Long Run Read online

  There had been several half-hearted attempts to revive the ancient Olympic Games in the 19th century, but Pierre de Coubertin, patriarch of the modern Olympic movement, applied himself to the task with formidable energy. The fourth son of French royalist aristocrats, de Coubertin established the International Olympic Committee in 1894. He persuaded bureaucrats and wealthy benefactors that the Games were a matter of nothing less than world peace. (In retrospect, I’m embarrassed at how readily I let myself be suckered into grandiose ideas about the marathon.) Sport for the greater good – and an opportunity to quash widely held concerns that too much civilised living was turning white men into degenerate weaklings. Women and non-white men fell beyond the reckoning of the architects of the Games, as if their degeneracy was a foregone conclusion.

  The motto of the Olympic movement – citius, altius, fortius; faster, higher, stronger – was de Coubertin’s work, and his exhaustingly long writings on sport are crammed with variations on the same theme: the worthiness of hierarchies based on strength and speed. In one volume, as he recalls a visit to the public schools of England, de Coubertin writes approvingly that ‘the muscles are made to do the work of a moral educationer’. As a hopeless schoolgirl athlete, I had languished at the slow and weak end of de Coubertin’s natural order. I’d since picked up some lessons that might have pleased him: exertion can be its own reward; persistence can yield improvement. And yet, I’d also come to much happier terms with my limitations as an athlete. An ethos of curiosity rather than competition had guided my running practice, and no one was going to give me a medal for that.

  De Coubertin died in 1937, having spent his fortune promoting the International Olympic Committee; in a final touch of pageantry, he requested that his heart be buried in Olympus. Without him, it’s unlikely either that the Games would have been re-established or that the marathon would have come into existence. Perhaps if Michel Bréal had raised the idea of a long-distance footrace in some other forum – but who can say if it would have stirred the same sentiments without the carnival of the Games and de Coubertin’s persuasive powers.

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  De Coubertin was hardly alone in seeking to connect a flourishing contemporary Europe to the achievements of classical Greece. There was a great enthusiasm for the ancient world in late 19th-century Europe and the feats of antiquity were alive in the popular imagination. Excavations in Greece – including at Olympia – and Egypt had brought plundered statues into the museums of the continent’s great capitals. Avatars of unforgotten civilisations, these became touchstones for poets and statesmen alike, who framed the magnificent present as a deserving successor to that grand past. Why, then, as this Hellenism thrived, was Pheidippides the model for the long-distance athlete, and not one of the many other great runners of the Greek world, such as fleet-footed Achilles or Atalanta?

  Pheidippides was a runner-messenger who loped between Athens, Sparta and Marathon at the behest of the Athenian leaders during the Battle of Marathon. At first blush, it may seem strange that the aristocrats who conceived of the modern Olympics celebrated a humble runner, not a general, a statesman or a god – but their decision points to the significance of the Battle of Marathon to 19th-century understandings of the glorious continuity of Western civilisation. It’s the kind of East versus West narrative to which conservative historians inevitably return.

  The inhabitants of democratic Athens had fearfully awaited the attack of the mighty Persian navy, led by the tyrant Darius. Against all expectations, Athens prevailed: the city won the Battle of Marathon and eventually the Persian Wars. Athens victorious, democracy also prevailed. In 1828, John Stuart Mill appraised the conflict, which took place in 490 BCE:

  The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.

  The achievement of Pheidippides as a runner is the centrepiece of marathon mythology: a symbolic celebration of the triumph of the democratic tradition. In these few, quick rhetorical moves, the marathon was thus established as an event that took in the epic sweep of Western history. If marathon runners seem self-absorbed, self-important, the Battle of Marathon can be invoked to make their efforts sound tremendously worthwhile. Can volleyball matches or pump classes claim this kind of lineage?

  It wasn’t all a matter of politics. The reputation of the runner of Marathon had received a boost when Robert Browning’s poem ‘Pheidippides’ was published in 1879. A dramatic monologue on endurance, this literary hit primed the imaginations of English and American readers for the 1896 marathon. Browning’s messenger ran 500 kilometres in just a few days – almost eight marathons. This runner was a ‘noble strong man’, a man ‘who could race like a god, bear the face of a god, whom a god loved so well’. For all that, he is flesh and blood, unable to transcend his mortality. Pheidippides collapses, ecstatic, when his message is delivered:

  ‘Rejoice, we conquer!’ Like wine thro’ clay, Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died—the bliss!

  And thus it ends for Browning’s messenger, in a fatal cardiac explosion of joy. His bliss is an extreme case of runners’ high, the post-exertion euphoria chased by so many distance junkies.

  Browning’s lines on the death of Pheidippides are widely quoted in motivational books about running, which has always struck me as an odd form of encouragement. That fist-pumping iamb, the injunction to ‘Rejoice’ and the skittering exultation of the dactyl – ‘we conquer!’ – are a stirring combination, but their effect is diminished by the immediate death of the runner. Of the blissfulness, I’m not convinced. The glory of Pheidippides’ death reads to me like just another version of dulce et decorum est. How sweet and noble is it to run yourself to death? How’s an amateur runner to emulate that commitment?

  Mortal and menial though Pheidippides may have been, only a very few super-fit ultramarathon runners would be able to cover the hundreds of kilometres that Browning attributes to him. In 2010, roughly two and a half thousand years after the Battle of Marathon, a Greek runner, Maria Polyzou, ran from Athens to Sparta and back. She was part of a group of runners who attempted this distance. It’s pleasing to me that the only one of this cohort who actually made it was a woman. For most runners, achieving such a feat is as remote as one of the labours of Herakles. The decision of the organisers of the 1896 Olympic Games to restrict their marathon to the distance between Marathon and Athens bequeathed us an event that’s extremely challenging but not impossible. The training guides promise that anyone can run a marathon, hastily advising beginners to see a doctor first. Maybe they were right, but before I started running, a 40-kilometre run might as well have been 400 kilometres.

  The sources collated by Browning, and by Bréal, present variations on the story of Pheidippides, but all agree that a runner was involved in the Battle of Marathon. The distractible, chatty Herodotus offers the only near-contemporary account in his Histories, written sixty years after the Persian Wars. Herodotus’ messenger is named Philippides; we’re told only that he runs from Athens to Sparta. (Browning makes the poor guy run back to Athens, to Marathon, and then back to Athens again.) Pliny the Elder, Plutarch and Lucian – historians born at least five hundred years later, after the birth of Christ – each tell slightly different versions. As in all good running yarns, the details are dwarfed by the great significance of the run itself. After all, who will be able to contest the details of my running stories? If my nieces get excited about my first races and decide to tell their kids about them, what will be distorted in the telling?

  Browning drew a little on all the ancient sources to give flesh and form to Pheidippides – and then filled in the rest himself. His messenger is a contemporary athlete who prefigures de Coubertin’s vision of the committed athlete. Browning’s Pheidippides isn’t just a man doing his job; there’s no question that he’ll give up or rest. He gives his all – and his exertions save democrac
y. He’s the cricketer doing it for Australia, the footy player doing his hometown proud – the athlete whose sport has been elevated to a civic duty. Those who run in Pheidippides’ footsteps are participating in a ritualised celebration of the democratic tradition. (This was also true of the first Boston Marathon, which was run on 19 April 1897, Patriots’ Day: a holiday that commemorates the run of another wartime messenger, Paul Revere.)

  Well, that’s the official story. The marathon celebrates the kind of democracy in which messengers like Pheidippides and working men like Spyridon Louis knew their place. When the first Olympic Games were held, the Great Game of European diplomatic rivalries was intensifying. That culminated in the first world war and the slaughter of millions of young men from the countries who’d sent athletes to compete in 1896. The grand democratic tradition hadn’t granted a vote to women in most parts of the world by 1896 – and women, of course, weren’t welcomed as participants in the ancient games at Olympus or the first modern Games. The legend that’s been cobbled together to serve the marathon is a boy’s own adventure about the meaning of male sacrifice in war. If it’s part of an ancient tradition, it’s one that involves men telling stories to each other and ignoring women.

  Why had I been so captivated by all this? Running a marathon is still a sign of socioeconomic status: people like me, with time and leisure and culturally formed aspirations, choose to run marathons and then blather on about them at tedious dinner parties. I can’t remember when I first heard about marathons; I suspect it was when I was eight or nine years old and my father was hurling himself into endurance sports. I learned then what a triathlon is, and I must have picked up on some triumphal rhetoric about marathons. I don’t remember my mother being anything other than supportive of my father’s training, though she obviously wasn’t moved to run a marathon herself. Or maybe she was – but all her time was occupied by her four small children.

  When I studied ancient history in high school, I loved reading Herodotus and Thucydides, and marvelled that I could encounter their worlds through literature. When I first saw the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum, my impulse was to touch them and connect myself to all the centuries they’d endured. Later, when I understood that they were stolen, my understanding of that endurance shifted. A similar instinct to attach myself to an epic continuity of human endeavour first drew me to the marathon – but I told myself that if I ever actually managed to run one, I wouldn’t be celebrating war. If I was going to run 42 kilometres, I’d take Browning’s lead and refashion the story for my own purposes. I’d run against patriarchal history and, eternal virtues of strength and speed be damned, I’d run as slowly as I liked.

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  There was no way I’d be able to tough out a marathon on a wave of determination and raw talent. I had no raw talent, and I’d needed more than determination to run half marathons. Rather than a one-off test of strength, I resigned myself to a long period of training. Self-discipline, tenacity, muscles, confidence: I’d pack it all into my apprenticeship. It would be tough – in moments like these, I addressed myself in the assured basso that I’d heard football coaches use on telly – but I’d faced tougher stuff. Can I do it? I can do it! I would move in an orderly fashion through each stage of training, from exertion to recovery. I shrugged at the likelihood of inconvenience and fatigue – surely I’d endured greater impositions on my days than long runs.

  I’ve met runners who jog for pleasure and never enter events, but they’re the exception: to most of the runners I encounter, the structure offered by training for a race seems to be almost as significant as the activity itself. It’s my guess that the structure of training programs is what leads so many avowed non-runners to attempt marathons when their lives fall apart. For every sports-mad glycogen junkie at the starting line, there’s someone who is recently divorced, whose child has died, who has survived chemotherapy, who’s found herself shocked, bereft, and still somehow alive. ‘Enduring’ and ‘coping’ are synonyms, and the logic seems to go something like this: If my body can endure a marathon, then my soul, my psyche, whatever it is that comprises my self, can blunder on too. This is quite a different motivation to the distress that compels the literary runners I’d met. The aftermath of loss is exhausting, repetitious and often very, very dull – and so is training for a marathon. But endurance can help turn elusive sorrows into something tangible, like aching muscles and blisters. Such pains can be easily described, unlike the pain of grief. Online forums for beginner marathoners are overflowing with anonymous stories about recovery written by those who’ve found some solace from chaos and dread.

  I didn’t recognise myself in the full-throttle sports books or even the unbearably upbeat guides for beginners. I’m nothing like those people, I grumbled to myself. And yet I flittered closer to catch glimpses of experiences that I might recognise, tantalised by the prospect of insight. The theory that, in extremis, we may be able to access our true and possibly best selves at our limit points has many precedents. That suffering will yield truth is the stuff of tragedy; follow the muse Melpomene: after catharsis, order.

  What if these themes preoccupied the megaphone-holding men at the beginning of distance events? What if, instead of asking, who’s feeling frisky, they asked, who’s had a terrible year, who’s struggled to connect to the world, who hopes that this run will shake it all back into place? There would be shrugs, and friends would exchange baffled glances. Maybe a few people would find that a painful, awkward sob had been dredged up. I’m so jumpy and defensive at the starting line that I’d probably roll my eyes and mutter something about how this had turned into a two-bit self-help forum. Get on with it.

  The truth is, I wonder about the people who cheer frantically when megaphones turn to personal bests and the pain barrier. If they were sat down Encounter-group style and asked, again and again, why are you here, why are you really here, what would they answer? I’d expect versions of familiar formulae: I wanted to see if I could do it, I wanted to test myself, I just thought it was time for a change, I’m getting older. I’d listen closely, encourage them to keep talking; I’d wait to hear them say the same things over and over again. And finally the themes would emerge in their raw form: mortality, pain, and the terrifying unknowability of the body’s limits.

  One friend, another literary scholar, surprised me when I told her I was going to run a marathon. She just nodded sagely. ‘This sounds like you,’ she said. ‘You battled through a PhD and you’ve read all the big modernists. You’re used to endurance. You’ll be fine.’ I turned her implacable encouragement into something like a motto: I’d read all the big modernists, I could run a marathon. Roger, a family friend and veteran marathoner, was generous with his counsel too. He told me that the couple of long meditation retreats that I’d endured in my twenties would help much more than any time in the gym – I already had an insight into the state of mind I’d need to commit to the training.

  Many friends looked faintly worried, however, when I told them what I was planning to do. Maybe they sensed the hint of drama in the air; maybe they withheld their flickering suspicions that a current of self-destructive behaviour had only just been diverted. A half marathon sounds like a far more moderate affair. Are you sure you’re up to it, I was asked. That’s a terribly long way. Don’t you think something more manageable would be appropriate? Manageable, I’d reply, what’s manageable? I stopped trying to decipher the concerns coded in these questions and presented a defiant, slightly flippant demeanour. Who do you think I am, a junior analyst up for a performance review? I assured them that if I trained carefully, I would be able to make the distance. Don’t worry, I’m not out to break any records. That became my standard line.

  *

  The half marathon that I’ve run most frequently knots around the centre of Sydney each May. It starts and ends in Hyde Park, not too far from the apartment building in which I lived for a decade. The route changes only a little each year. The planners have to negotiate Sydney’s peren
nial clog of roadworks and building projects to come up with a course that delivers some big money harbour views, that isn’t too hilly, that doesn’t throw the Sunday morning traffic to shit, and that has a few nice straights. No doubt various athletics organisations impose their own requirements. What it means in practice is a course with a few curly loops and awkward hairpin bends, and some surprising route-enabling connections up and down overpass ramps and along tight one-way streets. A strange mix of glorious Sydney and nondescript inner-urban concrete, the harbour on one side, the backs of car parks and service roads on the other.

  The principles behind training for a marathon aren’t fundamentally different to those that guide half marathoners: a weekly long run that becomes progressively longer anchors the training program, and shorter, faster weekday runs fill it out. By now I was very familiar with the 21 kilometres of a half marathon. I had learned how to slow down in the first half so that I would not have to walk the second. I knew that the first 5 or 6 kilometres are almost effortless, and that a terrible boredom can kick in after 12 or 13. I tried to train myself not to notice the kilometre markers in the middle of the event, hoping that I would surprise myself and find that I had only 5 kilometres left to run and not 7 or 8. I learned how to calculate my pace using my watch and the kilometre markers, with the goal of moving at the same speed for the entire race. I came to terms with frustratingly irregular experiences of distance: 4 kilometres from the finish line feels fantastically further than 3 kilometres. I’d already learned so much. I thought all I’d need to do would be find the time to run more.