NATAKI AND I (and Queenie) rolled into Clayton, New Mexico, at 4:02 p.m. on the eve of event number two in my search for the magic of the marathon. I note the exact time because it was a bit of a disappointment. Like many runners, I approach road trips with a marathon mind-set, setting time goals and going to great lengths (such as enduring extreme bladder discomfort) to achieve them, even keeping track of personal records for long drives I repeat often (Oakland to San Diego: six hours and forty minutes). During the 270-mile drive from Albuquerque, where we’d spent the previous night, I’d set an utterly arbitrary goal of reaching our destination by four o’clock sharp, and it pained me to miss by two minutes.
Clayton is a hardscrabble high-plains whistle-stop whose best days as a livestock shipping center are long behind it. Every second restaurant we passed on our final approach to the Kokopelli Lodge had a “Help Wanted” sign posted outside. I did not actually see tumbleweeds blow across the road, but I pictured them.
The lobby of the Kokopelli featured the rustic southwestern interior design style I had expected and vaguely hoped for. In keeping with this aesthetic, the man behind the reception desk spoke in a basso cowboy drawl that sounded uncannily similar to the voice of Sam Elliott. As he looked up my reservation on the computer, I asked the gentleman (who looked absolutely nothing like Sam Elliott) for a noon checkout.
“A lot of people have been asking for those today,” he said as though remarking on an unseasonal turn in the weather.
It was within my power to explain the anomaly, but I chose not to, confident of the innkeeper’s indifference to the fact that his hotel was infested with runners, my fellow participants in the next day’s Dust Bowl Marathon, who, like me, would be unable to complete the race, return to the hotel, clean up, and clear out before the standard 11:00 A.M. checkout time. My stomach fluttered reflexively at the thought of all these as-yet-unseen rivals, but then I remembered that I had no intention of actually trying to defeat them.
The official name of the race, actually, was Dust Bowl Series Marathon #5, the number denoting its position as the final event in a five-day series that passes through the states most affected by the great drought of the 1930s. A majority of participants do all five. Knowing this, I felt sheepish about dropping in for just one, and the last one at that. Staged annually, the series is organized by a New Mexico–based outfit called Mainly Marathons, which caters to serial marathoners—men and women who try to run marathons in as many states or countries as possible or who just try to run as many marathons as possible wherever. I had no such goal, but my present mission would be incomplete, I believed, if I did not expose myself to this flowering subculture within the broader marathon community. I was especially keen to meet the series’ marquee entrant, Jim Simpson, a seventy-five-year-old Californian who had completed more than 1,660 official marathons and had run as many as 181 in a single year.
After settling into our room, Nataki and I went out for an early dinner at the Rabbit Ear Café, a restaurant specializing in the local cuisine. The words “Help Wanted” scrolled by on an electric billboard outside. Inside we encountered a big square dining room occupied by seven or eight even earlier eaters, four of whom I pegged immediately as runners, tipped off by their T-shirts, caps, and footwear. A pair of hatted old-timers sat together near the back, empty plates between them. Two younger runners sat alone at adjacent tables near the one Nataki and I had taken. As we studied our menus, the old-timers stood and began to make their way toward the exit, but when they passed between the younger guys and recognized their kind, they paused for a quick chat.
In the name of research, I eavesdropped. The conversation began with an exchange of marathon credentials that sounded casual enough, but my inner ethnographer recognized it as a serious ritual effort to establish relative status, as when two tech guys meet for the first time.
“Once I got my fiftieth state,” said one of the old-timers, “I needed another goal, so I decided to do fifty in one year.”
The younger guys, who were facing me, exchanged looks that said, Can you top that? No? Me neither.
“I’m doing half marathons, though, not marathons,” the old-timer confessed. “They’re more manageable.”
He might as well have said he was doing 5Ks. The younger guys could not conceal their smiles, nor did they really try.
Back at the hotel, the day’s exertions caught up with me suddenly, and I scotched my plan to scout the race venue at Clayton Lake State Park. It seemed a reasonable decision at the time. Siri had assured me the park lay just 1.2 miles from the hotel, and in all likelihood there would be a veritable motorcade of runners heading that way from the hotel in the morning. But when I crept out of the room at 5:15 A.M., careful not to disturb a still-sleeping Nataki, I found the parking lot emptied of every vehicle but mine. Neither did Clayton Lake State Park lie 1.2 miles from the Kokopelli Lodge. Siri’s directions led me into a literal ditch, in which stood a road sign that read, “Clayton Lake 12 Miles,” like some kind of satellite-assisted practical joke. Tossing my phone into the backseat, I sped on through the dark, determined to catch up to others seeking the same destination, but the road was as desolate as Neptune. Only after I turned onto the park’s access road did I spy taillights ahead and relax.
A man wearing a reflective vest and brandishing an industrial-size flashlight pointed me to a parking area where another man, sporting a Merlin beard, guided me to an open spot. As he backpedaled in front of me I noticed that he walked with a pronounced limp. My immediate assumption was that he had acquired it by running too many marathons.
I stepped out of the Fun Mobile into refrigerator-temperature air and hustled toward the staging area, having glimpsed it on the way in. Ahead of me I saw the wavering lights of headlamps moving right to left through the blackness. Only then did I remember that the race organizer had offered slower runners the option to start at five thirty. This explained the empty parking lot at the hotel. I had dismissed the early-start option as masochistic. Was I the only one?
After several minutes of humping I stepped into a lighted space where I found hot food and drinks set out on large folding tables and a second table for check-in. I gave my name to one of the women stationed there and received in return my number bib and a finisher’s medal. Seeing my puzzled expression, she explained, “You get the medal now. When you finish, you get this.” This was a little brass New Mexico state flag hanging from an earring-style hook. She inserted the hook through an eye at the bottom of the medal and dangled it in front of me in the manner of a QVC host demonstrating product features. I made sounds of approval, but in truth the thing looked absurdly incomplete, like a one-trophy trophy case. With all five state flags, though, it would have looked really cool.
I walked back to the car to keep warm and kill time. At 6:20, ten minutes before the “late” start time, I reemerged and began to strip off my outer layer, reluctantly. The guy with the Merlin beard, still on parking duty, looked me up and down and spoke.
“What are you doing today?” he asked.
“I’m doing the marathon,” I said. There were half-marathon and 5K options on the menu as well.
“How many do you have?”
“I don’t really know,” I said. “Thirty, maybe, thirty-two. Almost all of them have been in California.”
Merlin looked at me queerly—confounded by the notion of a person who ran lots of marathons without counting them.
“Are you injured?” I asked, pointing at his gimpy knee.
“It’s a little stiff,” he said, reaching for it. “I’m just doing the 5K today.”
Someone else in my place might have pointed out that even walking 3.1 miles in his condition was probably a bad idea. I did not. Either Merlin knew this already and didn’t care or he would never know.
Picking up on my reference to California, my new friend told me a longwinded story about a marathon he had run on the rim of the volcano at Mt. Shasta. I made a show of checking my watch. Seven minutes to start time. Merlin took the hint and let me go.
When I returned to the staging area, Clint Burleson, the founder and director of Mainly Marathons, was halfway through his prerace announcements. Concerned that I might have missed some important information, I concentrated intently on his voice, trying to orient myself. The first phrase I caught was “dinosaur tracks.” I kept listening, and it soon became evident that we were being encouraged to stray from the official racecourse at a certain point for the purpose of checking out a set of dinosaur tracks that were a featured attraction at Clayton Lake State Park. I wondered what the event’s insurer would think of this idea.
Clint concluded his announcements with a series of shout-outs to runners who were achieving milestones (“Vincent Ma, who’s out on the course already, is doing his one hundredth event with us!”), to long-serving staff members (“George Rose, who will lead you out on his bike, has been with us since the beginning!”), and finally to runners celebrating birthdays. He then ushered us behind a long divot in the dirt that appeared to have been made with the heel of a boot and sent us off like a pack of third-graders with the words, “On your mark.… Get set.… Go!”
The rest of the racecourse was as eccentric as the start. Shaped like a flattened figure eight, it had turnaround points at both ends and was a mere five kilometers in length. I and my fellow marathoners would complete eight and a half laps, snatching a wrist band (actually just a rubber band) off a table each time we passed through the staging area at the figure-eight’s center to keep from losing count. We started out on what Clint had described as the Camp Loop because it penetrated the park’s camping areas. The field quickly separated into pairs and small groups, becoming a sort of movable mixer. I took part fully in the mingling, trading marathon credentials with a series of strangers, all of whom were running their fifth marathon or half marathon in as many days.
It was during lap two that the genius of Clint Burleson’s compact course design became apparent, as I met again—and exchanged greetings, high-fives, and words of encouragement with—the folks I’d met in lap one. But when a runner I hadn’t yet spoken to called out, “Hi, Matt!” I had a moment of confusion. My best guess was that he recognized me from the cover of one of my books. Then another total stranger hailed me by name, and another. I was beginning to feel like a real big shot when a less self-flattering explanation came to me. Glancing down at my bib, I saw that, sure enough, my first name had been hand-printed below my number.
As I made my third foray through the Dam Loop (so named because it crossed a dam on the west end of the lake), I met a pair of walkers, both elderly and both dressed in red and black. I recognized them from my Internet sleuthing as the aforementioned Jim Simpson, who holds the distinction of being the first American to complete more than 1,000 marathons, and Betty Wailes, also an accomplished serial marathoner and Jim’s “sweetheart” (as he referred to her in interviews). I hotfooted it to the turnaround at the far end of the loop and caught the couple from behind. When I drew even with them I slowed to their pace and introduced myself.
“Do you mind if I visit with you for a few minutes?” I asked.
“I’ve got all day,” Jim said in a pleasing accent that reminded me of… who was it?
“How are you holding up?” I asked.
Jim and Betty had already collected four flags for their finisher’s medal and were earning their fifth with a mix of walking and running.
“Nothing to it,” Jim said. (Jimmy Carter! That’s who he sounded like!) “As you can see, we’re not going for speed. It’s all about conserving energy. Imagine waking up on January 1 and knowing you have one hundred or two hundred marathons ahead of you that year. You want to get to the other end in one piece. That’s your goal: not to run fast but to just get through it.”
Over the next mile and a half, I learned enough about Jim to have written his Wikipedia page, had I been so inclined. He grew up “dirt poor” on a small farm in Douglasville, Georgia (which explained the Carteresque accent). After high school, he joined the navy and was shipped to San Diego for boot camp, put in his four years of service, and then went back to civilian life, finding work in Huntington Beach, California, as a plastic injection mold maker. The next twenty years of Jim’s life were what every American is supposed to want: he got married, bought a house, raised a couple of kids, saved money, and retired at age forty-three. What I most desired to know, though, was how Jim had managed to leap from the utterly typical existence he described to his present oddball lifestyle of crisscrossing the continent year-round in a camper, sleeping in Walmart parking lots, and running three or four marathons a week—and also what the heck he got out of it.
“It’s just something to do,” he said, deadpan. “We all have to have something to pass the time when we retire. For the first two days that I was retired I watched Get Smart on daytime TV. I figured, ‘There’s got to be something better than this.’ So I started a little training program. I ran three miles three days a week. I did that for a little over a year. One Saturday, I took the family to see a movie and they had an entry form for a 5K at the ticket counter. My son and I ran it and had a good time. A little later, we started running 5Ks and 10Ks regularly and worked up to the half marathon.”
“Ah, the slippery slope,” I interjected.
“My first marathon was Los Angeles in 1988,” Jim continued. “Six months later, I ran the Portland Marathon. So I did two that first year. It took me ten years to do the first one hundred marathons. That seems kind of quaint nowadays, when people run a hundred in one year.”
Having also learned from my Internet sleuthing that Jim and his wife were divorced in 1998, which was the very year his rate of marathon participation exploded, I asked (rather indelicately) whether his running had been the cause of the split.
“We just found that we were different people,” he said. “I wanted to go out and run marathons, climb mountains, and jump out of airplanes, and she was more of a homebody. She wouldn’t have minded going to Las Vegas every weekend. We just grew apart. So we decided to go our separate ways and be friends and it worked out. On holidays we still got together with all the kids and her new husband and we were like one big happy family.”
Although divorce freed Jim to run as many marathons as he pleased, this freedom came at a price. As much as he enjoyed the quixotic way of living he’d chosen, there was an empty space at the center of it. At races, Jim often saw couples holding hands and hugging each other to keep warm before the start, and his stomach twisted in envy.
What Jim did not know was that the older women on the serial marathoning circuit considered him a prime catch. At the 2009 Martian Marathon in Dearborn, Michigan, a group of these women—a group that included Betty Wailes—voted him the nicest person they knew during a late-night gossip session. In the morning, Betty informed Jim of the flattering designation that had been bestowed upon him while he slept, but Jim was a little slow on the romantic uptake and did not immediately recognize the flirtation for what it was. Even so, a seed was planted.
Jim and Betty continued to bump into each other often at events, yet more than three years passed before Jim worked up the courage to make a move. It happened finally at the 2013 Potomac River Run Marathon, where Jim arrived with a plan—an odd one, but a plan all the same. The race offered two separate start lines, one in the District of Columbia and the other in Maryland. Jim, who had chosen the DC start, asked a mutual friend to tell Betty, who had chosen the Maryland start, that he wanted to talk to her when the two courses merged. Betty was understandably intrigued, but, when they met up, all he did was complain about how cold his hands were.
“Will you hold my hand?” he asked.
Betty took Jim’s right hand in her left.
“Boy, it is cold!” she exclaimed.
Betty was still holding Jim’s hand when the pair came upon an aid station staffed by a couple of women of roughly her own age.
“How cute!” one of them said. “They’re holding hands!”
Betty’s heart began to thrash inside her chest. Had she and Jim just become a couple without her even realizing it? The next moment would reveal the answer—and might also determine the course of the rest of her life. If Jim withdrew his hand in embarrassment, as she feared he would, then the nicest person she knew would remain nothing more to her than an acquaintance with a shared hobby. But if—
Jim squeezed Betty’s hand tighter, and they’ve been together ever since, an inseparable fixture on the circuit.
“Finally,” Jim said to me, “after three and a half years of keeping my eye on Betty, I found somebody to fall in love with. We are compatible in every way you can think of. We are so fortunate to have found each other and to be so much in love and to be able to participate together in what we both love to do.”
Betty cast a tender look at her boyfriend as he spoke these words. I swallowed my last question, said farewell to the couple, and resumed running, pulling out my phone and FaceTiming Nataki as I went.
“Good morning!” she answered, projecting a bright morning smile that quickly turned into a confused squint. “Wait—are you still running?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve got a little ways to go. But I wanted to tell you about these people I just met.” And so I did.
“Aw, that’s beautiful!” Nataki said when I finished the story, as I’d known she would. Happy older couples give us hope.
I ran the next several miles alone, absorbing impressions. Several runners, I noticed, were wearing shirts, hats, and jackets branded with the Marathon Maniacs logo. Founded in 2003 as a club for serial marathoners, Maniacs doesn’t admit just anyone. I had qualified for a bronze-level membership by completing three marathons and a fifty-mile ultramarathon in the span of thirty-eight days the prior year. To attain the highest level, titanium, a runner must complete fifty-two or more marathons in a single year; thirty or more marathons in any combination of thirty American states, Canadian provinces, or other countries in one year; or marathons in twenty or more countries in the same time span. Visitors to the club’s website are presented with a quiz they can use to determine whether they are “addicted to running marathons,” hence likely to feel at home as members. “When asked about your racing from non running [sic] people,” goes a typical question, “do you find yourself talking with great passion to the point that the person that asked the question regrets ever asking?”
On the Camp Loop section of my fourth lap, I passed two men, one short, the other tall, engrossed in conversation. I could tell they had just met because they were exchanging credentials.
“I have a record,” I heard the short one say to the tall one in a Spanish-speaker’s accent.
“You have a record?” echoed the tall one, shouting instead of enunciating.
“In Guatemala, not here,” the short one hedged.
“What is it?” asked the tall one encouragingly.
“Thirty marathons in one year,” the short one confessed.
“Wow, that’s good!” said the tall one, his tone now that of a parent praising a child’s inscrutable finger painting.
“Not really,” the short one said, wishing he’d never brought up the whole record thing.
Halfway through lap five, having just slipped a ninth rubber band onto my forearm, I was addressed by a hippie-looking race staffer standing behind a kind of mini–buffet table.
“Come again?” I said, still running.
“I said, ‘Would you like a hotdog?’” he repeated, lifting the lid off a warming tray that contained a jumble of dogs in buns, cut into thirds.
Hell, no! I thought. I find hotdogs repulsive and hadn’t eaten one in ages. But then I caught a whiff of the steaming wieners and my stomach overruled. I captured one, buried it in mustard and diced red onions, and ate it on the fly. It was freaking delicious.
Approaching seventeen miles, I caught up with Clint Burleson, who speed-walks most of his own events. As I’d done already with Jim Simpson, I slowed down, introduced myself, and requested an interview.
“Oh, okay!” Clint said good-naturedly. “Sure!”
“So, what’s your story?” I asked. “The running version, I mean.”
“Let’s see,” he began, searching his brain. “I ran my first marathon in 1982…”
A second marathon soon followed, and a third, and so on. By the mid-1990s, Clint was on a mission to run a marathon in every state, a rarer but by no means unheard-of ambition in those days. Upon retiring from his job as a computer science professor at New Mexico’s Alamogordo Community College in 2008, Clint, then fifty-seven, went all in, driving east to knock out seven states in seven weeks. Having spent the bulk of this period waiting around between Sundays and wasting money, he returned home with an idea for a business, one that would enable folks like him to run a lot of marathons in a lot of different states more efficiently. After all, there was no law against staging a marathon on a Wednesday.
Five years later, the Dust Bowl Marathon Series was born. Clint reckoned he needed to attract twenty to twenty-five runners to each event of the five-state, five-day series to make it work. He got more than a hundred.
“And it just kind of grew from there,” he told me.
By the time I met Clint, Mainly Marathons was rapidly becoming the Starbucks of event organizers in the serial marathoning space, with plans to host eighty events in 2018, covering all fifty states.
“Is there a certain type of customer you tend to attract?” I asked him.
“Well, I think that people who are doing lots of long-distance running probably have an addictive personality,” he said. “And I’m not the only one who has said that. This conversation happens a lot. If these people weren’t addicted to running, they might be addicted to something not so good for them.”
“What do you get out of this?” I asked, repeating a question I’d asked Jim Simpson earlier.
“I like these people,” Clint said. “They’re the best customers you could possibly have. Runners are a good bunch. I mean, sure, they’re out here to abuse themselves, but the ones we get like to have a good time. We’ve got people who follow us for every series, so we’re seeing our friends over and over. If my wife were here she would tell you she’d like to spend a little more time at home. We’ll be on the road probably one hundred and thirty days this year. But when we get a little break, I start missing these folks. It’s a pretty good life.”
I thanked Clint for his time and forged on, full of thought. Can people really be addicted to something as challenging and uncomfortable as running marathons? I wondered. The answer to this question was all around me—and within me too, for here I was running eight marathons in eight weeks.
Too much is made of human laziness. Yes, we are lazy. That’s why 75 percent of us don’t exercise at all. But we’re also not lazy. That’s how we peopled every habitable inch of the planet within 85,000 years of first venturing out of Africa and how we landed on the moon a mere 15,000 years after that. George Mallory famously said that he climbed Mt. Everest “because it’s there.” It would have been more accurate of him to say he climbed the mountain because he’s human. There is an instinct within us—as irresistible as our instinct to take the path of least resistance—to set and achieve goals, to complete tasks, to test our limits and discover what we are capable of. A person can become addicted to anything that brings pleasure, and achievement is one of life’s most transcendent pleasures, because it is attainable only by passing through pain and struggle, pleasure’s antipodes. The marathon is a Mt. Everest for everyone—a healthy challenge, universally respected, that rewards its conqueror with a sense of earned pride that, on the spectrum of life’s satisfactions, falls somewhere between splitting the last log in a pile of cordwood and being the first human to set foot on the moon.
My reflections on this aspect of the marathon’s magic were interrupted here by an abrupt change in the weather. Clouds rolled in from the west and a ferocious wind kicked up. Many of the runners I had befriended in earlier laps began to look a tad miserable. Within another thirty minutes, only two or three other participants were still running; the rest had been reduced to the Jim Simpson Shuffle. More than ever, I felt like a cheater for not having run four marathons in the preceding four days.
A stop sign—a real one, propped against a sawhorse in front of the rubber band table—marked the finish. The moment I crossed it a familiar bliss rose up inside me. I felt expansive and all-loving, as after a third glass of wine. I approached the hotdog guy, pumped his arm as though he had just completed a marathon, and overpraised his frankfurters. Another race staffer then came up to me, and, despite the fact that I’d had no prior interaction with him, I liked him very much.
“Are you done?” he asked.
“Huh?” I said. “Oh, yes. Just finished.”
“Well, you need to tell them,” he said, pointing at a pair of women who sat with clipboards and papers spread before them on a folding table.
I did as instructed. One of the two women looked at my race number, then looked at her watch, and wrote “3:56:40” next to my name on the official results sheet. I looked at my own watch, which I’d stopped back at the stop sign, and saw 3:55:25. Whatever.
Moving on, I came to a table laden with munchies, and all of a sudden there was nothing I wanted more than to eat all of them. Like a broke stoner crashing a picnic I wolfed down apple slices, hardboiled eggs, and small squares of PB&J on raisin bread as the ladies who’d prepared the spread congratulated me on my appetite.
At the next table, I stopped to thank two more race workers, Shaquita and Brenda, for keeping me well supplied with Gatorade and repartee all morning. I felt a mad urge to tell them that my wife was black just like them, as if this created some sort of soul bond between me and all black women, but I managed to resist it, thank goodness, channeling my euphoria instead into one last bit of banter.
“You’re all bundled up,” I said, pointing at their long coats. “Is it cold or something?”
“You’ll find out in a minute,” Shaquita retorted.
On my way back to the Fun Mobile I encountered my dear, dear blood brother Merlin, whose real name, I now learned, was Emery. I asked for permission to take his picture, and he nodded like someone who got this sort of request all the time. While I set up my phone, Emery removed his jacket and adopted what looked at first like some kind of gangsta pose, but when I had him in focus I saw he was just pointing at a string of letters on the chest of his club shirt: SWFTR.
“It stands for Southwest Fun Time Runners,” he said. “Fun is our middle name.”
“Literally!” I said, like an idiot.
Continuing toward the car (and indeed beginning to feel rather chilly), I remembered something Josh had told me seven days earlier, after we finished the Modesto Marathon.
“I’ve been high all day,” he confided in a tone of spaced-out wonder. “Not just in a good mood. High.”
When Josh crept downstairs the next morning, Nataki asked him how he was feeling. She’d had to help me out of bed more than once on the day after a marathon and was prepared to fetch the Advil bottle if necessary.
“Still high,” he said.
“I meant your body,” Nataki said, amused.
That’s how I felt as I settled gingerly into the driver’s seat, my thirty-second marathon (give or take) having induced the same state of lucid insobriety as Josh’s second marathon. I started the engine, cranked up the heat, and laughed, realizing I couldn’t wait for the next one.