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.
Josh about to pass his grandpa
Here, at age three, Josh regularly runs a mile or two with me--and I have to work hard to keep up!
Monday, February 25, 2013
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
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.
Monday, October 8, 2012
"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.
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.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
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
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
Friday, August 24, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Enduring for Life, Part 5: Keep Learning, or It's the End of the Road!
This fall's JFK 50-Mile run will mark the start of my 57th consecutive year of long-distance running competition, and while going to a big race is as exciting now as it ever has been for me, it's also an occasion for sober reflection. Most of the kids I ran with in high school or college, and even most of the hard-core runners I knew during the "golden age" of American road-racing in the 1980s, are no longer around. Why? Some had their knees go bad, decades ago, and had to put away their Waffle Trainers or Olympias. Others were just tired, or burned out. Some were sticken by illness. But after half a century of reading, reflection, and conversation with other runners, I have a strong impression that what too often happens is that as an athlete ages, training begins to feel like the ordeal of Sisyphus--that mythological figure who was condemned to be eternally rolling a large rock up a hill, with the rock eternally rolling back on him (or so I recall it). Or if you're not into Greek mythology, just think of the ordeal of Bill Murray in the movie "Groundhog Day." When things don't change, they can have a deadly impact on you--sometimes literally.
So, suppose a 50-year-old runner doggedly repeats the workouts he did with some success at age 45, only now instead of getting better he gets inexorably slower, and the workouts get harder. Maybe he eventually thinks, "What's the poiint?"--and he stops. If you are worried about that happening to you, my suggestion is that whatever worked for you in the past can't possibly keep working if you regard it as a fixed formula. There's always something new to be learned. Part of what's meant by getting "wiser" as we grow older is recognizing that reality. Whether in science or in the art of living, we humans rarely if ever have final answers (except politicians, of course), and as long as we continue to have curiosity and interest in exploration and discovery, the pursuit will feel worthwhile.
As a guy who is now running ultramarathons in his 70s, I'm astonished at how much I have learned about running--and life--just in the past few weeks, that I didn't know as a dedicated runner in my teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s! Our species evolved not just by exploring the earth's forests in which primates first evolved, but by adapting to new environments in an ever-changing world. In practical terms, one way to keep the learning fresh is to keep seeking new places to do training runs, to try races of different distances in different kinds of terrain or climate, and to keep reading the new discoveries about human endurance coming from the fields of evolutionary biology, anatomy, human ecology, biomechanics, neuroscience, nutrition, sports medicine, and the sociology of sport. Read some of those things and then experiment or play with them, and the running will be enjoyable for a long time to come.
What I've discovered, so far, is that there's no fountain of youth or anti-aging pill, but that there's a secret strategy that does work and is free: continuing to learn with an open mind and an unobstructed heart.
These themes are explored in the course of a dramatic narrative about an epic race that took place in the wake of the 9/11 attack on America, as recounted in the book The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance, to be published October 9. The book now has a page on Amazon, where you can see advance comments about it from Bill Rodgers, Kathrine Switzer, Amby Burfoot, Jacqueline Hansen, Dean Karnazes, and others--and where if you wish you can pre-order a copy to be delivered immediately upon release.
So, suppose a 50-year-old runner doggedly repeats the workouts he did with some success at age 45, only now instead of getting better he gets inexorably slower, and the workouts get harder. Maybe he eventually thinks, "What's the poiint?"--and he stops. If you are worried about that happening to you, my suggestion is that whatever worked for you in the past can't possibly keep working if you regard it as a fixed formula. There's always something new to be learned. Part of what's meant by getting "wiser" as we grow older is recognizing that reality. Whether in science or in the art of living, we humans rarely if ever have final answers (except politicians, of course), and as long as we continue to have curiosity and interest in exploration and discovery, the pursuit will feel worthwhile.
As a guy who is now running ultramarathons in his 70s, I'm astonished at how much I have learned about running--and life--just in the past few weeks, that I didn't know as a dedicated runner in my teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, or 60s! Our species evolved not just by exploring the earth's forests in which primates first evolved, but by adapting to new environments in an ever-changing world. In practical terms, one way to keep the learning fresh is to keep seeking new places to do training runs, to try races of different distances in different kinds of terrain or climate, and to keep reading the new discoveries about human endurance coming from the fields of evolutionary biology, anatomy, human ecology, biomechanics, neuroscience, nutrition, sports medicine, and the sociology of sport. Read some of those things and then experiment or play with them, and the running will be enjoyable for a long time to come.
What I've discovered, so far, is that there's no fountain of youth or anti-aging pill, but that there's a secret strategy that does work and is free: continuing to learn with an open mind and an unobstructed heart.
These themes are explored in the course of a dramatic narrative about an epic race that took place in the wake of the 9/11 attack on America, as recounted in the book The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance, to be published October 9. The book now has a page on Amazon, where you can see advance comments about it from Bill Rodgers, Kathrine Switzer, Amby Burfoot, Jacqueline Hansen, Dean Karnazes, and others--and where if you wish you can pre-order a copy to be delivered immediately upon release.
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Enduring for Life - Part 4: Take nutrition seriously, for life!
For a quick intro to this group of posts, look to the right and click on the first one, then come back to here. OK, I'm a techno-doofus and don't know how to properly design a website, but I can still run like the wind! (Or at least like a gentle breeze....)
4. Take nutrition seriously, for life. I don't think many sports-nutrition experts would disagree with my belief that while race-day fueling is a big factor in an endurance athletic performance, it can't compensate for a poor diet over a lifetime. I've known of great athletes who seemed to thrive on Coke and fries in their 20s, but several decades later were long gone from the scene--some of them burned out, others overtaken by belly fat, and many brought down by cancer or other lifestyle diseases. A pervasive reason is that American life--and its omnipresence of fat-, sugar,- and salt-saturated junk food--is heaily influenced by quick-impression advertising and what I call "sprint culture." It's not just "fast food" that has afflicted our country with obesity and heart disease, but an expectation of quick satisfactions in all things. Fad diets come and go like fashions. But the best nutrition for humans developed over several million years of our evolution as nomadic hunter-gatherers. The diets most conducive to high fitness and health are those which most closely replicate what we ate in the wild, for hundreds of millennia--what we now call "natural," or minimally processed, foods.
When I was 13 years old, in 1954, I decided I wanted to be a long-distance runner, and toward that end I decided to give up all foods containing highly refined sugars, starches, hydrogenated fats such as Crisco or margarine, and chemical additives. That was also the year Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4 minute mile, and I was galvanized. I've stuck with that diet ever since, and am now in my 55th consecutive year of long-distance competition. Along the way, I've won four national age-group championships (at 50k and 50 miles), and I'm still going strong. This summer I'm planning to run two mountain-trail 50ks, then in November run the JFK 50-Mile--now in the 70-79 age division. I'm way, way slower than when I was a young man of 50, or a mere kid of 30 or 40, but the important thing is that I'm healthy and full of what JFK liked to call "vigah," and I think a big part of that is lifelong attention to good diet. Over a week or a month, the effects of good nutrition may be hardly noticeable, but over the decades they are cumulative, and by the time you reach old age they can make a world of difference.
4. Take nutrition seriously, for life. I don't think many sports-nutrition experts would disagree with my belief that while race-day fueling is a big factor in an endurance athletic performance, it can't compensate for a poor diet over a lifetime. I've known of great athletes who seemed to thrive on Coke and fries in their 20s, but several decades later were long gone from the scene--some of them burned out, others overtaken by belly fat, and many brought down by cancer or other lifestyle diseases. A pervasive reason is that American life--and its omnipresence of fat-, sugar,- and salt-saturated junk food--is heaily influenced by quick-impression advertising and what I call "sprint culture." It's not just "fast food" that has afflicted our country with obesity and heart disease, but an expectation of quick satisfactions in all things. Fad diets come and go like fashions. But the best nutrition for humans developed over several million years of our evolution as nomadic hunter-gatherers. The diets most conducive to high fitness and health are those which most closely replicate what we ate in the wild, for hundreds of millennia--what we now call "natural," or minimally processed, foods.
When I was 13 years old, in 1954, I decided I wanted to be a long-distance runner, and toward that end I decided to give up all foods containing highly refined sugars, starches, hydrogenated fats such as Crisco or margarine, and chemical additives. That was also the year Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4 minute mile, and I was galvanized. I've stuck with that diet ever since, and am now in my 55th consecutive year of long-distance competition. Along the way, I've won four national age-group championships (at 50k and 50 miles), and I'm still going strong. This summer I'm planning to run two mountain-trail 50ks, then in November run the JFK 50-Mile--now in the 70-79 age division. I'm way, way slower than when I was a young man of 50, or a mere kid of 30 or 40, but the important thing is that I'm healthy and full of what JFK liked to call "vigah," and I think a big part of that is lifelong attention to good diet. Over a week or a month, the effects of good nutrition may be hardly noticeable, but over the decades they are cumulative, and by the time you reach old age they can make a world of difference.
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