Long Run Read online

  I’d never been to the Gold Coast. In my imagination, it was a bit like a gym, an anonymous backdrop where I’d be able to test out my marathon-running fantasy. As summer slipped into autumn, I ran around Sydney and tried to picture myself completing the first kilometres of a marathon not in Queensland, but across the Verrazano Bridge. If going to New York to run a marathon seemed ridiculous, then going to New York and failing to run a marathon would be unbearable. I was hitting snags with my visualisation exercises – no one ran in the New York novels and movies that I loved. Still, the glamour of the big city helped keep me in motion. Each week I ran further around the north-western shores of the harbour, watching the leafy trees turn amber, then brown.

  I ran until I was ready to line up and wait for the starter’s siren on the Gold Coast in early July. The month before the marathon, I’d logged two runs over 30 kilometres, and I’d estimated the longest was about 36 kilometres. To run a slow marathon, that was about enough. I’d spent most of June at a film festival, loafing. My training tapered, and I stuffed myself with pasta and potatoes each night. The fortnight before, I kept my legs limber with short runs and slept a lot. After all that rest and exercise, my body was made of elastic. I was all potential. If I wasn’t going to run a marathon, I’d have climbed a mountain, or filibustered any crowd that would have me. If I’d started walking, I might never have stopped. The week before the race, I hopped around in a state of deranged invincibility pulled tight with nerves.

  I’d run my first half marathon with a brace of cousins and my aunt Anne on the sidelines. A happy collision of circumstances meant I was able to run my first marathon in the same company. On the eve of the race, we met in a hotel by a golf course that had been booked out by marathon runners. The restaurant was full of leggy people eating pasta and buzzing with the lunatic energy that had been keeping me awake for weeks. Spaghetti with tomato sauce and a glass of rubbery shiraz for me. The waiter insisted that it was a meal for champions, and I laughed on cue. Ha ha, some champion.

  In my room, I set the alarm for 4.30am, took half a sleeping tablet, and dropped off watching a rom-com about a stupid couple and their dog. In the morning, breakfast in an overlit hotel room: bananas, peanut butter and honey on toast. I’d eaten this breakfast a hundred times before. A cup of coffee and a bottle of orange Gatorade. Off my head with sugar and nerves and caffeine.

  It was dark when we arrived at the starting area. Anne hugged me and told me that she wished my father, her brother, was there to see all this, and I didn’t flinch, because I would have been pretty pleased to see him there too. My cousin Danny and I watched and cheered as Anne and the rest of the troupe started the half marathon. Just then, I didn’t care whether I finished the marathon; I was content to have finally made it to the starting line. Eventually, I waved goodbye to Danny too. A fast runner, he wanted to start near the front of the pack.

  I waited alone as the sky lightened, bringing myself into focus as if through a lens, and saw a thirty-something woman wearing old red sneakers. She was rolling her feet inwards and leaning on her inner arches, a nervous tic that kills the knees. Black shorts. Purple singlet. Green hat. I pulled back to include in frame the tens of thousands of people gathered there on the starting line. The further away it was, the more I looked like just another runner in a crowd of runners, and not like a freak who’d patched together a fallen-apart life and held on to the idea of a marathon as though it might pull her into a new reality. Who knows who else was waiting there? Former teenage cross-country champions out to give it another go; corporate types responding to a challenge from a colleague; marathon lifers, wizened by years in the sun; people shocked into running by divorce or illness; bucket-listers and goal-setters; a few who’d let themselves think this was the best way to shape up; dreamers; bewildered people with something to lose or to prove. Essayist Charles D’Ambrosio talks about ‘kindred doubts’ – perhaps that’s what brought us all together.

  *

  As I was warming to the new idea that I might have something in common with the runners around me, the MC stuck to the script: You’re all bloody legends. Give yourselves a massive cheer! This is an ancient tradition, and you’re running in the footsteps of heroes. Here we are, continuing this tradition on the beautiful Gold Coast. On he went. The marathon is about as ancient as the typewriter or the motion picture camera; that is, entirely the product of modernity. Its reputation wouldn’t exist without newspapers and photographs and news that whizzed across undersea telegraph cables. I doubted that those of us lined up to run on the Goldie shared much of the experience with the seventeen men who started the first Olympic marathon in 1896.

  How different was it to run a big marathon in 2011? That race on the Gold Coast started early to avoid the heat of the day – and, I suppose, to minimise traffic disruptions. In Athens they didn’t start till two in the afternoon. When they did, a revolver shot sent them on their way. Yeehaa. The competitors were given milk and two beers three hours before they started running – early marathons were convivial events with plenty of booze. Some runners were passed beakers of wine and cognac as they ran by assistants riding bicycles. These days, you see every flavour of energy drink being swilled before a marathon, but runners tend to hold off on the harder stuff until the finish line.

  The first winner, Spyridon Louis, had prayed and fasted the day before the run, and had reportedly eaten a whole chicken that morning. Not many starters finished in 1896, whereas most of us on the Gold Coast did. A Frenchman, Albin Lermusiaux, and the Australian runner Teddy Flack both gave the Athens Marathon a good go – but each dropped out 10 kilometres from the finish line. Flack collapsed, punched a race official and needed to be revived with a boozy eggnog.

  Women weren’t runners but trophies in 1896 – or, at least, one of them was. Should a Greek man have won the marathon, a special prize was offered: the hand in marriage of philanthropist George Averoff’s daughter. It’s a lurid twist on Atalanta’s story. Greece had been heavily in debt when it petitioned to host the 1896 Games and couldn’t afford to build all the stadiums required. A public subscription didn’t raise enough cash – and in stepped Averoff. A Greek man did win the race, but because he was already married, he and Averoff’s daughter dodged a wedding.

  Women stayed on the sidelines in all events at those Games, and the person we can thank for that is Pierre de Coubertin. He held strong ideas about women’s participation in competitive sport in that he was strongly opposed to it; if there were Olympic officials who disagreed with him, they held no sway. Opponents to the participation of women pointed to their absence from the ancient Olympics. In this, they were at least partially right. Sources vary: one says that the priestesses of Demeter were given leave to participate in the religious festivities, another says that any woman caught watching the Games would be hurled off a rock at Olympus. As usual, when talk of the wondrous traditions of the ancients gets going, particularly in the early morning, it pays to be sceptical.

  *

  I bounced on the balls of my feet, so full of calories and fitness and anxious excitement that I thought I might shoot up into the sky and start to belt out show tunes. Glimpses of stocking, something shocking. I was Patti LuPone, and the world really had gone mad. I hauled myself back to the ground. When the gun fired, I inched toward the starting line, elbow to elbow with the crowd. A slowmo long shot. By the time my foot carried the timing tag attached to my sneaker over the all-important sensor, I was giggling at the silliness of it all. I wanted to run, and run, I did. For hours.

  The first half of the course was a song and dance past the distance markers; the second was Sturm und Drang against a backdrop of ugly residential skyscrapers and flat dirty beaches. To begin with, I tried not to look at my watch to check my pace. I wanted to run slowly, oblivious to time, for as long as I could. This was my big race strategy, not exactly a technical approach.

  About 10 kilometres in, at the end of a long, straight stretch, I encountered a lone woman atop a mil
k crate who was bellowing persistent encouragement to everyone who ran past. That she wasn’t hoarse by the time I appeared astounded me. Entirely unselfconscious, she devoted her whole body to cheering. She could have been a roadside evangelist. You’re all amazing. Keep going. I wondered why she was there, whom she was yelling for, and I waved at her as I ran past. That’s right, darling, keep going. Her voice stayed on a loop in my head for a long time.

  My mood changed. I became enraged, just after the 18-kilometre mark, when a man rode his bicycle onto the course and pedalled alongside a friend. The course was narrow, and I couldn’t summon the speed to pass him. He lit a cigarette and smoked it as he rode one-handed, regaling his marathon mate with last night’s antics. I wanted someone else to upbraid him, to yell, You imbecile, get off the course! Over several kilometres, I composed a series of rebukes, not one of which I delivered. I should have lectured him on the history of women’s running and his place in the long line of smug pricks who have impeded the progress of women runners. Where were the race officials? I couldn’t face the prospect of initiating conflict on the course. He might turn around and hit back with some schoolyard fusillade. It’s a free country, mind your own business, you look like you’re not going to make it anyway, what sort of puritan are you? I needed my energy for running. I allowed myself only one tiny, passive-aggressive cough. Finally he rode off into a side street.

  I crossed the half marathon mark in good time – if, perhaps, a little too fast. And then, in unknown terrain, I panicked. I’d run further than 20 kilometres many times, but never in a road race. How was I going to run another half marathon on top of this one? My glee completely evaporated, and I sunk into a new mental environment: a grim swamp. Maybe I was cut from the same cloth as the smoker on the bike, not these real runners. I wanted to stop, to click my ruby red sneakers against each other and find myself back at home, comfortable: halfway through a Victorian triple-decker, chortling at Trollope’s public servants; halfway through a bottle of rosé, no matter that it was a winter’s afternoon; halfway through a spliff, amiably disconnected; halfway through a nap, a wheel of brie, a boring anecdote, a tureen of ratatouille, an argument with a neighbour – anywhere but halfway through a marathon with 17 kilometres left to run.

  I kept running. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do. The finish line swung in and out of my awareness. As I got closer, it seemed to sway further away from me. My memory of the last third of the run is weirdly estranged from my body, and I can’t remember what my legs felt like, just that I was tired and unreasonably angry that I’d let myself imagine I might run this far. Somewhere round the 34-kilometre mark, even this got boring, and when I heard a Patsy Cline song that my mother loved over the PA, I swallowed my rage and started to laugh.

  As the course approached the finish line, more spectators gathered and drew themselves into the action. ‘Trina’, which is what my family calls me, was marked on my bib, and onlookers started to cheer, Go, Trina! Keep running, Trina! I’d forgotten that this nickname was visible. As complete strangers quoted Forrest frigging Gump to help me along my way – Run, Trina, run! – I spluttered at the absurdity of it all, at this long, long road I’d run along. I was running a marathon and had less than 10 kilometres to go. I waved at the crowd and hooted to myself, astonished and delighted by the outrageous prospect that I, this I who had hated running for her entire life, who was so clumsy, who had been so sad, who had sunk so deep into the quicksand of grief, who had entered two marathons and hadn’t managed to start them, this I was going to finish a marathon.

  It got weird. Joyous, loving ghosts spurred me on. I was sure that I could hear the voices of friends on the other side of the planet cheering for me. I picked out faces in the crowd that I’d almost forgotten, and I was shocked to see them. This isn’t really her kind of event, I mumbled to myself. How strange that she’s here. What is that guy doing on the Gold Coast? I thought he was in Chicago or maybe Santa Fe.

  A brilliant, mad state of mind took me through the final stretch. Loves lost and lives lost emerged from the Gold Coast underworld to watch me run. Each kilometre marker cordoned off one impossibly long stretch of road from the next. I spliced the kilometre in half – and the remaining 500 metres reached before me as a new expanse. I was an exhibit in a lesson on Zeno’s paradox, and my body was time’s arrow, always approaching, never reaching its destination. Clutching that arrow, I met again my dear friend Nigel, one of the ones who really was mad to live and mad to talk, who’d named a zine after Zeno; Nigel who, had he lived, would have stayed up all night talking about marathons and masochism and ecstatic bodies and fascism; Nigel, who died when a tumour swallowed his kind, radiant mind, and provided yet more callous proof that death undoes every paradox. I lost my breath thinking of all the laughter that would have churned through those conversations we’d missed.

  What would I have told my mother about this sane, moving hallucination: Mum, I’m squeezing through a tiny aperture trailing all my pasts behind me, and every day I’d ever lived I’m living again here on the Gold Coast? She would have known that I wasn’t born to run. She would have remembered me sobbing at all those dropped catches and wooden spoons. She would have known that for me, to start running was not to continue a tradition, but to break with the past, that a marathon signified novelty and hopefulness. I kept running. Would my grandmother have been horrified by the sweat crystallising on my cheeks and told me to wash, immediately? I can’t stop now, I’ve got to keep running, I protested. I’ll clean up when I get to the end. I wanted more ghosts – they rarely visited me like this, and when they did, I shooed them away, scared. Running, I lost my fear. There was my father, cheering like a loon, just like he had when I’d played hockey as a kid and missed the ball with every swipe. I waved and kept running.

  This was supposed to be a rehearsal. I ran the whole stupid course to the end, raising my hands in the air when I crossed the line as some idiot runner would do, as I never thought I would. My aunt and cousins whooped and thundered while I cleared the timing strip in a mess of tears, sweat and relief. In the photos taken at the finish line, my face is red and I’m very out of kilter. My left hip hurt, so I was leaning hard to the right; it looks like an awful injury.

  The raving state passed, and I found myself in delighted shock. Someone gave me a banana, which I ate, and then I made my way to the people, keys and cards that connected me to the world. After running for four hours, even these basic tasks seemed gigantic, tremendously important. I sat down with my cousins, bamboozled by the sudden cessation of exertion. I was still, but far from calm. The chemical reactions provoked by running for half a working day send weird spasms through the body. My doctor cousins tried to explain this, but I was too wired to take it in. Around my neck, a volunteer had hung a medal. Forget faster, higher, stronger: everyone who runs a marathon gets a medal. I’d insisted I wasn’t in it for the glory but I didn’t take off that medal until we returned to the hotel and I sloughed away the grime of the morning in the shower.

  11

  A one-sentence success story

  I didn’t know what it all meant, but the desire for that marathon to mean something took on a terrific urgency, one that fortunately diminished as the stiffness melted from my legs. All the training guides make a circular promise: once you’ve finished a marathon, you will become a marathon runner. What could this possibly mean? What did crossing the finish line mean to me?

  That afternoon, as I traipsed through the airport with Anne for our flights back to Sydney, I had no idea. Had I some great insight into how that big run fitted into the big story of my life, I couldn’t have put it into words. If I drew my awareness to any one part of my body, I found an ache there. Heat and colour flushed over my cheeks and chest. I watched a pair of hands futz through the ticketing process as if they belonged to someone else. To step down even a single stair, I needed to clutch a railing. Feverish, I could almost have convinced myself that this glowing state of pain marked the final stage
in my metamorphosis into a marathon runner, that I was about to shed my old skin and board the plane in a new body.

  I tried not to think too closely about the commitment I’d made to a repeat performance of the show. The only reason I’d entered the Gold Coast run was to chase away my doubts about the NYC Marathon. If that was a warm-up, what kind of emotional explosion was I to expect from the main event? Calmly, I rehearsed in my mind how it would go: I would run very gently for a month to recover; I would pick up my training as the winter lifted; I would run another marathon.

  There are permanent ways to record having run a marathon, to claim the distance as part of your life story. Over the years I’ve seen plenty of marathon mementos etched onto the bodies running past me. Plug ‘marathon tattoo’ into a search engine, and you’ll soon be scrolling through galleries of photos of red, raw new tattoos, all with 42.2 at their heart, or 26.2 if the distance is measured in miles. Sometimes, the number is all there is to a marathon tattoo – discreet little digits on the ankle or maybe the hip. I’ve seen the magic number emblazoned on a medal or surrounded by a victor’s wreath. I am taken by the ones with elaborate illustrations, by numbers fluttering on cherub’s wings or being jogged along by jolly cartoon feet, burning up the skin with flames. I’ve seen the distance tattooed into a detailed commemorative ribbon, with the date of a marathon and the bearer’s time squeezed in for completeness. I’ve seen 42.2 illustrated by funky retro images of running shoes, long hilly roads and slogans like good old veni vidi vici. A subgenre of marathon tattoos involves Roman numerals, often with wonderfully incongruous decimal points: XXVI.II or XLII.II. The Romans have nothing to do with the marathon, but the anachronism speaks to the reputation of the event as being an all-purpose pan-historic Big Deal. Though I’ve never marked my body after a marathon, I can understand the impulse to do so. Marathons generate eloquent scars and sprains and limps – but a tattoo is a bold and deliberate declaration of how a body has lived. It is a one-sentence success story: I finished a marathon.