IT’S EASY TO spot the first-timers at the Boston Marathon Health and Fitness Expo. They’re the giddy ones jabbering nonstop at their friends and family members as they flounce across the crowded floor of the Hynes Convention Center, punctuating their manic speech with overloud laughter at things both funny and unfunny like teenage girls meeting their favorite pop star. Or else they’re the awestruck ones drifting about dazedly in wide-eyed, reverent silence like pilgrims at a holy site.
I could tell Rome (short for Romadel) was a first-timer the moment I laid eyes on him. He represented the second, awestruck type. Our meeting occurred two days before the big race at a booth where I was signing books and where Rome, passing by after collecting his race bag and recognizing me, stopped to introduce himself. Business was slow, so we were able to chat for a while, and I got to hear a good bit of Rome’s story.
Some runners qualify for Boston on their first attempt. Others need a few tries. It took Rome twenty years to punch his ticket to the Mecca of running. His first marathon was the 1996 Los Angeles Marathon, which he ran as a bandit on zero training after hearing a coworker brag about her runner boyfriend, an innocent expression of amorous pride that had the unintended effect of compelling Rome to prove that running 26.2 miles was no big deal.
On race day, Rome made it all of 1.5 miles before he hit the skids and staggered into a donut shop to refuel. It’s a wonder he got even that far: at five foot two, Rome weighed 180 pounds and he smoked the occasional cigarette to boot. After demolishing a Boston cream kismet, he returned to the racecourse and pressed on. Hours later, most of the other racers having finished the race and gone home, an angel appeared to Rome in the form of Flo from Good Times and walked him to the finish line. Just before he got there, however, he stopped.
“What’s wrong?” Flo asked.
“I can’t cross,” Rome said. “I’m a bandit.”
“Wait here,” he was told.
Flo—who in fact was neither a real angel nor Flo from Good Times but just another runner—crossed the finish line on her own, unpinned her number bib, and returned with it to Rome, who then completed his first marathon. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The race had started at seven in the morning.
The type of person who will run a marathon on zero training is also the type of person who, after suffering through the event for eight hours, will come back for more. By 2004, Rome had completed ten marathons and four Ironmans. But though he’d gotten a lot faster, he hadn’t yet met the Boston Marathon qualifying standard for his age group, and that bothered him—a lot. For reasons he did not yet fully understand, Rome still needed to prove to himself whatever it was he’d really been trying to prove when he jumped into his first marathon without preparation, and making it to Boston seemed like the way to do it.
A lieutenant commander in the US Navy, Rome was sent to war the following year. To deal with the stress of his deployment, he started smoking again. Then he quit training. Before long he was back up to his pre-running weight.
In 2014, now forty-seven years old, Rome launched a comeback, but this time he took a different approach. Having done some soul searching during his time overseas, Rome realized the reason he’d failed to achieve his goal in the past was fear—specifically fear of failure, which led him to create excuses for falling short, ensuring he did fall short. Rome’s first marathon, though impressive in its way, had created a self-limiting paradigm for everything that followed. While he may not have ever again attempted to run 26.2 miles on zero training, he still insisted on winging his workouts, never sticking to any plan. And if he no longer fueled his running with Boston cream kismets, his overall diet remained a C+, maybe a B−. Determined not to repeat these mistakes in his second go-around, Rome hired a coach and a nutritionist, and he did everything they asked him to, right down to the very last detail, as he readied for the 2016 Rocket City Marathon.
Twenty miles into that race, Rome was on pace to qualify for Boston at long last when his calves cramped up—a terrific excuse to fail yet again.
“Before, I would have quit,” he told me. “But this time I didn’t.”
Rome gutted out the final miles and just squeaked under the time he needed to hit to stand where he now stood.
“What does running the Boston Marathon mean to you?” I asked him, repeating a question I’d posed to Josh before we ran the Modesto Marathon together four weeks back.
Rome parted his lips to answer but no words came out. Instead his eyes filled and his lower lip trembled. Mouthing the word sorry, he raised an index finger to signal “Give me a minute” and dropped his chin to his chest.
“I’ve always had a complex about being a shorter guy,” he said eventually. “Making it to Boston validated that I could be as good as anybody else—that I was a real runner despite being five foot two.”
Growing up in the first percentile for height in suburban Seattle had been difficult for Rome in the customary ways: he was overlooked by the prettier girls, challenged by the tougher guys, and teased by friends and enemies alike. Although he loved physical competition, he felt his stature prevented him from being taken seriously as an athlete at sports-crazy John F. Kennedy High School. By the time he took up running as an adult, Rome had internalized these judgments, causing him to doubt his own ability to achieve goals like Boston qualification. When he did qualify, he performed a little research and learned that he was the first male graduate of JFK High ever to do so.
“Making it to Boston validated for me that I could be as good as anybody else,” Rome told me. “I know it sounds silly, but I’ve been kind of emotional ever since I picked up my race number.”
I told Rome this didn’t sound silly to me at all.
The next morning I took the T from Somerville to downtown Boston. My starting point was a house on Pembroke Street where Nataki and Queenie and I were staying, a house belonging to none other than Dori, our old family friend, who had put me up before both of my prior Boston Marathons and whom Nataki had not seen since Dori came to California for a party we threw on our fifth wedding anniversary. My destination was a retail space on Newbury Street that had been cleared out to serve as the meeting place for a group run organized by Black Roses NYC, a New York City running club. Stage lights and a green screen had been set up against one wall for photos and videos. Hip-hop music pulsed from a DJ station at the back. A racial rainbow of young harriers was arrayed about the room, shedding outer layers, chatting in small groups, stretching.
I found myself wishing Nataki were with me to witness this refreshing diversity, but she had stayed behind to have her hair braided at an African salon she’d discovered in Dori’s neighbor hood. Gone were the days when Nataki spent two, sometimes three hours getting ready for a night on the town, but gone too, thankfully, were the days when she wore the same musty frock for a week straight and sometimes forgot to brush her teeth until I commented on her breath. Her current approach to style and grooming split the difference between these past extremes, fake eyelashes one day, leopard-print satin pajamas at noon the next—whatever felt right.
For Nataki’s fortieth birthday I paid a photographer friend to blow up and box frame a selection of images from one of her old photo shoots, which I then hung in a cool geometric pattern on a wall in one of our guest bedrooms, my way of acknowledging her grief over the loss of the physical beauty captured in those pictures. Yet Nataki had never been one to take excessive pride in her looks. Even at the height of her radiance, whenever someone spoke to Nataki critically of another woman’s appearance, she would leap to that person’s defense, pointing out that with a little more attention to her hair and a dress that better flattered her figure (or whatever), she would look quite nice indeed, and Nataki applied this same attitude to herself after her figure filled out and she was no longer asked to show ID when she bought beer for me. “Work with what you got,” she often said.
A week or two before we left for our trip, a package arrived on our doorstep, and twenty minutes later Nataki appeared in the doorway to my office modeling an elegant cream-colored pantsuit with flared legs in size 22, pirouetting with her arms spread wide as she asked me what I thought, her girlish smile proof she’d already made up her own mind about the garment. It occurred to me then—not for the first time—that if life is going to hit you with the double-whammy of a major mood disorder and the sledgehammer drugs used to treat it, it sure helps to have been born an old soul.
After a quick tour of the room, I spotted the leader of the Black Roses, Knox Robinson, a handsome forty-two-year-old with a neatly trimmed Afro and matching beard and the bird-boned body of a high-level distance runner, and greeted him with a hearty bro hug.
“Glad you made it,” Knox said, already half-distracted by the next person wanting his attention.
“Wouldn’t have missed it,” I said.
I had known Knox for all of five days, having first met him when Nataki and I passed through the Big Apple on our way north from Virginia. A past editor in chief of the music magazine Fader and a former NCAA Division I track and field athlete, Knox occupied a singular position in the running community at the intersection of hip-hop culture and the running cognoscenti. In interviews, he quoted the likes of Amiri Baraka and Hunter S. Thompson without ever coming off as pretentious. Confident he had a unique perspective to offer on the magic of the marathon, I’d made sure to include an encounter with Black Roses NYC in my travels.
It was midafternoon on the Tuesday before Boston when the Fun Mobile rolled into Brooklyn. After settling my road-weary wife and pet into a hotel that compromised between the locally incompatible virtues of affordability and tolerability, I called Knox to confirm an arrangement I’d made with him previously to drop in on the club’s weekly track workout on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He gave me some sketchy-sounding directions to a place that turned out to be a 330-yard cinder oval with a hummock at one end. It was located right under the Williamsburg Bridge, thrumming then with rush-hour traffic, so that all conversation below had to be shouted, as in a crowded bar. It wasn’t an actual running track, but it served well enough as a venue for speed work and also, I soon discovered, as a symbol of the Black Roses’ scrappy approach to running.
About two dozen runners showed up for the workout. They were a perfect cross section of the city, an even mix of blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos, and the gender balance was pretty good too, though I was by far the oldest person present. The next-oldest, Knox himself, convened the evening’s session with some announcements.
“So, the author of The Endurance Diet is with us tonight,” he said by way of introducing me. “He’s here to fat-shame those of you who have been slacking on your food choices.”
I shook my head in denial as the runners sized me up. Knox quickly moved on, delivering individual shout-outs to club members who were racing Boston in six days. I confess I was more than a little surprised by the number, as these folks, by and large, did not have the look of the prototypical Boston Marathon qualifier. There were tattoos everywhere, alternative hairstyles, clothes not designed for running being used for running. I liked it.
“Let’s see, have I missed anyone?” Knox said.
A tall white guy at the back of the group raised his right arm.
“Oh, right, Mackay!” Knox said.
Everyone clapped for him.
“Mackay’s visa’s running out in a few weeks,” Knox continued, “so he’s checking a few things off his bucket list before we Trump him the fuck back to Syria!”
I learned later in the evening that Mackay was Australian by birth, lived in England, and had never been to Syria.
Knox concluded his announcements with an overview of the workout. We were to run six hard laps around the track (such as it was) with ninety-second standing recoveries between laps. These would be followed by a ten-minute tempo segment and finally a set of four 30-second strides. It wasn’t the toughest workout ever drawn up, but it made me nervous, saddled as I was with a balky left Achilles that raised hell whenever I subjected it to speed work too abruptly—and I hadn’t run faster than marathon pace in months.
We warmed up with seven or eight easy laps. I fell into rhythm with a guy named José, who had started running as a way to lose weight. Two years later, getting rid of flab was his last concern. “I just want to get faster,” he told me more than once as we ran in circles together.
Out of consideration for my Achilles, I ran the first interval in third gear, taking Knox’s instruction to “ease into” the session a touch further than he’d intended. Ahead of me the younger guys tore through the circuit like greyhounds. A leggy African American woman in booty shorts and a bra top surged past me just before the line, her competitive vibes palpable.
After the second lap, Knox ordered us to “start getting after it.” My Achilles was already grumbling, but otherwise I felt good, my lower extremities showing more bounce than I would have expected from them given the one-sidedness of my recent training. I completed the interval ahead of Ms. Booty Shorts. Barely.
While we recovered from the third lap, openmouthed, hands on hips, Knox offered fresh commands.
“I don’t want any sandbagging on this next one,” he warned. “You’re only cheating yourself if you do. The workout won’t serve its purpose, and you’ll have no one but yourself to blame.”
“Man, what a hardass!” I stage-whispered at Jeb, a club member who had recently run the Tokyo Marathon. Jeb laughed politely, but his eyes said it was no joke.
During a short break between the interval and tempo portions of the workout, José took me aside and pointed at various other members of the group.
“He’s run 2:42,” José said, referring to the marathon time of the runner who had won all the intervals. “That dude next to him has run 2:45. We have another guy who’s run 2:45, but he’s not here tonight. Sam there has run 3:04. And, of course, Knox has run 2:36.”
My eyes lingered on Sam. I would not have pegged him as a three-hour marathoner. He looked to me more like a sprinter or a running back or even a boxer. After the workout, I spoke to Sam and learned that he had been a sprinter in high school, a football player in college, and a middleweight boxer after college. Now, like his teammates, he just wanted to get faster.
We moved outside the park for the next part of the workout. Huddled together on the sidewalk, Knox and his charges argued back and forth for several minutes about whether to go north or south. I still had no idea which way I was supposed to run when Knox gave the command to start and everyone else went north, so I followed.
I got a chance to talk to Knox one on one after it was all over, as we walked together toward his car and my subway stop.
“So, what did you think?” he asked.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but the whole time I was out there I kept thinking about those sports movies like Mighty Ducks where an unconventional coach brings together a motley band of misfit athletes and turns them into champions. There’s a Bad News Bears quality to your group—serious but not too serious. Where does that come from?”
“No offense taken,” Knox said. “When I created Black Roses five years ago, it was to address what I perceived as a dearth of information in the urban running community about how to approach performance. People thought it was cool to stay out all night and then run a marathon the next morning, or to jump in a race with no preparation just to say they did it. As everyone knows, when you run a marathon, and you have a tough one, you start to reflect and ask questions, like, ‘What could I have done better?’ ‘What are the elements of success?’ ‘How do you put together a good race?’ Marathons are addictive because they’re logistical challenges. You try to figure out how to make it right. ‘If I had only fueled correctly.’ ‘If I had only paced properly.’ ‘If I had only had a little more preparation.’”
I nodded along as Knox spoke, thinking back on my own long struggle to solve the logistical challenges of the marathon distance.
“I had kept my running to myself up to that point,” Knox continued. “People thought I was just a cool guy in our group who hung out with rappers at Fashion Week in Paris. But other runners knew I could run, and they would come to me with questions, looking for help. Eventually, I decided I wanted to have a more codified way of delivering whatever insights I had gleaned. My goal was to share these elite-level tools for unlocking performance.”
I recalled these words four days later when I met Rome at the Boston Marathon expo. If Rome’s personal mission was to prove he could be a “real runner,” as he put it, despite being short, then Knox, it seemed, was on a mission to convince young urbanites that they, too, could be real runners regardless of where they came from, how they spoke, or what they wore.
At my second encounter with Black Roses NYC, in Boston, I saw a mix of new and familiar faces. Among the latter was Nadia, a South African spitfire with the physique of a gymnast, diminutive and powerful. When Knox had named her as one of the club’s first-time Boston qualifiers back in New York, Nadia had pogoed like a circus dog, shouting “Boing!” at the apex of each astonishingly high leap.
“Did you save any energy for tomorrow?” I asked her now.
“No!” she blurted defiantly, running in place with fast feet.
A piercing whistle silenced the room. Its source, Knox, took advantage of the hush to invite the gathering to follow him outside, where, on the front stoop of the building, he delivered a short speech that included another off-the-cuff jab at the current leader of the free world. A few group photos were taken, and the run began, the Black Roses swarming the streets with little regard for cars, pedestrians, or traffic lights.
In Boston, on the day before the marathon, running groups are as ubiquitous as mosquitos in Arkansas, but our crew stood out, attracting stares from fellow runners and civilians alike as we rumbled through the Back Bay. There was an aura of danger surrounding the charging horde, a vaguely piratical energy. Indeed, the Black Roses NYC flag, draped around the bare back of a sinewy young club member, could easily have been mistaken for the Jolly Roger from a distance. It was Easter Sunday, and as we passed by a long queue of stooped, silver-haired worshippers awaiting entry to a Catholic church, the flag-wearer bellowed, “Happy Easter, everybody!” in a tone that seemed somehow both reverent and irreverent.
The run ended at (where else?) the Black Rose, an Irish pub near Quincy Market. In New York, I had asked Knox about the origin of his club’s name.
“‘Black Roses’ is the title of a 1990s dancehall classic by Barrington Levy,” he said. “It’s about the rarest flower, a flower that you never find, that you never see. A lot of times, I’m with this group and I think of that line from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: ‘There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.’ Because these guys I’ve got running for me are crazy! They bring the idea of black roses to life.”
At a booth inside the Black Rose, I asked Knox one last question, one that had been on my mind since our first meeting.
“When I talked to you in New York,” I began, dropping my eyes to my phone to verify that it was recording, “you told me that you created Black Roses NYC because, in so many words, you wanted people in the urban running community to take running seriously—to take it all the way. Can I infer from this that you feel runners who don’t test their limits are missing out on something?”
Knox considered the question. “Yeah, I do feel kind of bad for the folks who don’t take the whole trip,” he said carefully. “Running has unfathomable riches to share. Someone who endeavors to put together the full modern runner’s tool kit and really understand the marathon, beyond just completing it and getting a finisher’s medal, ends up learning more, I think, about himself or herself and what it means to be human. That’s what those tools are for.”
Five hours later, the doorbell rang at Dori’s house, a tastefully maintained Victorian in which old and new are blended just right (quirky original colonial door locks balanced out by a modern kitchen) where Dori and Nataki were now preparing dinner while I blogged in the living room.
“It’s Mike!” I caroled, leaping from my seat and skipping toward the foyer like a kid whose favorite cousin has just arrived for a sleepover.
I flung open the door and there he was: my high school best friend and former daily running partner, a man I’d last seen seven years before, when I ran my first Boston Marathon, and had last run with sixteen years before, in Central Park, on the eve of his wedding. Mike had given up competitive running at the same time as me, quitting the Oyster River High School track team in a show of solidarity after Coach Bronson booted me for gross insubordination. From there we went in very different directions with our running, Mike moving on to other athletic interests as I returned to the sport in a big way in my late twenties. A short stint of competitive lumberjacking at the University of New Hampshire was followed by a couple of seasons of rowing at the University of Rochester. Then came a mountain biking phase in San Francisco and an ongoing love affair with downhill skiing, which he shared with his wife, Alison, and their four children in (as fate would have it) Hanover, New Hampshire. Mike’s own running comeback began after my second tilt at Boston in 2016, which had somehow inspired my friend to try to qualify. And now here he was, weighing fifteen pounds less than he had the last time I’d set eyes on him.
“You look like a real runner!” I said, ushering him in.
A slight yet noticeable flinch preceded Mike’s verbal response (“I’m trying!”) to this greeting, as though I had called him fat instead of the opposite. Puzzling over his reaction, I led Mike into the kitchen to greet Nataki and to meet Dori. I offered him a beer and he declined. With a suit yourself shrug I popped the top off a single bottle and waved Mike into the living room, where we sat in adjacent vintage armchairs to go over the race plan.
“Let’s start with your goal,” I said. “What are you thinking?”
“I want to break three hours,” Mike said.
It came to me now why Mike had startled at the doorway. I’m not a real runner anyway. One month earlier, Mike had written these words to me in an e-mail listing his reasons for having decided to treat the Boston Marathon as a fun run instead of a race—“a victory lap,” as he called it. But since then Mike’s forty-six-year-old legs had shown flashes, more and more frequent, of the zip that had once powered him to a 4:24 mile. In his qualifying event, Mike ran 3:00:00—perhaps the most excruciating time a marathoner can possibly run. First Rome, now Mike—what was this real runner business all about?
“Just to be clear,” I asked Mike now, “is your goal to break three hours or to run as fast as you can?”
“I just want to break three,” Mike said.
“So, as far as you’re concerned, 2:59:59 is as good as any faster time?”
“That’s exactly right.”
This meant Mike would be running 6:50 miles, a pace I felt I could keep up for about twenty miles without jeopardizing my greater mission (assuming my sore Achilles behaved). I told Mike I would pace him to the base of Heartbreak Hill and then back off, leaving him to soar away to individual glory.
“Soup’s on!” Nataki called from the kitchen.
We filled our plates from the stove with fresh artisanal pastas and sauces Dori had procured from the same neighborhood shop that supplied the last supper (so to speak) before my disastrous first Boston Marathon in 2009 and carried them to the dining room, where the conversation remained marathon focused. I asked Mike—as I’d asked Rome before him and Josh before him—what running the Boston Marathon meant to him.
“I’m a really goal-oriented person,” he said, leaning back. “I set goals and then I work very hard to achieve them. And then I set different goals and I work very hard to achieve those. Running the Boston Marathon is yet another goal.”
The contrast between this rather flat response and Rome’s tearful earlier answer to the same question could not have been starker. How casually Mike lumped Boston in with his past goals! For as long as I’d known him, Mike had kept his emotions well contained, never letting anyone see him sweat. I wondered: Was this because he was afraid to show the doubts and fears that existed within him as they do in all of us or because he truly didn’t sweat? I had no idea, despite our almost thirty years of friendship. Perhaps there was a clue in the concern he and Rome shared about whether they were or were not real runners. Or maybe the poker-faced gentleman forking fettuccini into his mouth on the other side of the table was the only runner on earth for whom a marathon, even the Boston Marathon, was 26.2 miles, nothing more.
Whether by coincidence or by fate, Mike and Rome met face to face the next morning, in Hopkinton, one hour before race time. Mike and I were jogging back and forth along a short stretch of road tracing the boundary of the Athletes Village when a familiar-looking figure approached us, an economically proportioned Filipino man with salt-and-pepper hair.
“Rome!” I called.
We paused our respective warm-ups and introductions were made. While the two first-time Boston Marathon runners shook hands, I looked Rome over, admiring his snazzy black uniform with pink trim. At the upper right corner of the singlet was a cross made up of letters and numbers.
Later Rome told me that the alphanumeric configuration referred to his Auntie Emy, who had died of breast cancer in 2014. “I lifted her as a pallbearer,” he told me. “She lifts me on race days.”
“How are you feeling?” I asked him now.
“Honestly, I’m a little nervous,” he said.
Rome didn’t look nervous to me—he looked pants-shitting petrified. I cautioned my new friend to run conservatively (it was a seventy-degree day), and we went our separate ways.
Forty-five minutes later, Mike and I stood pressed together in the corrals, surrounded by the cream of Earth’s amateur running population. The national anthem was sung. Fighter jets ripped overhead, their roar briefly drowning out the thrum of a hovering TV helicopter. Ten or twelve of the world’s greatest professional distance runners were recognized over the public address system.
A sudden commotion occurred to our left. A female runner had fallen to the pavement, where she lay insensate, the apparent victim of an anxiety attack. I had done my best the previous evening to prepare Mike for this madness, but in my heart I knew it was like expecting a soldier to be fully prepared for his first taste of combat.
“Forget what I said last night,” Mike told me as we watched a police officer scramble over a barricade that separated him from the collapsed woman’s limp form. “This is not just another goal for me. I’m about to bust out of my skin!”
The starter’s pistol cracked, and a cheer went up all around us—and then everyone just stood there. Mike and I were in Corral 7, stuck behind 6,000 other runners like idling cars in a long backup at a traffic light that’s just turned green. By the time we crossed the timing mat and were officially on the clock, the male pros were already almost a mile up the road, and even then the field remained so closely bunched that our rate of progress scarcely matched that of our earlier warm-up as we muddled through what should have been the fastest section of the course: a four-mile, 310-foot free fall toward Ashland. Mike’s body language communicated an impatience bordering on distress.
When at last the glacial floe of bodies loosened up enough to allow Mike to accelerate toward his goal pace without barreling through people, he did just that, darting left and right and executing abrupt forward bursts to slip through slim gaps between human obstacles. I played the same game, and in no time Mike and I had developed a sophisticated system of teamwork in which whoever found the next gap led the way for the other, using gestures of the head and hands to signal imminent moves and to prevent collisions.
Suddenly the past twenty-nine years were obliterated. Everything was as it had been half a lifetime ago: Mike’s exasperatingly erratic pacing, his penchant for half-stepping me (running six inches ahead when we were ostensibly running together), the fraternally nuanced nonverbal communication between us—this was what it had been like to race with Mike in 1986, and nothing had changed. I was seized then by an aching cognizance of the preciousness of the moment, a feeling akin to what an aging crooner might feel on reuniting with his former accompanist for “One Night Only” after decades apart and unexpectedly finding, relishing, that old magic.
We completed the first mile and I checked my watch. “Even with all of that, we still ran six fifty-five,” I told Mike. “We’re fine.”
Mike made no reply, but his actions spoke volumes. The more dispersed the cattle drive became, the faster he ran, leading us through the next four miles at an average pace of 6:36 per mile.
“Are you running this fast on purpose?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said flatly.
I realized then that Mike was not running to break three hours. He was running as fast as his middle-age heart would drive his slightly bowed legs, risking catastrophe in unfavorable conditions in a bid to leave absolutely everything he had to give on the racecourse. He was, in short, taking Knox Robinson’s whole trip.
As we worked our way through mile six, a male voice, heavily accented, hailed me from behind. I swiveled my head and identified the speaker as a pint-sized South American–looking dude.
“Are you Matt Fitzgerald?” he repeated. I said I was.
“I have your Racing Weight,” said the fan, offering me a hand to shake, a very awkward procedure given our relative positions. “And now we are suffering here together!”
I turned toward Mike with an expectant smile, certain he was remembering any of a number of embarrassing episodes from my past, like the night during our sophomore year when we camped out in my neighborhood and I left a huge puddle of beery vomit right outside the tent door, forcing us both to leap over it in the morning, and that he would be unable to resist saying something to take me down a peg. But no. His eyes stayed locked on the road ahead.
A few miles farther on, we passed by a spectator who held a large sign in front of him, a professional-looking rendering of the 2017 Super Bowl scoreboard. It showed the Atlanta Falcons leading the New England Patriots by a score of 28 to 3 with 2:12 left in the third quarter. The implicit punch line, of course, was that the Patriots had gone on to win the game in overtime, proving forevermore that in sports, no matter how bad it looks at any given moment, it ain’t over till it’s over. I laughed out loud, imagining the effect this message might have had on me in some of my worst marathon moments. Mike remained expressionless, oblivious to everything but a distant finish line visible only in his mind.
At the next aid station, congestion caused Mike to miss the cup he wanted. Seeing this, I grabbed an extra and handed it to him. He dumped it over his head.
“That was Gatorade,” I said, trying but failing to suppress an apologetic giggle.
Mike’s face stayed as still as a photograph. Tossing the empty cup aside, he pressed on.
We passed the halfway mark of the race in 1:27:47, well ahead of Mike’s stated goal pace. Soon we entered the famous Wellesley College Scream Tunnel, no longer quite the gooseflesh-raising sonic assault it had been before the post-bombing security crackdown forced the coeds behind barricades, but Mike’s tempo lifted slightly even so. Ears ringing under the onslaught of a thousand treble voices, I thought of Kathrine Switzer, who had defied a traditional ban on female participants to become the first woman finisher of the Boston Marathon in 1967, and who was running the race again today, fifty years later. “If you are losing faith in human nature,” Switzer once said, “go out and watch a marathon.” How many of these fresh-faced spectators, I thought, were right now changing their minds about our imperfect species as they witnessed women and men from ninety-nine countries striving in common purpose, driving themselves to the brink of breakdown in an effort to create meaning out of meaninglessness, to become more than they were?
After Wellesley came Newton and its dreaded hills. On the first of these, Mike bogged down a little more than he had on prior climbs, his stride losing some of its characteristic jauntiness, his eyes taking on an unfocused look, lips bent in a frozen scowl. My watch beeped, marking the completion of mile seventeen. Seven minutes flat—our slowest yet.
“Looking good, Mike,” I said.
We came to the base of Heartbreak Hill, the last and toughest ascent of the race. My injured left Achilles tendon blazed with pain. The Glass City Marathon was six days away. I had promised Nataki I wouldn’t do anything stupid. But at the precise moment my foot touched the spot where I had planned to back off, Mike, whose water cups I had continued to fetch for him over the last several miles, groaned involuntarily.
I stayed with him.
At the top of the hill, my watch chimed again: 7:08. I began to pray, even more urgently than I’d prayed for Kacey eight days before, words bubbling up spontaneously from my deepest inner depths: Please, God, let us have this. Please, God…
The fire in my ailing leg intensified. Mike’s fatigue visibly increased. But we kept moving, and the passing of each subsequent mile marker—twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—seemed to me an incremental unfolding of an answer to my divine petition. I made myself as useful as I could by grabbing more drinks, guiding Mike as linearly as possible through the road’s tangents, even moving ahead of him at one point to block the headwind that had kicked up. Mike, meanwhile, checked his watch obsessively, and from this I knew that he was still battling, trying not merely to survive but to conquer. My heart swelled with brotherly pride, and something grape-sized lodged in my throat.
“Let’s go, Mike,” I said as we approached the next, and next-to-last, mile marker.
Mike sped up, having apparently misinterpreted my encouragement as a directive, and it was then I realized that Mike was not pushing himself to the absolute limit for his own sake entirely but also for mine—that my presence and support made him want to give his very best effort. But he could not sustain the surge and soon fell back into the funereal 6:45-per-mile rhythm we had kept up since coming over the top of Heartbreak.
We turned right onto Hereford Street and then left onto Boylston—the long, iconic homestretch of the world’s greatest footrace. Seeing the finish line banner ahead, Mike surged again, fighting for every last second until there were no seconds left to fight for. We had overtaken nearly 5,000 runners to this point, and we continued to reel in flagging competitors as we approached the line. The grape in my throat burst and I began to cry, absurdly, a grown man weeping and running as thousands watched.
One thing I had never said to Mike in all the years of our friendship was, “I love you, man.” His Spock-like emotional containment doesn’t invite such effusions, and, for that matter, no one has ever accused me of being the touchy-feely type. Even hugging is awkward between us. But what better way for two old running buddies to say, “I love you, man,” than to stride shoulder-to-shoulder to the finish of the Boston Marathon in shared struggle, an agony freely chosen by each as a gift to the other?
We crossed the line at 2:57:45. Mike and I became separated almost immediately as I limped behind and he speed-walked ahead like a Manhattan pedestrian, fearful (he confessed afterward) that if he stopped moving his legs would cramp, and that if he turned to face me his own feelings would overflow. Just when I was beginning to think my friend had forgotten about me, he wheeled around. I made fists of my hands and let out a primal scream. Mike smiled queasily and raised his palms overhead, initiating a weary high-ten.
“That’s all I could do,” he said. “I couldn’t have run any faster.”
To a non-runner, these words might have smacked of disappointment, but to me they conveyed the deepest fulfillment—the satisfaction of having taken the whole trip.
Mike woke up two days later in an unfamiliar bed at Homewood Suites in Washington, DC, where he had driven with his family all-too-immediately after the race for an enriching spring holiday. Separating his sore body from the sheets with some difficulty, he dressed proudly in the neon-yellow long-sleeve official Boston Marathon participant shirt that had come in his race bag and took the elevator down to breakfast with Alison and the kids.
In the dining room, Mike began to have second thoughts about his clothing selection. Feeling the eyes of the other eaters on his back, he worried that he might be giving the wrong impression, falsely passing himself off as a real runner. At home in Hanover, Mike was surrounded by serious athletes—skiers and cyclists and others whom, he felt, he didn’t measure up to in midlife, decades after his glory days as a high school runner. But these second thoughts gave way to third thoughts as it occurred to Mike that his high-achieving athlete friends and acquaintances probably viewed him the same way he viewed them—at least now, if not before. After all, he’d just placed among the top 4 percent of finishers and the top 3 percent of men his age in the world’s most prestigious running event, smashing the hallowed three-hour barrier in tough conditions that had brought down many a more experienced marathoner.
Back at the room, while the kids got ready for a day of sightseeing, Mike sat down with his computer to answer some questions I’d asked him about how his Boston Marathon experience had affected or perhaps even changed him. Mike described his choice of shirt and the self-consciousness it had caused him at breakfast and the introspection that followed.
“So maybe it’s time I gave myself permission to think of myself as a real runner,” he concluded. “Maybe that’s what’s changed.”
When I received Mike’s reply, I was seated at an imitation cherrywood desk in a hotel room in Danbury, Connecticut, where Nataki and I were stopping over on the way to Toledo, Ohio, and marathon number six in my search for the magic of the marathon. While I worked, Nataki relaxed on the bed with her back braced against the headboard, conversing by phone with Tayna, something she does every day without fail as part of her self-care regimen. As I read my friend’s words, there appeared suddenly in my mind’s eye the forgotten image of a strawberry birthmark that was conspicuously visible on Mike’s left cheek when I first knew him—a blemish that he’d traveled to (wait for it) Boston at age sixteen to have blasted off with a medical laser. Mike took some good-natured jibing from his teammates, including me, about the procedure, and he took it sportingly, but I remembered now catching a hint of strain in his smile, sensing an eagerness for the subject to be dropped.
Of course! Underneath his impenetrable sangfroid, Mike truly was as human as the rest of us and cared what other people thought. It all made sense. Mike’s initial hesitance to take aim at the three-hour marathon barrier in Boston was rooted in a natural fear of putting himself out there, of stepping forward for public measurement and possibly coming up short. That he would do so in the company of a man whom Mike once measured himself against as a runner—me—could only have intensified his trepidation.
All at once, I understood what this real runner stuff was really about. We humans are social animals, and as such we measure ourselves against each other in all kinds of instinctual ways. As a consequence, our happiness depends on our self-esteem, which in turn depends, to some degree, on how others perceive us. It is often said that we shouldn’t worry about what other people think, that our sense of personal worth should come from within. But self-esteem cannot be manufactured out of thin air. An undersized boy whose ego has been damaged by bullying and teasing and being overlooked must find something of real value inside himself before he can walk tall. A city girl whom society has repeatedly given the message that people who look like her cannot excel in a particular sport needs a fair opportunity to prove otherwise before she can fully believe otherwise. This is what running did for Rome and has done for certain members of Black Roses NYC, and it’s what running does generally.
From the outside, running may seem like just another way to fail to measure up—an unnecessary one, at that. Height and ethnicity are beyond our control, but a marathon is a choice. A non-runner can be forgiven for assuming that only the winner gets an ego boost from a race—that the novice runner who can’t finish a 5K without walking feels inadequate next to the marathon finisher, who in turn feels inadequate next to the Boston qualifier, who in turn feels inadequate next to the Olympian. In fact, running is a reliable self-esteem builder across the entire spectrum of abilities.
You’ll see this if you watch the first printed results being posted in the finish area of a local road race. Runners scrum around the pages like honeybees, eager to find out how they measured up. “I was fourth in my age group!” shouts a man with a running cap covering his balding head. “I was less than a minute behind Rick!” says a college-age woman in reference to her boyfriend. Everyone has a different result, a unique takeaway. Yet everyone is pleased. (Well, almost everyone.)
All runners yearn to be “real” runners. The definition of this term, however, is relative, not absolute. The runner who cannot yet complete a 5K without walking may define a real runner as one who can, and strive to do so. The runner who can already run a full 5K but has never run farther may define a real runner as one who has completed a marathon, and strive to do so. And so on. At every level, runners define “real runner” in such a way that it is just within their reach to become one, but only if they take the whole trip, giving everything they’ve got to realize whatever amount of potential they have.
And therein lies the magic. For our self-esteem is not determined entirely by how we measure up against our peers. It is influenced as well by how we see ourselves independent of others’ judgments. All runners who try as hard as they can to become the best runner they can be discover something in themselves—what Mike described to me in his response to my written questions as “a real satisfaction that I’ve got the fire in the belly to dig deep and not fade away when the going gets tough”—that heightens their self-image. All runners who try as hard as they possibly can to measure up, do.