Long Run Read online

  As the story of the nameless female runner and her fierce, angry antagonist unfolded before me, I mused on whether images like this lay at the foundation of my grandmothers’ worries about unladylike behaviour. Could it be that the warnings of the Decameron about the impropriety of running had fuelled my sense that running wasn’t for me?

  *

  Botticelli’s runner is naked, and that makes the Nastagio paintings all the more shocking. There’s no costume to protect her. She’s condemned to being chased by the knight as Nastagio and everyone who visits the Prado stares at her.

  We don’t know what Melpomene wore when she tried to run the Olympic marathon in 1896, but the conventions around what women runners look like have changed profoundly. Throughout the 20th century, women have been required to cover less and less of their bodies, especially when playing sport. Running gear makes it easier to interpret why a woman is running. There’s now a truly astonishing array of items to help us declare what kind of runners we are. Consumption offers a quick and shallow means of reinventing the self. Shorts and sneakers say, calm down, I’m just out for a run. An uber-femme running outfit might baffle the spectator as to whether a runner is embracing conventional ideas about femininity, or subverting them. There are running outfits for women who want to look hi-tech and in charge; there are frilly pink skirts and leopard-print shorts for those who want to look foxy; presumably there’s a way to combine both modes. Stella McCartney has designed a range of pricey running gear for Adidas. Retro runners can model their wardrobe on the cute shorts that Grete Waitz and Josephine Hanson wore when they were breaking records in the 70s. To cover up from the sun and prying eyes, athletes can wear head-to-toe compression gear; alternatively, plenty of women commune with the sun by running in tiny bra and shorts combos. A runner can literally buy into the peak performance narrative through the acquisition of very costly ‘technical’ garments that promise to boost her endurance. How could anyone think that women runners were vulnerable when there’s all this choice available? Consumer goods aren’t a pathway to self-actualisation (especially when most of the unseen workers who make them in factories in the developing world are women), and they don’t offer liberation from the male gaze or any other substantial freedom. That gear for sale, however, gives the women who can afford it opportunities to move their bodies in new ways and to invent personae to present the world. It’s a shame there always has to be someone watching.

  I haven’t really taken advantage of the spectacular gear market – I’m not indifferent to fashion generally, but to running fashion specifically. It still seems very strange to me that I can convince people I’m a certain kind of runner just by wearing the right clothes. My sneakers and tights are comfortable, but I don’t wear them to shop for groceries or to meet a friend for coffee. I don’t want the attention.

  Accordingly, my running wardrobe is pretty nondescript. It’s getting increasingly faded, it’s not sexy, and it’s an even bet as to whether a given item will be clean or not when I put it on. I own several pairs of shorts (black, blue, green, grey) and several synthetic singlets (purple, pink, black, yellow, grey, orange) and a few pairs of stretchy tights. The garments that once were bright have had their zing washed out. None of my singlets have motivational slogans printed on them, although sometimes I run in an old, grotty women’s collective t-shirt, hand-printed in the 1990s with that peerless feminist mantra riots not diets. That usually gets a second look when I’m lapping the park. (I wish I still had the one with a little girl in plaits and a flouncy dress holding a sparking bomb beneath the slogan bomb the patriarchy.) I have a new pair of sneakers and an old pair of sneakers that I upgrade when the padding behind the heels wears through. If it’s very cold, I wear black and grey compression tights, but I’m certain they don’t make me run faster. I’ve worked through many pairs of fashion crisis no-name sunglasses with polarised lenses that block at least some light coming in from the sides. All up, it’s not so much a triumph of careful self-presentation as a lazy effort to avoid making an impression.

  *

  When those Paris shopgirls, the midinettes, first ran their race in 1903, they dressed as if for a picnic. A large illustration that appeared in a weekly newspaper, Le Petit Journal, shows the midinettes at the starting line. Loose blouses are neatly tucked into long skirts that swish gracefully beneath their knees. All the midinettes are running in stockings and boots buttoned at the side. Some have adorned their blouses with fancy lace yokes; others have tied big floppy bows around their necks. Every head carries a hat: berets, smart short-brimmed straw hats, fancier felt hats with ribbons. The only hint that this is a sporting event is that all the runners have a pale blue armband with a number printed on it.

  Two gendarmes watch from horseback, along with a big crowd of men on the sidelines, a few of whom are holding their hats in the air in encouragement. The winner, Jeanne Cheminel, finished in seventy minutes. Le Petit Journal records that she was ‘une agréable brune’, but didn’t ask her why she’d entered the race. For those who didn’t get to ogle the beauties on the day, postcards featuring buxom shopgirls in running poses did the rounds in Paris after the race.

  The midinettes were working women with modest incomes of their own. Their livelihoods were tied up with the production of desirable, fashionable items for sale. Journalists treated these runners as goods on display, but I’m curious about what lies beyond the illustrations. What were they chatting about as they waited to start? It would surely be anachronistic to script a set of girl power slogans for them. Maybe they were worried about whether they’d be able to run the whole 12 kilometres. Did they wish they could hitch up their skirts and roll up their sleeves, even if that meant exposing their calves and lower arms? Maybe they were pressing their leather boots against their heels and making blister predictions. Maybe they were giggling to themselves about all the pervy blokes on the sidelines as they eyed off potential suitors.

  A few decades later, when Violet Piercy ran to establish that her marathon record really was hers, the dress code had evolved somewhat – although she’s still attired as if for a day out. In 1927, on the Pathé newsreel I mentioned earlier, Piercy ran in black shorts and a collared white jumper. It’s made of heavy cloth, onto which the crest of a sporting club has been patched. Her appearance has been thoroughly de-eroticised, and it seems to me that her male chaperones are there to warn cinema audiences against seeing her as eye candy. On her feet are what look like Mary Janes strapped over little white socks. The shoes have short heels, and her legs are otherwise bare. I can’t imagine how she ran a marathon in them. She has a cute bob and wears a woolly hat that could be mistaken for a cloche. Her appearance is nothing like what I would have expected. Shorts are the only garment that she and I have in common. She looks like an overgrown schoolgirl on her way to an art school party, not an athlete.

  The athletic women who appear in Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film Triumph of the Will embody a more recognisable female athleticism. They are wholesome and strong, and their functional clothing does not impede their movement. Such images define a certain kind of idealised, muscular femininity, one built on conformity, hard work and obedience. In the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, there were no distance running events for women, but women wore much less restrictive uniforms to compete in swimming, shorter track events and field sports. What would a few decades earlier have seemed distressingly immodest and unladylike was becoming accepted, and so too was the idea of female athleticism.

  And yet, for all these developments, as we’ve seen, women runners still looked like trouble to many people, especially sports officials: women who would wilfully imperil their capacity to bear children; women who didn’t care how they looked. Trouble. Not only were the female distance athletes who broke through in the late 1960s and early 70s challenging ideas about how far a woman’s body could run, but they were also rewriting the rules about what women runners look like, effectively challenging centuries of visual history. It took a fe
w decades for clothes makers to catch up with them and provide women who run with extensive, expensive choices.

  *

  Every so often when a person discovers that I like to run, they look me up and down, as if sizing up a racehorse, and tell me that I look like a runner. The hint of a claim that I might be some kind of athlete is taken to make my body available for inspection. I find it all terribly uncomfortable. Perhaps novice male runners are also subject to such assessments, but it seems to me that there’s something irrevocably gendered about this gaze.

  What does it mean to tell a woman that she looks like a runner? The standard image of the female distance runner: quite short, long-legged, with narrow hips and shoulders, small breasts and low body fat. This is the most efficient physiology in terms of gait and load; of course, many spectacular runners shaped very differently have won medals and broken records. Kathrine Switzer, for example, is very tall. In terms of height, I am decidedly middle-sized. My shoulders are not very broad, but my hips are, which cancels out any advantage that my longish legs might bring. I’ve always carried enough body fat to keep me from gauntness, and I wouldn’t think of running without a sports bra. When it comes down to it, I don’t look much like a runner at all. That’s just what people say to account for staring at me in such a clinical and invasive manner.

  Usually it’s the low body fat part of looking like a runner that gets my interlocutors interested. That running is an extremely effective way to burn calories is touted as one of its great benefits. And so, when I’m told that I look like a runner, I wait for the questions about weight loss to come. Did I start running to change my appearance? (No.) Did I go on a diet? (No.) Do I have any weight-loss tips? (No.) How much weight did I lose? (Gah.) What is it that puts my body up for grabs like this? After a few years, I got fed up with being looked at and sick of the questions. I used to explain that my discovery of what my body could do was much more interesting than anything about body fat, but now I rarely bother.

  The last time I ran the City2Surf, I saw a pair of women in matching t-shirts scrawled with bare breasts and hands groping them. Is that what a woman runner looks like? It made me laugh out loud because it’s such a crude rejoinder to all these anxieties about women running. That image out-Benny Hilled Benny Hill; it administered an excellent up-yours to the sleaze brigade. I haven’t gone out and bought a t-shirt like this, and I haven’t shed my desire to be invisible. I don’t want to be a sideshow; I don’t want anyone to mistake the glee, exhaustion and indifference I might display when running for fear. When I most enjoy running, my limbs swing through the air as if heavy weights have been untethered from them. That’s when it stops feeling like a performance and, finally, it’s all movement.

  8

  Rejoice, we conquer!

  I kept running and, gradually, it became a habit. I ran another half marathon, and then another and another. My race times weren’t impressive, but I’d learned how to move. I could run just like anybody else. Any residual concerns about the awkwardness of my scratched knees and flapping elbows drifted away. If I was tired, I simply slowed down, and sometimes I walked.

  Old certainties gave way to new ones. I knew how fit I needed to be to run 21 kilometres. First, work up to running 10 kilometres, then nudge a little further each week. If I could run 18 kilometres in training, I would be able to run a half marathon on race day. I couldn’t spell out such equations to myself without chuckling. Race day. I knew that if, after a training run or race, I didn’t stretch the big muscles that strap around the femur, my gait would be stiff the next day. I knew what sort of push I needed in my legs and lungs to run up a hill; that if my hips started to grate, I could keep running, but that if I landed hard after leaping off a gutter and jarred my knee, I’d have to walk home. I could predict the furious hunger that kicked in an hour or so after a long run, and the deep weariness that would take me to bed in the evening.

  Hitherto I’d been unable to understand feedback mechanisms that govern the body. After Mum and Dad died, I was always tired but rarely able to sleep the night through. Sometimes I ate for comfort; often my view of hunger and satiety was clouded by emotion. Now, I observed closely the relationship between exertion and sleep from week to week. An icy bright negroni, even early in the evening, would turn my feet to lead the following morning. Pasta was top-notch running fuel; potato chips were not. A salad was always too little; lasagna was always too much. In no other areas of my life were the dividends on behaviour so simple to calculate. There was a balance to this empiricism that pleased me enormously. I became aware that I was both healthy and mobile, and very lucky to be so – that I might one day not be able to run, due to sickness or injury, was a grim thought. I had no children competing for my attention in the mornings, and my work schedule was flexible enough to accommodate both running and recovery. As I logged more half marathons, I could see no compelling reason why I could not run even further.

  Twenty-one kilometres is a substantial distance, but it’s only half a marathon. Running a marathon had once seemed to me as abstract a goal as swimming to the horizon from the beach. An idea that I’d used as a trampoline, springing higher and higher until I could see what was over the fence next door, and then past the garden beyond. If I could jump high enough to gain a clear view of the neighbourhood, I could run a marathon. If I could run a marathon, I could cartwheel into the future, brightly coloured ribbons twirling from my wrists and ankles. I would relinquish this jerky, bouncing fantasy of transcendence in favour of the movement registered by the swishing reflective strips on my shoes, the rhythm picked out by my knees and my elbows.

  When I talked about running to my friends, I told them with great confidence that I’d run a marathon, one day. I’d applied very little thought, however, to how I might actually prepare to run a marathon, or when that one day might fall. A blast of January resolve finally prompted me to confront the question, When will I run a marathon? The answer turned out to be: This year! I picked a spring marathon in Sydney and gave myself lots of time to train, many more months than I needed. With caution, I sketched the outlines of a training program, the beginning of another beginning. I bought a book about running a first marathon and egged myself on by reading lurid testimonials about running the distance, even though their sentimentality made me squirm: My proudest achievement; A complete personal revolution; Don’t ever believe you can’t do it.

  Many ancient traditions of thought applaud the cultivation of the body as a virtue. The Greeks called it arete. Training for a marathon, however, far exceeds the requirements of living a balanced life, of being a good sport, of shaking out the mental cobwebs. There are less risky ways to get very fit, and certainly many that are less time-consuming. Just running regularly would do the trick. Joining a sports team is much more convivial. Marathons aren’t the best path to weight loss, stress relief, greater energy – and to train for one involves courting the risk of serious joint injury. I heard anecdotes about scores of other people’s uncles and cousins who had blown their knees on the marathon circuit. And yet, I let the marathon in my mind glisten with the promise that it would yield extraordinary benefits, benefits that would outflank the perils and discomfort of training.

  Even atheists like me, who can’t curl up in the embrace of a benevolent fatality, clutch at marathon magic. It’s easy to get carried away by it all, and I certainly did. I relinquished my sneeriness about the marathon gurus. The finish line I endowed with the qualities of an enchanted threshold: if I could cross that line, I would stumble, transformed, into a new realm. Could my legs carry me that far, and if so, what then? In this vision the marathon became a kind of feminist fairytale, in which damsels in distress rediscover themselves as conquering queens.

  These were returns that a simple regime of weekend running couldn’t deliver. I would finally articulate with my body the stories about grief and recovery that I had been unable to put into words. I entertained a secret hope: something in me that had been knocked out of place wh
en my parents died might be knocked back into place. What a strange and still desperate manifestation of optimism that was, although I didn’t recognise this then.

  *

  Like the glitter that sparkles on so many lucky charms, the glamour of the marathon is only superficial. It’s run over a distance just a bit further than the 40-odd kilometres separating the Greek town of Marathon from Athens. It’s based on an almost certainly inaccurate measurement of the distance between these two points, and a historically shaky account of events that may have taken place two and a half thousand years ago. It’s certainly not an ancient test of self.

  To the men who founded the marathon, the long run was a means of telling a story about the endurance of ancient virtues in the modern world. The first marathon was run in 1896 and until midway through the 20th century marathons attracted only tiny fields of runners. The wide uptake of the marathon as an exercise in self-definition – one that even so-so athletes such as myself might consider – dates to the 1960s, not exactly the dawn of time.

  In 1894, as bureaucrats and aristocrats chewed over the details of the first modern Olympic Games, a French philologist, Michel Bréal, hit on the idea of a footrace called a marathon to honour Pheidippides, one of the great messenger-runners of the ancient world. It would be run from the Plain of Marathon to the Pnyx of Athens. Bréal offered a handsome silver cup as a prize. The proposal was greeted with gusto, and when the young Greek runner Spyridon Louis won the event, he was hailed as a hero running in the footsteps of the ancients. The silver cup is now on display at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, an irregular exhibit in a building otherwise dedicated to marbles sculpted over two thousand years ago.