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  The first marathon run in Australia had a similarly emotive ending. The race started at the Sydney Cricket Ground on 12 April 1909, while the Easter Show was in full swing. Thirty-one runners headed for Blakehurst Post Office and returned to a stadium full of spectators. They weren’t disappointed: while the winner, Andrew Sime, made it across the line still looking fresh and vigorous, the man who followed him staggered to the tape, fainted, and was carried away in a stretcher. The Sydney Morning Herald’s report the day after the race pays due homage to the lineage of marathon hardies – and gives more space to the man who placed second and provided the crowd with a bit of drama than it does to the winner.

  Finishes like these cap off narratives about marathons as a transformative process. Many coaches advise that marathoners should approach the finish line with nothing left in the tank. (I’ve no idea how they reconcile this with that ‘floating’ visualisation.) I’ve never pushed myself this hard, never run to the point of vomiting or losing control of my bowels, misfortunes suffered by many distance runners. When people say they ran a marathon to see whether they were up to it, I think they mean they’re curious about this place at the limits of human endurance, the one captured in the pictures of Pietri.

  By people, of course, I mean me. When I started running, I was curious about how I’d perform under this kind of pressure. Bailing out of two marathons shifted my attention to the starting line. Perhaps if I’d made it to my first marathon start without any bumps, intrigue about a big, bloody finish might have kept me going. This kind of thinking posits marathons and other tests of physical endurance as trial scenarios for adversity that most safe and sheltered runners are never likely to experience. Endurance through prolonged, painful exertion is a sign that we’ve tried hard to outrun whatever we believe is tailing us: sadness, a knight on horseback, a fear of failure. To endure is to abide, to outlast pain. Are we brave and strong and tenacious at our limits – or do we slow down, collapse?

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  Only once have I experienced a test of self, or some approximation of it, while running a marathon. I can’t say for sure whether I passed or failed. During the months that I was reading about Pheidippides – the exhausted, run-till-you-die-and-die-ecstatic Athenian messenger – I was thinking about Browning’s ideas of heroism: the crazy self-annihilation that runners are supposed to be able to achieve, the feats of pain suppression. This was a couple of years after my Gold Coast debut. I’d entered the Canberra Marathon, which takes place in autumn as the trees around Lake Burley Griffin blaze red and yellow. I’d had a great run in the Sydney Marathon the previous spring and had spent the summer running on national park trails rather than on the roads.

  Canberra should have been a good marathon for me: I’d run the course before and I knew it was reasonably flat. A clear day – but I turned up woefully undertrained. So much for a narrative of progress, of learning to prepare for runs and knowing your limits. Usual story: life was busy, and I hadn’t set aside enough time for regular runs. Standard running advice is that you can muddle your way through a half if you’ve done it before, but not a full marathon. I was extremely irritated on the morning of the race, because I’d forgotten to charge the mp3 player that I hoped would distract me as I ran. I was nervous, and snappy too, because I knew I was poorly prepared. I avoided all visualisation exercises.

  Twenty-five kilometres in, my knee began to twang with pain, and I decided to walk for a spell. I hadn’t tripped or twisted anything – my joints just weren’t accustomed to the distance. I’d completed a couple of slow 30 kilometres runs to prepare for this marathon but I’d started the race too fast, wanting just to get it over with. Here, perhaps, is the first rebuke to the idea of a defining, single encounter with pain. This sudden halt was the consequence of many decisions taken in the months before the marathon – to stay in bed, to cut short my training, to postpone a run – made worse by the foolishness of outpacing my training in the first 20 kilometres. And now I was walking.

  I thought about Pheidippides as I hobbled, about the way he’s been used as a teaching aid in lessons on endurance. And I thought about the valiant Dorando Pietri, knocked out by strychnine, battling on. I know that running marathons at all seems deranged to many people; as much as I enjoy running into a state of mindless exhaustion, those models of athletic self-sacrifice seem idiotic to me. I could jog for about a minute before pain caused tears to well in my eyes. As I adjusted my gait to take the weight off my knee, mismatched twinges ricocheted around my thighs. Eventually, whatever mechanism makes the femur comfortably swing in the hip joint stopped working. Was this the kind of pain that gun runners take ibuprofen to prevent? It would be both an exaggeration and a typical runner’s cliché to claim that every step was agony; it wasn’t, but my knee hurt, it really hurt, and I didn’t want to run anymore. What sort of resilience would I have needed to keep running – and how stupid would I have been to court real injury? Surely stupider than starting a marathon without sufficient training.

  I grunted along in this way for several kilometres and eventually stopped at a rest station in a park. Something like this would probably have happened, I thought, if I’d elected to tackle those first two marathons instead of taking the sensible option and running the half; if I’d done that in Canberra, I’d already be finished, eating pancakes and drinking coffee in the sun. An older gentleman was in charge of the rest station – just a table with water in paper cups – and when I told him, not puffing but still a bit wobbly, swallowing my bad temper, that my knee hurt, that I didn’t think I could run any further, he gestured to a chair and passed me some water. ‘Do you need an ambulance?’ he asked. I didn’t. ‘Well, you’re welcome to sit here for a few hours, and then we’ll drive you to the finish line.’ I was faced with two equally dismal options: going on or staying still. I wasn’t carrying a phone and was far too vexed to make a distress call for a lift.

  Wait for hours or walk for hours? The people I know who’ve pulled out of marathons weren’t faced with such a banal dilemma. They had good reasons for stopping: digestive explosions, snapped ankles, immobilising pain. I started to walk again, not through any heroism of spirit but to bring this sorry business to a quicker close. I ran for short spurts and walked for long stretches. Slowly the pain in my knee retreated, and I could jog at a constant, glacial pace.

  I met a South African man in his fifties who was also disputing the urge to walk. He was running his first marathon and, though he looked pretty fit, he told me he’d never run more than 20 kilometres at a stretch. I’d trained more than he had, at least. I jogged past a heavy-set man in his twenties with tattoos on his calves who lumbered forward slowly and seemed oddly happy to shake his head every few steps and say, ‘Fa-a-a-ark.’ When we were side by side, he turned to me with a beatific smile and said, ‘I’m fucking dying here, love. You have a great day.’ Were we competing against each other? Hardly – we were just sharing the road for a while. A stranger riding a bike along the sidelines offered me water and red Gatorade, and encouraged me to persist. I was startled by her kindness. I thanked her with the little warmth I had, but I still regret not being more effusive. It wasn’t some powerful reflex of will that pulled me out of my cantankerous mood and back into the race, but these small, companionable exchanges.

  I’d heard a lot about ‘the wall’ when I started talking to other marathoners. It’s beyond the point where you want to give up, and maybe closer to a state of exhaustion and depletion where rational decisions – to walk or to drop out, for example – aren’t possible. If you hit the wall, you’ll know you’ve hit it, they say.

  The wall is the boundary of a bearable and familiar reality; beyond it, who knows? There, we might find out whether we can go on when everything that’s held us together shatters. The news, perhaps, that a plane has gone missing, and that plane contained your parents. Other shocks: your child has cancer, your spouse is leaving, your position is redundant. Will we survive this shock? Will we make it over the finish line?
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  When I walked most of the last quarter in that dismal Canberra Marathon, disappointed and tired, I was greeted with cheers in the final straight. ‘You’re doing great!’ someone shouted. I was too whacked to reply that I wasn’t, that I hadn’t trained enough, that I hadn’t passed any psychic test, that I’d had enough. It wasn’t the wall I hit on that run – just the direct consequence of under-training. I’d conjured an encounter with the wall as an heroic test of determination, an opportunity to show that while I might not be sporty, I sure as hell was gritty. My conviction was that I had the necessary reserves of whatever I’d need to see me through a few hours of arduousness; giving way to a minor injury on a long loop around Lake Burley Griffin wasn’t what I had in mind.

  I didn’t need to botch a marathon to know what it’s like to endure pain that seems endless and unbearable. I didn’t need to hit a wall either. I wonder now if I looked a bit like Dorando Pietri in the years after my parents died: staggering toward thresholds that seemed arbitrary – birthdays, graduations, new jobs; bombed to the edge of consciousness. Would someone else have sat down on the track and refused to go any further? How did you keep going? people asked me at the time – and, later, How did you not give in, collapse? A curiosity about the frontier lands of pain lies behind questions about both grief and marathons. Many people think of grief as something like an encounter with the marathon runner’s wall: a defining and lonely test of self that, once mastered, yields immediate recovery.

  I’m still suspicious about the wall, but I know that grief is nothing like that. I felt alone, but I wasn’t; small flashes of kindness have brightened even the solitary business of marathon running. There was no single moment of unbearable difficulty that I survived, only to turn back with relief and understand that a wound had closed. I’ve found it enormously satisfying to finish races – but every finish line, whether it’s been a skirmish or a cinch, has just marked another beginning, another shift in the parameters of the possible. If there’s any analogy to be drawn between marathon running and enduring grief, it shouldn’t turn on one great exhausted clash of will against circumstance. It should accommodate a million training runs, aches and doubts, stops and starts, setbacks, tiny advances, odd connections and, ultimately, not triumph, but joy and renewal.

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  It’s as obvious to the absolute beginner as to the veteran marathoner that running engages the mind in vivid and surprising ways. Trying to express the holistic experience of running requires something like a trapeze to swing from one proposition to another – it’s just the body at work, legs, lungs, core; no, it’s the mind that keeps the body moving. But perhaps the mind itself is more muscle than mystery. And if running is an experience first of the mind, what happens to the body? From what spring flows the discipline needed to withstand pain? Questions like these drift through my consciousness when I run; my body brings them back to me when I’m weary and thinking about stopping. What would it take for me to run harder – a stronger mind or a stronger body? If my lack of running ambition is a failure, is that failure located in my guts or my brain or my past? And if that lack of ambition doesn’t torment me, perhaps the failure collapses like a spent athlete, leaving me to pick out my own path. Such fragmentary thoughts on corporeality have brought me into a much happier physical existence; I don’t see my clumsiness as a betrayal by my limbs anymore; I understand fatigue not as weakness but as feedback; I hold no desire to escape embodiment.

  For feminists, questions about the mind and body aren’t just pathways to running faster – they’re also a way to understand the hierarchies that have structured gender. Controlling bodies is exactly what patriarchy does to women and queer people. Incitements to run harder and push through pain are in harmony with the constant exhortations to women: Regulate your weight and appearance! Ignore hunger, ignore suffering, ignore anger!

  What do we lose when we cut off our sensitivity to pain? In Western traditions, carnal, corrupt women’s bodies have been disciplined by the clarifying minds of strong men. Mind over matter! The prescriptions are exhausting, oppressive: running ever faster, impossible graphs of self-improvement, performance willed from unwilling limbs, mastery of pain barriers, the conquest of vulnerability. Who needs it? For some, wrestling discomfort keeps them in motion. Not me. What I love is running, just running. It’s true that I was suckered by marathon magic for a while, that I ran in thrall to some notion that twisted bowels and screaming joints might represent a peak human experience. That view now seems incredibly myopic. There are better ways to map the pleasures that running has brought me; I’ve come round to a gentler approach.

  Actually, the things I love about running are what many other writers love about walking: mental spaces cracked wide open by movement, new relationships to space, the body transformed into a medium of perception. It may be that the literature of walking resonates with my experience of running because I’m not a fast runner. For the walkers who traipse through the history of literature and philosophy, a slow pace can be revolutionary: ambling undermines the imperative to work, to produce, to earn. Similarly, running slowly is a powerful way to disobey the injunctions to discipline the body, to whip pain and fatigue to a pulp. Walkers find new ways to see the world and understand their place in it; that’s how I think about running – and obviously it’s easier to run steadily than like a woman under attack, and much more relaxing. There’s less cause to suppress protest from the joints and the lungs. Blood sugar doesn’t plummet in such a precarious way. It’s safer, as the runner is less likely to slip, overdo things or overstrain. If I threw my all into performance, if I sought out brutal, painful scenes at the finish line, I might miss out on the new worlds materialising around me as I run.

  The first spaces that opened to me as a runner were urban. I found new lines of sight on gorgeous, greedy Sydney. I invented myself as a roving geographer and ran along the same paths each week, with set detours to see plants in bloom and mosses tumbling down stone walls. The boundaries of one run bled into the next as I fixed points on my new map of the city, visiting them again and again. I became attentive to the shifts in mood from suburb to suburb, the distinctive shapes of footpaths and fences; a witness to the battle between the built environment and the skies, the sea and the trees. I ran on roads and footpaths, and found myself an animal presence in the city, unburdened from the rate-paying, form-filling and voting that comprised my responsibilities as a citizen. I was often tired and my legs often ached, but I was never bored.

  Later, I moved from the inner city to a tiny village hidden in Sydney’s southern rainforest fringe. Here, I began to run on fire-trails and slippery tracks built for bushwalkers. The Coastal Track in the Royal National Park became my regular running path; it dances along the coastline for 30 kilometres from Bundeena to Otford, through heath, rainforest, low scrub, tall eucalypts and beach.

  Off the concrete and asphalt, running has allowed me to enter into demanding dialogue with my surroundings. Plenty of runners who started off on the road abandon the racing circuit altogether in favour of trail running, and I can understand why. The exchange between a runner and her environment is greatly intensified off-road. Each step requires concentration. Running down a muddy hill, my thought narrows to the placement of my foot. Where will it fall? Will the ground hold? Will I slip?

  On the Coastal Track, the headlands are steep and treacherous, and loose rocks spray from the paths. A metal grille path has been raised over the slick mud alleys through scratchy heath, but clumps of sword grass still slice at my calves. I wear heavier shoes to absorb the impact of rocks and branches underfoot, and to protect my soles from sharp stones. I carry water with me in a pack. Headphones and sunglasses just get in the way – so my apprehension of the world is unfiltered.

  Even after weeks of fine weather there’s plenty of mud, and on most of my summer runs I worry about snakes, mistaking sticks for scaly bodies and birds rustling in the undergrowth for slithering. One summer, the cicadas were so loud I could ba
rely hear the padding of my feet. I sometimes fret about being alone in the bush and pursued by anonymous assailants; if warnings circulate about women running without a chaperone in city parks, there are even more alerts about lonely national parks. But mostly, I worry about falling over. There’s poor mobile phone reception along the track, so if I fell and twisted my ankle or tore the skin from my calves, I’d have to figure out my own escape route.

  I return home covered in mud, my body salt-sticky with dried sweat rills. Leaves and twigs tangle knots into my hair, and the stray branches that lash my calves and exposed arms leave scratches and sometimes bruises. If it’s been particularly wet, I pull leeches from my ankles – a bloody finish to a run. The next morning, I wake up with the peculiar muscle strains from running up and down very steep hills and, often, aching feet.

  If the running changes me, my body also leaves marks on the tracks. I slip on the path and deepen the puddles. I pull down branches to help me stay balanced, and strew rocks and leaf litter with my feet. When I kick a branch heavy with blossoms, I tell myself I’m helping to spread the pollen. I am slowly learning the names of the plants, and one day I hope the flora will be as familiar to me as the cottage garden plants that my mother loved so much. I look out for tiny native orchids, dainty as violets, and for flannel flowers. As winter hatches spring, bells hang from the heath, and the enormous Triffid heads of Gymea lilies open red metres above me. On my breaks, I cut through the trees to the spaces at the edge of the escarpment, and stretch my arms out to the ocean – a hundred metres below – like a figurehead, my ship the forest behind me.