Long Run Read online

  The milestones were all lugged into place by men; intrepid women distance athletes were trailed by groups of officials carrying sheaves of arguments as to why their achievements shouldn’t be recognised. And the shoddy treatment of female athletes continues. Sports officials are still bothered by fast women – and women’s sport is still treated as secondary to men’s. As if that weren’t sufficient outrage, those of us at the other end of the speed spectrum are upbraided for running too slowly, shamed for not trying hard enough. I’ve met plenty of runners who are astonished by my lack of ambition, who can’t understand why I don’t want to get faster. I could point to the hassle that elite women runners endure, and ask why I should bother. Women who run long distances are defying cultural norms that restricted their mothers and grandmothers to more ladylike activities; now it seems that women like me (and yes, a lot of men too) must conform to a different expectation: to commit to personal improvement, to hunger for a win.

  Did I want to run faster in New York than I had on the Gold Coast? I suppose so – but much more immediate was my desire to finish the race.

  *

  With a few charismatic or celebrity exceptions, sports history celebrates winners. Who remembers runners who weren’t placegetters? To make the official history books, what matters is how fast a runner reaches the finish line. In starting my own account of running a marathon decades before I loitered at its starting line, I’ve already broken the rules – but all my beginnings and false starts are as important to me as the races. Had I spent my teens playing netball and actually catching the passes that were thrown to me, I would have become a different runner. Had I spent my twenties arguing with my parents and not making sense of their absence, I might not have become a runner at all. To start the story of my marathon-running in my thirties would lop off too much.

  When I was twenty, the age a lot of the women who’ve held marathon world records got started, I wasn’t training for races – I was hissing about patriarchy and scribbling feminist slogans on toilet doors. I was angry about hierarchies based on strength and speed, angry about all the restrictions women are expected to swallow. All that rage, surely, cast me as a runner. I was fed up with my mother telling me to dress nicely and my father teasing me as I tried to articulate a political position. I was refusing to shave my legs and chucking the ideas of beauty peddled by cosmetics companies. To have worn a pair of sneakers sewn in a sweatshop would have been social death. Would that fragile, passionate, self-absorbed young woman recognise the person preparing to do something so indulgent as fly to New York to run a marathon?

  I had rested for a few weeks after finishing the Gold Coast Marathon and, as planned, I resumed my training as the weather warmed up. I didn’t have to prove myself with a qualifying time to enter the New York Marathon, although many do. There’s no way I would have made the cut-off. I ran as a charity entrant and raised money for a human rights organisation; I signed away medical liability on the entry form, of course, but there were no questions to answer about my reproductive organs. The program featured profiles of a carefully curated mix of pro-runners, veteran marathoners, first-timers, and athletes who’d battled the odds, as if to reassure doubters like me that anyone can do it. The New York event had been the site of some of the most vigorous campaigning about the women’s marathon, and I was proud to be running it. Each week of training I ran a little further, clutching for confidence that I’d be able to complete the race. Don’t overdo it, I’d been warned – just make sure you do enough.

  The week before the marathon, I flew into JFK and applied myself to my first task: overcoming jetlag. Then, on my first quick run around Central Park, it became apparent that New York can be very chilly in November, especially in the early morning. This shouldn’t have been a shock, but it was.

  I’d had to bow out of my last long training run in Sydney thanks to unexpectedly intense heat. For reasons I can’t remember, I set out in the afternoon rather than the morning, and ran through the city parklands to the eastern beaches: Bondi, Tamarama, Bronte. The glare from the ocean and the bright evening sun left me dizzy and nauseated, and I needed to lie down in a bus shelter for twenty minutes to cool off. I had a ten-dollar note in my pocket, just enough cash to buy a bottle of sparkling apple juice from a fancy deli in Woollahra. The staff watched me with concern as I took a first draught, possibly because my uncouth sweaty figure disrupted the clean lines of their shop. I couldn’t explain or apologise – the cider had set off fireworks in my throat that made me cough.

  The morning before I flew to New York, I swam in the swell at Bronte. As I dried off in the sun, I scrunched my toes in the sand, trying to picture these feet in a pair of sneakers, running 40 kilometres. The Pacific lay before me; I would have to cross first an ocean and then a continent before I started to run. What would I do in New York? I’d see old friends, visit the Frick, walk the High Line, meet a childhood friend of my mother’s; I’d complain about the coffee, interview people at the Occupy protest, see movies in the morning, eat bagels, read Frank O’Hara. And then, I would run a marathon.

  My contemplations didn’t steer me anywhere close to the practicalities of a massive seasonal shift, and I boarded the plane unprepared to run in freezing weather. I had packed a pair of uncomfortable leggings, but hadn’t thought to pop in a warm hat or a shirt that would cover my arms. If it rained on me in New York, if the wind picked up, I’d be lost. I could buy new gear, but even I knew that it was a novice’s error to run a race in untested kit.

  I met a runner from Auckland in Manhattan who invited me to the opening of a shop in Greenwich Village selling New Zealand woollens. He was a finance guy; a friend of his from the consulate was organising the event. A runner named Kathrine Switzer was going to speak. She was married to a Kiwi. Had I heard of her? Her husband was an English professor; maybe I knew of him? Yes, I’d read his book on the literature of running and wondered where all the women runners were. It wasn’t the professor who interested me, of course – it was Switzer. I could hardly believe my luck. What did it feel like to run a marathon that bucked the world’s expectations? I had my own tiny answer to that question but I wanted to hear hers.

  Did Kathrine Switzer unlock the mysteries of the marathon for me and reveal my place in its history? She delivered a stump speech about her Boston run and her part in promoting the women’s marathon; I think I’d read some key phrases in interviews elsewhere. I didn’t really care. I was starstruck and, I have to confess, extremely amused at the incongruity of finding myself tongue-tied in a downtown sock shop, intimidated by an athlete.

  The day before, I had been working as a journalist, interviewing Wall Street protesters for a story I never filed. And the last time I’d visited New York, I was a serious graduate student doing archival research for my doctorate. The people who daunted me then were academics, and my doubts turned on whether I’d ever manage to complete my dissertation. I smoked cigarettes under the stone lions that guard the New York Public Library and strolled around Prospect Park at the end of the day, giggling at squirrels. Now it was as a runner that I wriggled through the crowd and introduced myself to a very friendly Kathrine Switzer. I managed to squeak out something earnest about my admiration for her as a feminist. Switzer had just been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame; as she shook my hand, she told me that it was the greatest honour of her career. The Gold Coast had nothing on this.

  That was Thursday night. On Sunday morning, I got up so early that the streetlights barely broke through the darkness. The bus from Midtown to Staten Island passed across empty city blocks hung with marathon banners and bright bunting. My normal routines had been left in Sydney. On the bus, I ate a bagel and a floury banana, and scoffed an uncaffeinated espresso-flavoured carb gel given to me by a man who really wanted an audience for a thorough account of his race-plan. I told myself that I needed a very small cup of coffee to start the race; my only option was Dunkin’ Donuts, and I watched the sun come up on that cold November mornin
g, sipping filter coffee and eating a doughnut.

  Marathons always involve a lot of waiting and the overture at this starting line was epic. If it took this long to start, how would I ever finish? I surrendered to the wait and let my mood billow. The air was still and the sky was cloudless: a perfect day for running. A soundtrack of New York classics played on a loop – Frank Sinatra, Jay Z, Billy Joel – and I sang along too, even though I wanted to hear Leonard Cohen and the Pogues and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I’m usually impervious to the mass emotions that shear through crowds, but I couldn’t separate myself from the sentiments erupting around me. A group of Dutch runners was singing songs and exchanging hugs as if they’d already run the race. Two women darted through the throng, high-fiving everyone they passed. I swapped life stories with a man from the West Village dressed in head-to-toe fluoro lycra. This guy, I learned, had run oodles of marathons. He also ran a good line about this being the greatest marathon in the greatest city in the world – no offense, Sydney – and I was one lucky little Aussie to be running it.

  All my runs around Sydney had brought me here, to another threshold. The fierce alienation I so often experience in big groups ebbed and left me standing in something like an ephemeral community. I never would have believed that blending into an international crowd of runners could produce such a wonderful sense of identity and potential. Why was I here and not holed up at home, watching Double Indemnity for the seventeenth time, missing my parents? How had I managed to start again?

  The starting siren blasted from a bridge pylon, and my questions disappeared. I forgot Sydney. I forgot the Gold Coast. I forgot all my missed starts and my big ideas about marathons and those stupid questions about how fast I could run. I just ran.

  I ran with the city: up and down five bridges, past bands playing Puerto Rican hip hop and Hasidic metal; past school brass ensembles and speakers hanging out of the windows; I ran from Staten Island through the long straight avenues of south Brooklyn and the remnants of last night’s Williamsburg parties. I got a little broody and anxious in Queens, until the climb up over the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan brought me back into my body. I ran to the Bronx and then back over the Willis Avenue Bridge into Manhattan.

  Two million spectators watch the NYC marathon, and I was part of the show. Surely not everyone cheering on the sidewalks was there to watch a friend. The cheers were exuberant and I regretted that my name wasn’t on my shirt this time. ‘Go, orange shirt!’ someone yelled. I waved in the direction of the voice, hoping it was me they meant, and not one of the Dutch runners.

  If this were a truly uplifting motivational tract, the run would have got better and better, and I wouldn’t have stopped grinning for the whole 42 kilometres. It would have been effortless, I would have floated across the line, everything would finally have made sense. There were no hallucinations to carry me to the finish line, but the last few kilometres were painful. Not even the recent memory of meeting Kathrine Switzer – women’s marathon legend Kathrine Switzer – could keep a smile on my face. By the time I was running the last 5 kilometres down Fifth Avenue, my hips ached. Cold sizzles shot up my calves, and no matter how I swung my arms, something hurt: the balls and sockets in my shoulders squeaked as if they’d run out of lubrication; my damp shirt had stiffened to a board and chafed the soft skin near my armpit; pain alarms sounded in my neck and upper back. My shoulders slumped with the weight of my hands, so heavy I couldn’t lift them to swat a hank of sweaty hair from my brow.

  Did I think about stopping? Of course. I thought of nothing else. I was long past reminding myself that I’d flown halfway around the world to run this race, that I couldn’t possibly withdraw. My first marathon hadn’t turned me into a running warrior, invulnerable to doubt and weakness. Comforts filled my mind, so mundane and childish it’s embarrassing to remember them: the thick counterpane on my hotel bed, pillows, sweet tea, warm water, potato chips. How to reach this softly furnished nirvana wasn’t a problem I could solve. I couldn’t have walked back to the hotel, even if I’d been able to hoist myself over the barricades. Dressed only in a singlet and shorts, now both wet and hard with sweat, I would have become very cold very quickly, and anyway, the footpaths were clogged with spectators. I thought the matter through carefully. The easiest option was to keep running. Finishing that marathon wasn’t a triumph of will over flesh – it was pragmatism. I kept running and, after an epoch, limped through Central Park to the finish line with nothing left in me but a desire to sit down.

  The finish line of the NYC Marathon only marks the end of the running. It was as if I were a character in a work of experimental fiction: never starting, never finishing. An official gave me a medal, pretzels, water and a crinkly space blanket; she directed me to keep walking through what felt like both a maze and a prank. I could stop and have my photo taken if I chose, but I couldn’t exit the maze. I couldn’t see any way to climb out and escape. I walked several blocks north and finally was released from Central Park, only to turn around and pick a path south to my hotel.

  It took me an hour to get there, and along the way I high-fived a new cohort of strangers and beamed at other runners like an afternoon drunk. I kept my space blanket wrapped around my shoulders and held on to my medal as if it were my lover’s hand. I don’t think I could have spelled my name; I couldn’t walk in a straight line, and I held my arms and blanket out beside me like a pair of wings for balance when I stepped off the kerb. Adrenaline spikes made me stumble in and out of the scant November sun.

  I ordered a giant cheese and pickle sandwich at the deli next to my hotel. The guy behind the counter wanted to give me free prosciutto, thought that I didn’t have the cash, that I needed more protein, that I deserved it because I’d just run the New York City fucking Marathon. It took a while for me to persuade him that I was good to pay for the sandwich, thanks. Hold the meat, I’m a vegetarian, I’ve just run a marathon, I can’t argue the toss, I need to eat right now.

  I walked into the hotel lobby with a carton of that sweet pink grapefruit juice that I’ve only ever drunk in the States and a sandwich so big I didn’t think I’d be able to bite it. I ran a warm bath and took two bites of my sandwich. The phone rang – home – and I answered it, a salty, weary wreck. If this was what it meant for a slow marathon runner, an unambitious athlete to be part of the history of the marathon, I could live with it.

  12

  Hitting the wall

  Running gurus sometimes advise first-time marathoners to visualise themselves moving easily over the finish line, and to return to those images when the going gets tough. The trick, apparently, is to picture yourself floating to the end of the race. It’s a tactic to help cope with sorely delayed gratification: imagine the hard part is over; imagine your body is unable to resist the impulse to move.

  I don’t have the knack of conjuring these states of effortlessness. My visualisations of fluent movement are all interrupted by images of me tripping over my shoelaces, of dogs running into my path, of my extended family appearing out of nowhere in some fond, disruptive show of support. The state in which I finished my first two marathons was nothing like floating – I was a stumbler. By the time I reached the finish line, my limbs had long lost any grace, and joint pain had forced a readjustment of my body’s axis. I looked desperate, effortful and a bit mad. Although ‘flowing’ and ‘gliding’ are keywords for visualisation exercises, the finish line is more often understood to be a dramatic site, one where we’re tested, where we approach our limits. In other words, it should look like it hurts – and usually, it does.

  The most memorable finish line images are the ones that show a runner on the brink of exhaustion, as if she’s almost given up but somehow managed to access a precious last drop of energy. Runners who cross the line limping, with nipples bleeding and tears streaming down their cheeks, are invariably greeted with huge applause. Agonised finishes have fascinated runners and spectators alike since marathons were first dreamed up. Remember Pheidippides, the model for
the modern marathon runner? He ran himself to death.

  A few blotchy images exist from the 1896 Olympics, but there is nothing from the finish line of the marathon. Journalists reported that Spyridon Louis collapsed in distress not long after he won the gold. He never raced again. While there’s pathos in the story, photographs can bring a runner’s pain to life for those who aren’t at the sidelines. During the Olympic marathon of 1908, images were collected at the finish line that express perfectly the charisma and drama of the painful finish.

  Like Pheidippides and Louis before him, the Italian runner Dorando Pietri almost killed himself finishing that marathon – right in front of the assembled international media. The press corps were conveniently situated to capture image after image of Pietri as he slowly collapsed, his face contorted in pain and his limbs seizing up. His last lap of the stadium took an operatic ten minutes. Pietri had been given a dose of strychnine by his trainers just before he entered the stadium: a common, if risky, practice at the time that effectively switched off the brain’s pain receptors. According to a contemporary newspaper, Pietri ‘staggered along the cinder path like a man in a dream, his gait being neither a walk nor a run, but simply a flounder, with arms shaking and legs tottering’. He hit the deck a few hundred metres from the finish and was ‘helped’ – dragged – across the line to first place by officials.

  As the cinematographers cranked their cameras and recorded newsreel footage, and the photographers leaned into their tripods to take front-page pictures, they made an important contribution to the visual lexicon of endurance: this is what it looks like to finish a marathon; this is what it’s like to push yourself to the edge. The footage is easy to dig up online, and it’s unpleasant to watch. How, these shuddering newsreels invite us to wonder, would we fare if we were in that much pain? Thirty seconds after the wavering Pietri was pulled over the line, an American runner, Johnny Hayes, made it under his own steam. Pietri was carried away on a stretcher – disqualified. He woke up in hospital a hero and received a special prize from Queen Alexandra for valour, even though Hayes took the gold.