is never a one-person skill, but rather an ability to grasp and expand on the vision of others you work with or who came before you.  Taylor was no doubt influenced by the concerns of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who'd come to regret his role in leading the Los Alamos project that built the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And I took to heart the hard facts Taylor had compiled.  But the nuclear agencies--and the world--paid little heed to his warnings.
       Now, four decades later, while no nuclear bomb has yet been exploded by terrorists over Washington, DC or New York or London, we are hearing explicit threats from the rogue nation of North Korea, and the even greater dangers of a coup by anti-American jihadists in unstable Pakistan, where extremists could seize a large nuclear capability.

1980s: The running boom in America:  By the mid-1970s, I'd noticed that the population of serious long-distance runners in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had gone from a few hundred to at least a few thousands.  I felt strongly that an important new phenomenon was getting a foothold (literally!) not only in New York but all across a country that had become too soft for its own good.  In 1960, president-elect John F. Kennedy had written an article for Sports Illustrated, "The Soft American," in which he observed that half of all young men being considered for military service were being rejected by the Selective Service as "mentally, physically, or morally unfit."  He had argued, "If we fail to encourage physical fitness, we will undermine our capacity for thinking, work, and use of the skills vital to a complex and developing America." Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, but by the mid-70s I saw that growing numbers of Americans were taking his concerns to heart--we were bicycling, hiking, and running not just for the fun or competition but for the physical and mental health benefits.  The times were a-changin', as Bob Dylan intoned.  In 1977, I launched a magazine, Running Times, which envisioned an era when running would become a passion for millions of people whose lives would by transformed by it.  At the time, the number of serious runners in the U.S. was in the thousands.
         Three decades later, surveys by the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association found that the number of Americans who were regular, "lifestyle" runners had climbed to more than 49 million--more than the number of people playing baseball and basketball combined.

1992:  Climate change:  In 1992, I was in my second year as a senior staff member at the Worldwatch Institute (publisher of the annual State of the World).  That year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a consortium of the world's top climate scientists, issued a landmark warning that human-caused global warming would generate increasingly frequent and intense extreme-weather events.  As editor of the Institute's magazine World Watch, I wrote a series of essays on what the scientists' warnings might mean for the human future, and especially the future of coastal cities.
       Two decades later: All of the trends the climate scientists warned of, and that I'd tried to help lay readers to picture--record wildfires, record floods, a mile-wide tornado, rogue hurricanes, disrupted ecosystems, and one other kind of catastrophe (see below)--had escalated even faster than the scientists had first projected.

2005: Hurricane Katrina:  In 2000, I was invited to lead a seminar on environmental security at the U.S. National Defense University in Washington, DC.  In my presentation, I noted that the climate changes we were experiencing made it highly probable that, sooner or later, the city of New Orleans would be hit be a catastrophic storm surge which--if generated by a category 4 or 5 hurricane--could wipe out the city.  In 2001 and 2002 I was invited back, and presented the same scenario for new groups. 
       Two years later: Hurricane Katrina, a category 3, hit New Orleans--and delivered a clear message about what would (or will) happen with a more powerful storm.

       So, there it is.  Do I claim to have an ability to predict?  No.  Anyone who claims to be able to see the future is at best naive or deluded, and at worst a blasphemous charlatan.  What I do claim--in accordance with well established scientific principles--is that by closely observing what is happening today and has happened in the past, we can envision what is most probable for the future.  As I've noted above, doing that well is a skill, and no algorithm has yet given us that capability because no real-life phenomenon of major importance is ever the outcome of just one or two quantifiable factors.  Those of us who are skilled at envisioning important future outcomes aren't even conscious of all the factors we take into account, any more than a skilled  basketball player is conscious of all the all the many biomechanical, neurological, emotional, and tactical factors he employs in an off-balance drive to the basket.  But we are at least aware of the need not to be thrown off, in our envisioning of the future, by the sway of sentiment, myths, corporate advertising, political propaganda, publicity, rumor, scapegoating, undiscriminating Google searches, and particularly the appeal of very simple answers, all of which can distract or obfuscate truths that might otherwise be obvious.
       With those caveats in mind, in my next post I will venture to apply my skill at envisioning to the ever-moving target of the next three decades, as seen from the perspecctive of 2013.  If I should be fortunate enough to live to 100 years (not likely, actually), to see how well my forecast turned out, the one thing I'm fairly sure of is this:  How skillful I prove to be at envisioning the world of the 2040s will be closely linked to how well I have succeeded in keeping my mind and body free of the crippling addictions and blinding distractions of the sprint culture.  We were born to run slowly, to persist, to be patient, and to envision with care and clear heads, and right now our civilization is moving far too blindly and fast to be sustained.





 

"The Longest Race" featured on NPR

        My  book The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance caught the attention of National Public Radio host Bill Littlefield earlier this month, and he did an interview with me that was broadcast on 220 NPR stations around the country.  It was a little intimidating, I'll admit, because Bill was in Boston (at host station WBUR) whle I was in Pasadena, CA, at Southern California Public Radio, with a headset and a mike--and I'm frankly a lot more comfortable with a water bottle and a pair of running shoes than with a headset and a mike.  Twice during the interview, I was in the midst of an interchange with the guy I could only hear, not see, when my headset fell off.  But it really wasn't the headset that discombobulated me so much as the fact that I was all alone in the studio, in a big swivel chair in front of a semicircular array of equipment that looked like what they had at the NASA Mission Control in Houston on the day of the first moon landing, back when I was young.  Except that in Houston they had about fifthy engineers and tech guys who could control a rocket flying 24,500 miles per hour, whereas I'm one of those clueless people (when it comes to tech, as opposed to my own bodily propulsion system) who never quite learned how to operate a VCR before it became obsolete, and who now wonders what the heck to do with all those useless cassete tapes in the TV cabinet.  There, in the NPR studio in front of me, were five very large computer screens and seven keyboards plus a giant eighth keyboard the size of a surfboard, with about a thousand keys, flanked by a bank of instrument panels with enough blinking lights and controls to fly a fleet of starships to Pluto. 
       What had caught Bill Littlefield's interest, I think, was the admittedly far-out theory I discuss in the book, that there is a critical link between the kinds of endurance, patience, and persistence that long-distance runners learn to practice on wilderness trails, and the kinds of priorities that scientists tell us human civilization as a whole will have to adopt if we are to have any real hope for a sustainable future.  In short, training for the long run--literally--can provide key insights to our own long-run future as a civilization.
       Littlefield also knew I wasn't just an over-enthusiastic marathon or half-marathon junkie espousing an idea that was just a little too much of a stretch.  In addition to having run long-distance races for over 55 years, I'd made my living as an editorial director for the Worldwatch Institute--publisher of the annual State of the World, which tracks global trends in such areas as human population, global warming, human food supply, major epidemics, and environmental decline.  I'd done editing for some of the world's leading environmental and climate scientists.  In my book, as I told the story of an iconic 50-mile race I had run a few weeks after the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon (one of my rivals in the race, Frank Probst, had been the closest survivor to witness the Pentagon crash), I offered some provocative speculations on just what that link between individual endurance and societal sustainability entails.
     Along with the broadcast, Littlefield posted a review on the host station's website, and my impression was that he "gets it" in a way that not all readers do.  (A few of the reader comments on Amazon have been like "Hey, I thought this book was going to tell me how to improve my marathon time.  What's all that other stuff?" But if you happen to look at the book's page on Amazon, also note the comments by Bill Rodgers, Kathrine Switzer, Michael Wardian, Naomi Benaron, Marshall Ulrich, and others, along with the most recent half-dozen reader reviews at the bottom!).  Here's a link to Bill Littlefield's review: http://onlyagame.wbur.org/2013/02/09/the-longest-race.
       One reason I wanted to be fairly candid about my techno-cluelessness about things like VCRs or radio broadcast equipment (or smart phone apps, or Garmins, or any of the other electronic stuff that has taken over for our bodies and brains) is that I wan't to establish some credibility when it comes to making a candid observation about my strengths, as well as my weaknesses.  There is one strength in particular (beyond a talent for running), which I'll discuss in my next post--an ability that has a strong bering on the validity of the theory of individual endurance and civilizational survival.  Look for it in the next couple if days.
      

Lance Armstrong, Artificial Organs, and the Big-Brother Toilet: What Do They Have in Common?

Three Things That Really Piss Me Off:

1.  Lance Armstrong.  I'm a competitive endurance athlete, ran my first long-distance race before Lance Armstrong was born, and have never run for money or fame.  And no, I'm  not envious of Armstrong's money or fame, nor was I envious even when it was all golden, before it turned to rot.  The thing is, long-distance running and other endurance sports are not even remotely like pro football, baseball, basketball, etc., which bring obscene amounts of income to their stars--many of whom never developed their social skills or education beyond early adolescence and are too often in the news because they've been involved in beatings, burgleries, shootings, or other crimes (note that the Huffington Post has an entire news section titled "Sports Crime."  It's hard for me to imagine that long-distance runners might someday get sullied by such things--though with the huge cash prizes awarded in major marathons now, I fear the day might not be far off.  Personally, I run for the pleasure of running and for the benefits of great health and fitness it brings--which, incidentally, I wouldn't trade for all the money ever banked by any pro athlete or hedge-fund manager or other fat cat you could name.
      But I'm also aware that beyond what endurance running has meant to me personally, it has brought something critically valuable to our troubled society at large.  Long-distance running--especially trail running--has brought millions of us a greater sense of connection with the natural world that sustains us and that we depend on foor every breath and step we take.  It takes courage and honesty for an athlete to recognize that those assets are worth infinitely more than personal glory or wealth.  That's a truth that growing numbers of us have embraced, in party because it's a truth that may be critical to the survival of civilization itself.  And when the  best-known endurance athlete in the world betrays that truth, it's a tragedy not only for him, but for all of us.  Lance Armstrong, like Barry Bonds, was a kind of Judas.  He really pisses me off.

2.  Wilderness visitors loaded with equipment.  It started with hiking and camping, and has since moved to trail running and ultrarunning.  When I was young and maybe a little too innocent, I joined the Boy Scouts, which in those days seemed an admirable means by which kids could learn about nature.  We had fun going on camping trips, cooking dinner over a campfire with a cook kit the size of a cereal bowl, and sleeping in a pup tent you could fold up and carry in your backpack.  The other stuff you had in your pack included a canteen of water and a small spade for digging a latrine.  Decades later, I learned that people were going camping with 30-foot motor homes, fully equipped kitchens, chaise-lounges, and TVs.  In Southern California, guys were driving out to the desert to race 400-horsepower vehicles with monster tires, wrecking the landscape.  And still later, I noticed that many of my fellow endurance runners were carrying more and more high-tech aids to navigation and performance: GPS, camel backs, fuel belts, cooling hats, hand bottles, gel paks, computerized running shoes, vented jackets, super sleeves, thermal gloves, and so on.  OK, if you're running in a place where you'd be arrested for running naked, or if you're going more than 10 miles on an extremely hot or extremely cold day, some of this stuff is very useful.  But where do you draw the line?  Or, more to the point, are you ever curious about whether a line should be drawn?  Or to turn that question upside-down, if you currently carry a lot of equipment to enhance performance by cooling, warming, hydrating, fueling, pain-killing, and replenishing electrolytes, what's wrong with enhancing performance by doing what Lance Armstrong did? 
     There was a time, a few decades ago, when a fundamental part of endurance sports was teaching your body how to increase its adaptability to thirst, fatigue, heat, etc., by developing greater energy efficiency and more astute awareness of your physiological and environmental conditions as you go.  But who needs optimal energy conservation when you can have replenishment as often as you want?  (Hint: If paleolithic humans had had readily available replenishment of food and water every half-hour, our species would never have developed the endurance, patience, and ability to envision and adapt that enabled us to build civilization, and none of us would exist today.)  The unchallenged, never-questioned trend toward ever greater dependence on technological aids to do what the body can do amazingly well on its own--if well trained and attuned--is dangerous, because that dependence increasingly disconnects us from our own nature. 
     Someday, I'd like to see the announcement of an endurance race in which the quantities of water and fuel we can consume during the competition, as well as the kinds and capacities of all of any equipment we wish to use, are as strictly limited as are the kinds of drugs we're allowed.  If a "minimalist" approach to endurance sport makes any sense at all, it can't be just with your shoes but with all that other stuff some runners now carry as if they're heading to Afraica to shoot lions and tigers on a rich-man's safari.  The realization that large numbers of my fellow Americans, even including a growing cohort of endurance athletes, still embrace a safari attitude toward wilderness pisses me off.

3.  The Big-Brother-Is-Watching-You Toilet.  Somewhere, a few years ago, I read about a new high-tech toilet developed by a Japanese company, which can save you a lot of the inconvenience of such disagreeable tasks as doing stool tests or being lectured by a doctor about your bad dietary habits.  Or, if your doctor is ignorant of nutrition himself (as many doctors clearly are), it's a toilet that at least might alert you to a problem that would otherwise be overlooked.  You don't want your underside to be overlooked, do you?
     This toilet, if I recall, will automatically collect small samples of your poop, analyze them for various diseases, drug residues, or dietary deficiencies or excesses, and automatically report them via direct electronic links to the appropriate authorities.  The purported use is for getting data quickly and efficiently from your bowels to the local Health officials, who will then be alerted if you are carrying a serious disease even before you know it yourself.  But you can also see the other obvious uses for this toilet: Any residue of illicit drugs could be automatically reported to the police or DEA (Lance Armstrong should have had one of these years ago), and--if you're a celebrity--any indication of pregnancy could be passed on (for a price) to reporters who know the right people at the Health Department or other agencies.  And if the model of toilet you have is equipped with a camera, personnel at these agencies might make a nice income on the side by selling photos of your butt. 
     When I read about this toilet, I found it both hilarious and appalling.  When I poop or pee, I'd prefer not to have anyone watching.  OK, if I'm running an ultra and have to stop and step into the woods a few yards, I don't mind if other runners see me as they go by.  But close examination should be for me, and only me, to do or request a lab to do.  The idea of having every poop or pee intercepted, examined, and evaluated for possible further action by the government?  It's part of that same trend that's bringing us police-department drones looking in our windows or  CIA analysts perusing our phone calls.  That really pisses me off.

OK, so how are all these things connected?  And what about that other item in my catchy title, "Artificial Organs"?  Well, I need to clarify something important: I'm not a Luddite, one of those people who hate technology.  Technology is not always bad.  (Do I really even need to say that?)  But too many people, especially Americans and Japanese, regard it as always good.  Virtually every new technology generates excitement in the media and among investors and consumers, and rarely do we have any concern about unintended consequences.  We are enticed by the short-term satisfactions (the newest Apple or Samsung devices, etc.) while the long-term consequences of what were once promising technologies (coal-generated electricity, nuclear fission, DDT) fade from our awareness. Who even remembers Hiroshima, Chernobyl, or Love Canal?  And who really worries about obesity, diabetes, or global warming?
     For a more hidden example of a seeminly promising technology that has yet to reveal its fangs, who isn't glad for the biotech research that's beginning to produce artificial organs to replace diseased or injured ones?  Isn't that good?  Well, of course.  But then, we don't think much at all about the long-term imnplications of a technology that could someday be used by a neo-Nazi government or organization not to help the ill or injured, but to build a superior breed of human.  The technology that builds replacement livers and limbs could also be used to pioduce tall, blond, blue-eyed, beautiful, high-IQ children for the 1-percent of the population rich enough to have their genes engineered to order. Does anyone remember Hitler?
     What artificial organs, the big-brother toilet, and Lance Armstrong's chemical joy-ride all have in common is that all are manifestations of the mad rush of our civilization to allow our most fundamental human capacities, including our intelligence and wisdom, be replaced by mindless technology.  We turn our legs over to cars; we replace the mental mapping capacity of our hippocampuses with our GPS; we alleviate the stresses of hard work (whether at the desk or on a bicycle) by handing the burden of that work over to stimulants, painkillers, steroids, synthetic hormones, and narcotics.  The trouble is, unlike in our highly evolved bodies and brains, which have had 60,000 years to work out the bugs, these new technologies are not coordinated with each other, and have no conscience.  And the fact that we are so easily seduced by them really scares me.

If these themes are of interest, I hope you'll check out my book The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance.  It's had great reviews from Bill Rodgers, Jacqueline Hansen, Michael Wardian, and editors at Runners World, Running Times, and Ultrarunner, among others.  Available at Amazon and in bookstores.

"The Longest Race" is Out!

      My book has been printed and released at last! (as of October 9).  The pre-publication reviews have been amazing--as have the comments both from leading endurance athletes and from leading environmental activists concerned about the future of the planet we depend on for every step and breath we take.
      I want to quote just a few of the reviewers' comments, and then share a reflection (or warning, if you will) of my own.

From the Reviews of The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance:

"Revealing, savvy, and fast-paced, Ayres's eloquent book on marathon running is a master class on the priceless life lessons of enduring and conquering obstacles to victory."
          --Publishers Weekly

"The book is well structured, and the conversation is thought provoking, planting questions and ideas that readers will ruminate on long after the last page is turned.  Ayres's narrative skill makes this book stand out from other accounts of ultramarathons and is sure to appeal to both runners and nonrunners alike."
          --Booklist

"A leading environmental activist and ultramarathoner uses the 2001 JFK 50 Mile as a staging ground for his reflections on running, aging, and saving the planet . . . . Ayres admits he is addicted to running, but its importance for  him goes beyond the physical -- a race of that length is a 'rutual of survival' . . . The author's broad-ranging interests and accumulated wisdom will appeal to a wide readership, not just runners and environmentalists."
          --Kirkus Reviews

From Endurance Athletes:

"The Longest Race is a fascinating, compelling, and far-reaching read."
          --Amby Burfoot, Runners World editor-at-large, and winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon

"An epic story of how important our fitness as individuals may be to the long-run sustainability of our national and global society."
          --Jacqueline Hansen, first woman to run a sub-2:40 marathon, and two-time marathon
             world record holder

"Ayres is a legend who shares his many provocative insights and lessons in an informative yet enjoyable way."
          --Dean Karnazes, New York Times bestselling author of Ultramarathon Man

"I have been reading Ed Ayres's insightful thoughts on running and life since I began serious training in the 1970s.  We can all benefit greatly from Ed's wisdom.
          --Joe Friel, elite endurance athlete, coach, and author of The Triathlete's Training Bible

"In this compelling read, visionary Ed Ayres takes us on a run that may save our nanosecond lives . . . and our planet."
          --Kathrine Switzer, winner of the 1974 New York Marathon

"This book reminds us that our strength and vitality can never be separated from the health of the earth we run on, and whose air we breathe."
          --Bill Rodgers, four-time New York Marathon winner and four-time Boston Marathon winner

"Ed deftly weaves together a lifetime's experiences and observations . . . . Each topic alone would have made a good book.  Together they yield a great one, richly detailed and finely written."
          --Joe Henderson, former editor of Runners World

"Ed Ayres has a talent for drawing the reader into his adventure.  Enjoy the journey; it is a fun one."
          --Michael Wardian, World Ultrarunner of the Year for 2011

From Me (and From the Heart):

          The Longest Race isn't just a feel-good story, although some of the reviewers say they've been quite entertained.  It's also something of a feel-alarmed story, so be forewarned!  I feel a little like one of those movie-rating czars who warn parents that "the following contains sexually explicit or violent scenes . . . ."  But in the case of The Longest Race, it's not naked bodies, etc., that may be hard to watch with the kids around (near-naked bodies go with the territory for us runners), but a form of impending violence that makes action movies look tame.  I'm referring to the violence our "sprint culture" is doing to the planet we depend on for every step and every breath we take (see Bill Rodgers' comment above).  If you can take a deep,slow breath and not be in denial about that, this book can take you on a memorable journey.  I can promise that it will be unlike any other book about running you've ever read.
          The Longest Race should be in bookstores now (the week of October 9-14), and is also available at all the online bookstores: http://www.amazon.com/The-Longest-Race-Ultramarathon-Endurance/dp/1615190635. 

     

100 Quotes on Running and Human Endurance

       For fun, but also for inspiration and enlightenment, I decided to put together a collection of 100 quotes about that most fundamental activity of our species, the human race.  The quotes I found range from whimsical to profound--sometimes in the same breath (see Dr. Suess). And I was especially fascinated by how universally evocative running seems to be not just to those of us who run for sport, but to philosphers, scientists, and even U.S. presidents (Thomas Jefferson, John F. Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter), as well as to some of the giants of literature and the arts (Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Joyce Carol Oates). And of course, let's not leave out actual runners, from Clarence DeMar to Kathrine Switzer to the guy who may have written more about running than anyone else on our crowded planet, Joe Henderson. I hope you won't mind that I'm also including a scattering of quick takes from my book The Longest Race, which will be out on October 9.
        So, here goes:

1.  "Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures
      that the final victory comes."
                --The Buddha

2.  "Men ran after and ate horses for four hundred thousand years.  The outcome is
       more than a love of horse flesh; it is a runner's body."
                --Anthropologist Paul Shepard

3.   "There are as many reasons for running as there are days in a year.... But mostly
       I run because I am an animal and a child."
                --Dr. George Sheehan

4.   "Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing
       to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be."
                --Joyce Carol Oates

5.   "If you can fill the unforgiving minute
      With sixty seconds worth of distance run--
      Yours is the Earth..."
                --Rudyard Kipling

6.   "I got plenty of cautions that one or two of these marathons was all a man
       should do in a lifetime."
                --Clarence DeMar, in 1911, before the first of the seven
                   Boston Marathons he won, and the 65 he ran overall.

7.   "Running has substantiall shaped human evolution.  Running made us human."
                --Evolutionary biologist Dennis Bramble of the University of Utah

8,    "What's true for us as individual humans is true for the civilization we create:
        a sprint culture, seeking ever greater speed and power in all things cannot endure."
                --from The Longest Run: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon,
                   and  the Case for Human Endurance (October 2012)

9.    "I'm 84 years old. Don't let the altar-boy face fool you."
                --Johnny Kelly, aftger the finish of his 61st Boston Marathon

10.   "There are clubs you can't belong to, neighborhoods you can't live in, schools
          you can't get into, but the roads are always open."
                --Nike advertisement

11.   "The best long-distance runners eat raw meant, run naked, and sleep in the snow."
                --Alaska Airlines advertisement referring to sled dogs, as cited by run100s.com

12.   "As a boy, I was about the slkowest moving youngster in school."
                --Seven-time Boston Marathon winner Clarence DeMar

13.   "Happiness is pushing your limits and watching them back down."
                --New Balance advertisement

14.   "We humans...don't just sense what's happening in our bodies through
         the mediation of our consciousness up top in the ivory towers of our heads,
         but through our feet."
                --The Longest Race

15.   "Why couldn't Pheidippides have died at 20 miles?"
                --Frank Shorter, 1970, two years before he won the Olympic marathon

16.   "Sport, which mimics the language and emotional intensity of war but eliminates
         the fatal destruction, may be a form of redemption."
                --The Longest Race

17.    “They say a good love is one that sits you down, gives you a drink of water,
         and pats you on top of the head. But I say a good love is one that casts you
         into the wind, sets you ablaze, makes you burn through the skies and ignite
         the night like a phoenix; the kind that cuts you loose like a wildfire and you
         can't stop running simply because you keep on burning everything that you touch!
         I say that's a good love; one that burns and flies, and you run with it!” 
                --C. Joybell C.

18.    "A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man."
                --Arnold Toynbee

19.    "It might be a paradox that would only irritate an old-school coach, but I knew
          well that I would run my best by hoping that everyone else ran their best."
                --The Longest Race

20.   "Men are born human.  What they must learn is to be an animal.  If they learn
         otherwise it may kill them, and kill life on the planet."
                --Anthropologist Paul Shepard

21.   "Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience."
                --Ralph Waldo Emerson

22.   "Early humans actually ran with lower energy efficiency than the animals they chased--yet
        prevailed."
                --The Longest Race, citing University of Utah biologist David Carrier

23.   "Since I was forty and definitely slipping, I have won seven full marathons,
        got second six times, and third four times.... I'm wondering what I can do
        after I'm fifty."
                --Clarence DeMar

24.   "The feature that differentiates hominids from other primates is not large brain
        size, but the set of characteristics associated with erect bipedal posture and
        a striding gait."
                --Biologist David Carrier

25.   "Fatigue is not an enemy.... In fact, it's quite friendly and only wants you to be
        more comfortable.  It wants you to stop and lie down, for God's sake...." 
                --The Longest Race

26.   "Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory."
                --William Barclay

27.   "Stone-age humans and their predecessors didn't have smart phones, but they
         were smart on their feet, far longer than post-industrial people have been."
                --The Longest Race

28.   "We can't reach old age by another man's road."
                --Mark Twain

29.   "The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art."
                --Leonardo da Vinci

30.   "Now bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible."
                --Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar"

31.   "You don't so much outrun your opponents as outlast and outsmart them, and
         the toughest opponent of all is the one inside your head."
                --Joe Henderson

32.   "In training (as opposed to racing) you don't want to let yourself run out of fuel totally,
        but you do need to make yourself adapt to running farther with less."
                --The Longest Race

33.   "Without patience, you will never conquer endurance."
                --Yiannis Kouros, holder of multiple world ultra records, as quoted in
                  TheTrailJogger

34.   "Man is a distance runner as a consequence of hundreds of thousands of years
        of chasing antelopes, horses, elephants, wild cattle, and deer."
                --Paul Shepard

35.   "Paradoxically, ultrarunhners have (and need to have) less body fat than
         most other people--yet the little we hve is of great value.  Fat is
         the ultrarunner's secret friend."
                --The Longest Race

36.   "Come what may, bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance."
                --Virgil

37.   "No matter how lean you might be, unless you are actually starving, you will
         have enough fat to go for days."
                --The Longest Race

38.   "Heroism is endurance for one moment more."
                --George F. Kennan

39.   "A secret of Superbowl quarterbacks and long-distance runners alike: to go faster,
        Slow the game."
                --The Longest Race

40.   "America may yet learn to endure, not from its pundits and politicians, but from its
        endurance athletes."
                --The Longest Race

41.   "Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent
        is body without mind."
                --Thomas Jefferson

42.   "There is only one cardinal sin: impatience.  Because of impatience we were driven out
        of Paradise.
                --W. H. Auden

43.   "The human cardiovascular system evolved as part of the physiology of
        [prehistoric] hunters, who ran for their lives."
                --Paul Shepard

44.   "We had seen God in his splendour.... We had reached the naked soul of man."
                --Ernest Shackleton, as quoted at Brainyquote.com

45.   "Some of the events in the Olympics are about as athletic as a hotdog-eating   
         contest.  Yet, there's no 100k run!
                --The world's ultrarunners

46.   "The law of conservation of energy tells us we can't get something for nothing, but
        we refuse to believe it."
                --Isaac Asimov

47.   "Pushing your body past what you thought it was capable of is easy;
         the hard part is pushing yourself even further"
                --Rex Pearce, as quoted by a blogger I've lost track of, for which I apologize.
                   Blog on!

48.   "A lot of animals evolved through blind adaptations.  We didn't.  When we
        felt the breeze pass across our  nostrils and chests, we were already envisioning
        what awaited us far ahead on the trail or over the horizon."
                --The Longest Race

49.   "If you fall, then you crawl.  What is it about finishing?"
                --Chapter subtitle from The Longest Race

50.   "Here are some who like to run. They run for fun in the hot, hot sun."
                --Dr. Suess, quoted by @We_Run

51.   "When men do not run they are likely to die prematurely from dysfunction of the heart
        and vascular systems or from disabling chronic disease."
                --Anthropologist Paul Shepard

52.   "The most useful thing for a competitive runner to know about fatigue is that it is
        fundamental to nature.  Fatigue is not an enemy, and if you fight it as if it were, you
        squander what little energy you still have."
                --The Longest Race

53.   "We think running is one of the most transforming events in human history."
                --Dennis Bramble, professor emeritus in the biology department of the
                  University of Utah, commenting on how humans evolved as long-
                  distance-running "persistence hunters"

54.   "Some people never get their feet on the ground,
         They're either sitting in a chair or theyre laying down...."
                --Folk singer Phil Ochs, in his song "50-Mile Hike"

55.   "Everyone who has run knows that its most important value is in...removing tension
        and allowing released from whatever other cares the day may bring."
                --President Jimmy Carter, after recovering from his collapse in a Maryland road race

56.   "The body of a runner, like the engine of a car, has to get rid of waste heat as rapidly as
        it's generated, or else fail."
                --The Longest Race

57.   "I couldn't help but note that the notion of spending a bunch of money on something
        'minimalist' was more than a touch ironic."
                --Stacey Gordon

58.   "The now-too-neglected secret, I knew, was that the body's output, like industry's, was
        more strongly determined by energy efficiency than by supply."
                --The Longest Race

59.   "Sweat cleanses from the inside.  It comes from a place showers will never reach."
                --Dr. George Sheehan

60.   "Ultrarunning won't save the world, but it's a practice of the kinds of skills and
         outlooks that could ultimately help change the world's course and will almost
         certainly change yours."
                --"Notes for an Aspiring Ultrarunner," an appendix to The Longest Race

61.   "You can hurt more than you ever thought possible, then continue until
        you discover that hurting isn't that big a deal."
               --Seven-time Western States 100-Mile winner Scott Jurek, quoted
                  by Can't Stop Endurance

62.   "In almost anything worthwhile, and especially ultrarunning, rushing to achieve success
        is a big mistake."
               --"Notes for an Aspiring Ultrarunner," an appendix to The Longest Race

63.   "Long-distance running is not separate from the rest of life.  It will affect
         your overall vitality, endurance, and patience, and may also affect your
         relationships and worldview.  You will very likely becomed less complacent,
         more questioning, more adventurous, and more reconnected with your youth."
                --The Longest Race

64.   "If we fail to encourage physical development and prowess, we will
        undermine our capcity for thought, for work, and for use of those skills vital
        to an expanding and complex America."
                --John F. Kennedy

65.   "Is this level of athletic competition the ultimate distraction from real life?  Or
        is it a form of prayer?"
                --Norah Vincent, on the Olympics, submitted by Mark Pynt

66.   "I suppose if you could have only one thing, it would be that--energy.  Without it, you
        haven't got a thing."
                --John F. Kennedy

67   "The Greeks understood that mind and body must develop in harmonious proportion to
       produce a creative intelligence."
                --John F. Kennedy

68.   "I always loved running.... It was something you could do by yourself and under your
       own power."
                --Jesse Owens

69.   "There's no fountain of youth, and there's no anti-aging pill.  But there is a secret strategy
         that does work to a remarkable degree, and is free: continuing to learn with an open
         mind and unobstructed heart."
                --The Longest Race

70.   "For a long-distance runner, the end of the race is when you pause for rest before
        beginning a long and patient preparation for the next race and that sense of rebirth
        it will bring."
                --The Longest Race

71.   "Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise."
                --Thomas Jefferson

72.   "If 95 percent of the runner's success is achieved before he or she even goes
         to the starting line, then 99.9 percent is done before the finish line is even
         within sight."
                --The Longest Race

73.   "It's ironic that Olympic spectators will never have seen Yiannis Kouros, the greatest
         Greek athlete since Pheidippides"
                --Ed Ayres, during the London Olympics in 2012

74.   "What are my running shoes for?  The journey from barefoot hunter to "boots
        on the ground" to where I am now"
                --Chapter subtitle in The Longest Race

75.   "If you want to win something, run 100 meters.  IF you want to experience something,
        run a marathon."
                --Emil Zatopek, winner of four Olympic gold medals

76.   "Learning from Quarterbacks: the Slower-is-faster Phenomenon"
                --Chapter subtitle in The Longest Race
 
77.   "The more you sweat in practice, the less you bleed in battle."
                --TeamRunner4Life

78.   "Mental will is a muscle that needs exercise, just like the muscles of the body."
                --Lynn Jennings

79.   "The reason we race isn't so much to beat each other...but to be with each other."
                --Christopher McDougall

80.   "The Blessing and Curse of Competition: Why Vince Lombardi Was Dead Wrong"
                --Chapter subtitle in The Longest Race

81.   "Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live
        life to the fullest."
                --Haruki Murakami

82.   "I'm a minimalist.  I'd rather run naked than over-clothed and over-equipped.
                --EA

83.   "I'm a minimalist.  I don't want a GPS; I want to develop the ancient skill of mental
        mapping.
                --EA

84.   "May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most
        amazing view."
                --Edward Abbey

85.   "We who run...are different from those who merely study us.  We are out there
         experiencing what they are trying to put into words."
                --Dr. George Sheehan

86.   "That's the beauty of this great sport (track), though--it's such a fine line between success
        or not, which makes the sweet moments that much more worth savoring."
                --Nick Willis, U.S. 1500-meter Olympian, 2012

87.   "In the year 2025m, the best men don't run for president, they run for their lives."
                --Stephen King, in The Running Man

88.   "The will to win means nothing if you haven't the will to prepare."
                --Juma Ikanga, 1989 New York Marathon winner

89.   "Every man dies, but not every man really lives."
                --William Wallace, as played by Mel Gibson in "Braveheart"

90.   "Becoming a Persistence Hunter: the Long Day of Tracking, the Grateful Kill,
        the Celebration"
                --Chapter subtitle in The Longest Race

91.   "This knowledge, the knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important
        foundation for all of the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself. But
        it is a knowledge which today, in America, we are in danger of forgetting."
                --John F. Kennedy, 1960

92.   "If you are losing faith in human nature, go out and watch a marathon."
                --Kathrine Switzer, first woman to run the Boston Marathon

93.   "Running is the greatest meaphor for life, because you get out of it what you put into it."
                --Oprah Winfrey

94.   "You have brains in your head.
          You have fee in your shoes.
          You can Steer yourself any
          Direction you choose!"
                --Dr. Suess

95.   "I had as many doubts as anyone else.  Standing on the starting line, we're all cowards."
                --Alberto Salazar

96.   "Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory."
                --William Barclay

97.   "Listen to your body.  Do not be a blind and deaf tenant."
                --Dr. George Sheehan

98.   "Years ago, women sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and discussing life.
         Now they discuss the same topics while they run."
                --Joan Benoit, first winner of the women's Olympic marathon

99.   "These two looked light on their feet, relaxed, conversing amiably--just a couple of
         young people enjoying the day, in a world that might have a future yet."
                --The Longest Race

100.   "Without fellow humans, there's no foot race.  Without a healthy planet, there's no
          human race."
                --The Longest Race, out in October
       
      
               







 

Dark Clouds Over the Olympics . . . and Maybe a Silver Lining

     What?  Dark clouds over all that giddiness in London--even to the point where stiff-upper-lip Brits were cheering their heads off?  (And I don't mean in the manner of their former king Henry the Eighth!)
     I know this is politically incorrect on both sides of the Atlantic, not to mention in China, Jamaica, and Ethiopia, but dark clouds there are.  Since the mainstream media were far too lazy and impressionable to do serious reporting or even acknowledging that those clouds exist, I'd better explain myself.  Before I get to a little bright silver, let me first discuss some very tarnished and sometimes-false gold.
     When I was a kid, the Olympics were to me what the Holy Grail might have been to a Medieval knight.  I was 13 when Roger Bannister ran the first 4-minute mile, and soon after that galvanizing event I was one of the 100 million people worldwide who listened to the radio broadcast of Bannister's epic duel with John Landy (the second sub-4 guy), in the British Empire Games of 1954 (see my article "Moments" in the September Running Times magazine).  That was the year I began running myself, and the notion of going to the Olympics was for me like what the idea of playing for the Yankees or Brooklyn Dodgers might have been for some of my playmates in those halcyon days.
      In my coming-of-age imagination, going to the Olympics was the ultimate daydream.  It was no doubt affected by the Olympic ideal, originating in the ancient Games of Athens, of the uncompromised amateur athlete. Those naked Greek runners did not have apparel endorsement contracts. In those years of my youth, long-distance running was under the aegis of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), and a runner could be banned for life if he accepted any sort of financial compensation. When I took a job as a high school teacher and cross-country coach in 1963, the school offered to pay me $300 for the coaching, but I asked them to please just increase my annual salary for the classroom teaching by that amount, and not pay me for the coaching, so I wouldn't be banned from running for the rest of my life!
     Of course, this being America, it didn't take too long for that idea to be scuttled, and some guy named Bolt can now be paid more for 10 seconds of competition than the world's best long-distance runners of the 1950s or '60s were paid for a thousand hours of competition over their entire lives.  But while this dream of a beautiful ideal still lingered, I at least won an AAU national-championship medal (bronze) and patch, which still occupy a place of honor on my bookshelf.  (The AAU was a badly run organization, but I didn't really know how relatively OK it was until later, when it was succeeded by the Athletics Congress (TAC), which was even more hapless, and which was itself replaced by USA Track & Field (USATF), which is little more than a money-processing buraucracy that as far as I can see does nothing for 99.9 percent of the country's track and long-distance runners, other than try to sell them stuff on its online store.)
     Whatever the reasons for my youthful dreams about the Olympics, they were destined to be ruined not just by my own failure to qualify for the Olympic Trials (that's another story, for another day), but also by a series of commercial, geopolitical, and terrorist events that in my lifetime has turned the Olympics from an erstwhile Holy Grail to something more like the mortgage debacle of 2008, or Bernie Madoff's brobdingnagian heist.  In brief, some of the dark clouds as they gathered:
     1968, Mexico City: As quickly suspected and later confirmed, East Germany, with a population about the size of today's Mexico City, doped its athletes with drugs--and wins 9 gold medals.
     1972, Berlin:  Terrorists murder Israeli athletes in the Olympic village.  This time, East German athletes win 20 drug-juiced golds.
     1976, Montreal: As U.S. athletes win individual events, American spectators shout "We're Number One! We're Number One!"  I have to wonder how an athlete from a small country, who had performed just as well, feel about that.  The U.S. spectators contribute nothing to the U.S. athletes' success (and largely ignore them for the four years between Games), but don't hesitate to claim national hegemony when an American wins.  And oh yes, this time the East German's take 40 golds.  And the drug-doping business seems to have expanded to other events.  The defending marathon champion Frank Shorter is handed a silver medal, when there is good reason to believe he'd actually won the gold.  And Don Kardong, who finished a bittersweet fourth, seems to have been denied a rightly earned bronze.
     1980, Moscow:  The United States government decides to boycott the Moscow Olympics, forbidding its citizens to participate--even though America is advertised as a "free country" and the Olympics are supposedly about individuals competing, not nation-states.  And the reason for the boycott?  The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, to fight bad guys there, and America does not condone invasions.  Do I need to put an explanation point after that last sentence, or invoke that handy word "irony"?
     1984, Los Angeles: An eye foir an eye, the Soviet Union reciprocates with a boycott of its own. The people most hurt are the Soviets' own citizens.  Sorry, Russian gymnasts: Your arch-enemy Hitler is long dead, but the soup Nazis of the world still rule: No medals for you!
     . . . And so on, through the years: the Games get even bigger, more costly, and more prized by national governments as trophies, the way the heads of mooses or bears might be prized by the owners of upscale hunting lodges.  In much of the media, the Olympics become a "medals race," not unlike the "arms race" of the Cold War years.  And as the Games become ever larger spectacles, corporate sponsorship and control (and, more to the point, profiteering) continues to expand.  If I might invoke that handy word "irony" just one more time, what do you think of all those athletes of enviably lean and fit physique being paraded around by two of the world's largest junk-food traffickers?
     2012, city of Dickensian waifs who'd be very grateful for a bowl of watery soup, please: Nearly all of the vices are now at their zenith (except the terrorism, fended off by a massive army of soldiers and police, at English taxpayers' expense).  The medals race again is rampant, with none of the sports reporters (who are not known for their thinking, in any case) ever questioning whether a nation has legs and lungs and can perform athletic feats.  Nations and corporations don't have heartbeats and can't breathe, which may partly explain why they do so little to prevent air pollution.  And by now, the "we're number-one" delusion has spread from the Americans to the British.  The British singer Morrissey makes a well publicized objection to the "blustering jingoism" of his countryment.  And the Denver Post writer Steve Lipshen writes, "This year's Games reflected the most stereotypical traits of Americans: jingoism, cockiness, and hubris, all presented by McDonalds and Coca-Cola."
     * * *
     So, after all that, how can there be any silver lining?  I'll mention three moments out of the thousands spewed across the ether by NBC and the Internet, that lifted my spirits in spite of all that has gone so wrong with my youthful ideal.
     1.  The last 10 seconds of the men's 10,000 meters: Gaylen Rupp catches up with the East African super-runners who've been outrunning American runners for Rupp's entire life, and passes them with a big smile on his face, to win the silver and come within a half-second of the gold . . .
     2.  Rupp's training partner and friend, Mo Farah, turns his head the instant he crosses the line first, to see and celebrate his friend's having taken second.
     3.  And the last 30 seconds or so of the women's 10,000, in whichTirunesh Dibaba smoothly pulled away from her formidable rivals and sailed to the win with a big smile on her face, like a kid on a playground swing.
     Thesw three moments (among many, I'm sure) were not about competition between nations, but between individual humans at their best.  Significantly, at least for me, Rupp and Farrah weren't teammates on one of the artificial, corporate- and government-funded "teams" that wore the uniforms of their countries (many of which maintain huge military arsentals to war against each other in less sporting ways).  Rupp and Farah are citizens of different countries, but in training together became real teammates.  The smiles on Rupp's and Dibaba's faces weren't manifestations of national or geopolitcal righteousness, or corporate success, but of the human spirit at its best.  Contrary to a recent ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, a corporation is not a person!  Neither corporations nor the governments they largely control have spirits; only the people who form them do. 
     The Supreme Court, in its blasphemic declaration that corporations have "personhood," reminds me of the old men of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) who a few decades ago ruled out any Olympic running events for women longer than 1500 meters, in the belief that women can't safely run for longer than about five minutes.  Maybe the troglodyte denizens of these institutions will eventually die off, but in the mean time I get a big kick out of seeing that despite all the corruption the gladiatorial spectacles thrust upon us every four years now embody, the real strength of the Olympics is alive and well in the some of the individual athletes. And I don't care what country they come from or who paid for their shoes.