The Starting Line
2011
This could go one of several ways, all of them ugly. Daybreak is still around an hour away. What remains of the night sees me standing in corral G, slap, bang in the middle of around 20,000 people, my immediate vicinity seemingly populated exclusively by pumped-up septuagenarians. They surround me — these ancient pots and pans bubbling over with excited anticipation, detailing the times and split times they’re expecting to run. I am feeling a little less sanguine. Emil Zatopek, the great Czech distance runner of the 1950s, once said: ‘If you want to run, run a mile. But if you want to experience another life, run a marathon.’ I wouldn’t know, I’ve never run a marathon before. But it does strike me that my training for the marathon did tend to follow the general contours of life: a promising, but essentially misleading, start — and then it all went downhill. There are around 52,000 steps between here and the finish line, and I have no idea if I’m going to be able to complete more than a hundred of them.
It had all been going so well. In fact, I clearly remember boring my wife with interminable commentaries on how I had utterly nailed the preparations for my first marathon. It’s not that difficult, really. Most people can run a marathon if they put their mind to it. But, there again, most people are far too sensible to want to put their mind to it. If you are already running around twenty miles a week — say four runs of five miles each — then you are only about four months away from being able to run your first marathon. In fact, I wasn’t even running that much when I started my preparation. The cornerstone of this preparation is what is known as the ‘long run’. This will typically be done on a weekend. The week is then reserved for shorter, faster runs. I started with three short runs of four miles during the week. The short runs always stay relatively short — when my training was in full swing, I was running six miles, eight miles and six miles during the week.
The long run is really the key to training for a marathon. On the long run, you keep your pace down to something that allows you to hold a conversation, or would allow you to do this if there were anyone else there. I run only with my dog, Hugo, who is not the best conversationalist. For me, that pace was just a little over five miles an hour. Then, holding this pace more or less constant, you gradually build up the distance, week by week, mile by mile. The first, and rather inglorious, long run of my training regime was a pathetic six miles. In my defence, this was September in Miami: the temperature was in the mid-nineties and the humidity made it seem ten degrees hotter than that. People who have never run before in serious heat and humidity are shocked at just how much more difficult it is. I know I was. Your heart and lungs have to work so much harder just to keep you cool in those conditions. Sometimes, I would find myself sucking in air, like I had just come off the back of a series of sprints. But I slowly built up the distance — an extra mile per week, give or take. That, I suppose, was not as easy as it sounds. Every week, the last extra mile was a killer. I ran it if I could, I walked it if I had to. The key was simply to stay on my feet and keep moving forward. By early December 2010, I had my long run up to twenty miles — and for a marathon virgin like me, the long run never really goes above twenty miles. I was set.
There were still two months to go until the race, and so I did what I usually do in these situations: I broke my own cardinal rule. When I first decided to run this race, I told myself in no uncertain terms that I was not going to even think about times. This was my first marathon, and my goal was simply to negotiate the 26.2 miles without dying. Whatever you do, Mark, I told myself, just focus on that. You’re not young any more — less than two years to the big five-o in fact. Your goal is simply to finish. Don’t get caught up in anything else. But then December arrived, I was running twenty miles without too much difficulty and I started thinking. I could fit in another five or six of these long runs before race day, even allowing for the tapering-down in the final few weeks of training. I could really work on getting the times down. I could not only run this race, I could run a respectable time. Maybe not four hours, but 4.30 is definitely on; even 4.15 is not beyond the bounds of possibility. And so, a recurring theme of many of the best tragedies, it was my unseemly ambition that brought me down. My body threw in the towel when I started asking it to do this extra distance in less time.
When it happens, a grade-two tear of the calf muscle feels like someone has whacked you across the back of the leg with a stick. But I knew that already. Grade-two calf tears and I go back a long way — back to the mid-1990s, I seem to remember. The typical rehab for this sort of calf tear, for someone of my age, is six weeks plus. If the patient turns out not to be patient at all — and I am a very impatient patient — then that period extends accordingly. I treated this particular tear with more than usual deference, at least initially. I did my rehab, got the scar tissue broken down and did all the exercises my PT told me to do. Then, just as I started getting better, I lost all patience, tried to run, my calf broke down again after a few hundred yards and I was back to square one. This happened several times. So eventually I just did nothing: complete rest. The tear occurred on 4 December 2010. It is now 30 January 2011. I am standing at the starting line of the Miami Marathon — and, more significantly for me, my first marathon — and I haven’t been able to run for the two months leading up to it.
I am therefore, as they say, a little ‘undercooked’ — and that’s probably putting it mildly. Until Friday lunchtime, if you had asked me whether I was going to run, I would have told you ‘no’ — or some more emphatic variation on that theme. And I think I would have almost been sincere. This was the official position that I used not only in my dealings with others but also, more importantly, with the rational part of my mind. But there was a small, sneaky, irrational but enormously influential part of me that always knew that I was going to find myself standing at the starting line of this race. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to find myself driving over to the Miami Beach Convention Center on Friday afternoon to pick up my race packet. I still had to deal with the rational part of me, of course. Just keeping our options open, I told it. Indeed, my rational self replied, is that why you also purchased a calf sleeve, and interrogated just about every runner you met at the Center about how to approach running a marathon when in a seriously under-trained state? That’s the rational part of me — he can occasionally be a little snide. But despite the abundance of countervailing evidence, I think I was still spouting the ‘just keeping my options open’ line when I crawled onto the train at 4 a.m. this morning. But now, it seems, the time for options is over. Perhaps I should have listened a little more to the rational part of me. This was all very preventable.
The most likely scenario, given the events of recent weeks, is that my calf immediately breaks down again and I don’t even make it as far as the MacArthur Causeway. I suppose that would be a little humiliating — my abject failure on display to the thousands who run past me. But suppose it doesn’t happen like that: suppose my calf pulls itself together. Then the question is: how long will it be before I am wishing that it had gone? I’m not entirely sure what sort of shape I’m going to be in, but I suspect it’s not going to be good. Just how far am I going to be able to go? I could always call it a day at the half-marathon mark. But will I even get that far? Just how painful is this going to be?
Then there is the question of time. Suppose I do make it around the course. Just how long is that going to take me? This has nothing to do with pride. Well, if I am being honest, I suppose it may have something to do with it but, vanity aside, the one thing you absolutely, positively don’t want to do in the Miami Marathon is take your own sweet time about it. There is, as in most city marathons, a graduated reopening of the roads. You want to stay ahead of these reopenings if you can. After six hours, all the roads are open again. Having to finish the race weaving my way in and out of traffic would not only be somewhat mortifying — it would be positively dangerous. I’ve been in many countries where the drivers are clearly insane. Greece and France spring to mind. But in those countries the vehicular psychosis is more or less predictable. After you’ve been there a while, you can more or less predict which senseless gambit is going to occur in what situation. After a while, it all seems wearyingly quotidian. But in Miami, nothing that has to do with the roads is predictable. There is no public transport in Miami worth speaking of. The city’s elevated monorail has, as the writer Dave Barry once put it, about as much significance in the life of the average Miamian as a shooting star occasionally glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. Everyone drives. And so the demographic runs from boy racers to boozed-up businessmen to heavily medicated centenarians, even the occasional heavily-medicated-boozed-up-centenarian-boy-racer. No one really has a clue what’s going to happen at any given junction. And since a significant percentage of them are armed — the medicated centenarians, especially, seem to like to drive a little ‘heavy’ — remonstration is a dangerous game to play.
On YouTube yesterday, while I was ‘researching’ my run, I found a video record of last year’s race entitled, unfortunately not inaccurately: ‘Scumbag Miami drivers honk marathon runners.’ The humiliation of immediate calf breakdown, a protracted and painful run, or mortality by vehicular means: disappointment, pain or death — Zatopek may have had a point. This is certainly going to be ugly. I feel a strange tingling, something I haven’t felt for quite some time. Is it fear? Perhaps that is a little aggrandizing. Let’s just say I’m nervous. And it is not entirely unpleasant.
Why am I doing this? It’s not an easy question to answer, and to avoid trying to do so, when people ask me this, I am more than happy to resort to platitudes. I could say, ‘Because I enjoy it.’ In some sense of the word, I enjoyed the training — while it lasted — and I am enjoying the trepidation of these pre-race minutes. I am enjoying the feeling that I may have bitten off more than I can chew; I am enjoying the uncertainty — the not knowing what is going to happen next. In some sense of ‘enjoy’, I might even enjoy what is going to happen next. So there would be a modicum of truth in this ‘enjoyment’ answer. But it’s not a particularly illuminating modicum — it is not the sort of truth that advances understanding, but merely invites the further question: why do I enjoy these things? I could add: I’ll soon be fifty, and if I don’t do it now, I’ll probably never do it. And it would be a shame to have lived a whole life and never run a marathon. I am sure that’s part of the reason; but it is still just a stock answer, and vulnerable to the same sort of objection as the original response. After all, why do I think it would be a shame to have lived a whole life and never run a marathon? The real reasons, I suspect, are more difficult to identify, let alone explain. But it is an interesting sociological fact that (a) many people seem to have opinions on what my reasons are, and (b) the content of these opinions depends on where — specifically which side of the Atlantic — those people live.
There is, I think, a distinctively American way of thinking about running and, by extension, about what I am doing today. Books written by Americans about running almost always revolve around certain recognizable themes. In saying this, I don’t mean in any way to disparage them. I’ve read quite a few of these books — from Dean Karnazes’s inspiring Ultramarathon Man, to Christopher McDougall’s astonishing Born to Run, to Bernd Heinrich’s (whom I shall regard as an honorary American since he has lived in the US most of his life) engaging Why We Run, and many more. But even in these thoroughly admirable books, the shared themes are evident, and this is what makes these books quintessentially American.
One theme is an unflinching pioneer optimism. You can do great things. Everyone has this capacity. Every day, you can be better than you were yesterday; and there is nothing that exceeds your grasp if you put your mind to it. This sort of optimism is, of course, a semi-ubiquitous mantra of American life. I love this belief, and I find its profession, by large swathes of the American population, touching and sincere. The only problem is that I’m pretty sure it’s not true. Most things lie outside the grasp of most people. And the one unbreakable truth of life is that we get worse. Maybe you could do great things. Maybe you still can. Maybe you successfully completed an unspeakably brutal ultramarathon yesterday — Badwater, Leadville, the Marathon des Sables or something like that. I don’t know. But I do know that you will get worse. If you can do great things, then the time is coming when you won’t be able to do them any more.
Another theme is the emphasis on faith. Faith is what gets you through the inevitable dark times you will face on the run. Faith is, it goes without saying, a cornerstone of American life. Faith makes us strong; we are at our best when we have faith. But I — a European of shadowed soul, skulking in the middle of the starting pack — suspect that, on the contrary, we are at our best when we have lost our faith. In fact, this was, arguably, the principal message of my earlier book, The Philosopher and the Wolf. The loss of faith is, precisely, an opportunity to grow stronger. In the end, I believe the only attitude we can bring to bear on life that is worth anything at all is defiance. Not that it makes any difference in the end, of course: it is going to end badly for us, whatever we do — if not, our defiance would of course be singularly misplaced. Compared to the sprightly sales figures in Europe and other parts of the world, sales of the US edition of The Philosopher and the Wolf were, I think it is fair to say, ‘sluggish’ — a term which will also almost certainly be applicable to any progress I make in today’s race. I have absolutely no faith that I will finish this race or even get very far in it — and, for me, this is part of the attraction. What’s the point in trying something if you know or strongly suspect — whether it is through faith or any other means — you will succeed? In fact, I suspect it is precisely my suspicion that I haven’t a hope of finishing that is one of the primary attractions for me today.
Finally, American running books will emphasize the positive value of work. Two different strands of this idea can be distinguished. Some seem to think that work is inherently ennobling. Others tie the value of work to the dreams it allows you to grasp (see the first ‘optimism’ strand). But my murky European spirit tells me that work is not inherently ennobling at all: to work when you do not have to is stupid rather than ennobling. And there is no evidence of any reliable connection between hard work and realization of dreams. Nothing good comes of work, I tell myself. At its best, and its most valuable, running is play not work. This is one of the things I actually learned through running.
Optimism, faith and work: I want nothing of these things. Apparently, I am a faithless pessimist who thinks that hard work is worthless. It is a little surprising they gave me a Green Card.
I am running this marathon because I have lost my faith. Perhaps that is a step in the direction of the truth? Imagine a toothless crocodile with Alzheimer’s looking for a hat that is already on his head. This was my brother’s classic 1993 ‘Fossil of the Week’ birthday card to my father; perhaps the apotheosis of a family tradition of sending each other insulting, and preferably cruel, birthday cards. We put a lot of time, effort and ingenuity into finding exactly the right one. It’s the thought that counts.
Perhaps my most telling contribution to this tradition was the 2007 triumph on the occasion of my brother’s fortieth birthday. That card comprised a group of boy scouts on a camping trip. A boy is telling a scary story illuminated, as tradition dictates, by a torch pressed under his chin. The faces of his audience express terror and disbelief. This is the snippet of the story to which we are privy: ‘And then hair starts growing out of your nose and ears!’ The card’s message: some horror stories are true.
A few days before my forty-eighth birthday, and a few months before finding myself at this starting line of a marathon, I received a worthy riposte. Two bats are hanging upside down (that is the card’s salient visual fact). One says to the other:
‘You know what frightens me most about old age?’
‘No. What?’
‘Incontinence.’
The function of religion is to make us feel better, by peddling a lie. The function of philosophy, and a carefully chosen birthday card, is to make us feel worse, by telling the truth. And the truth is of course: we get worse.
Around the time this card was winging its way to me over the Atlantic, I found myself asking my GP a question: ‘What do you mean, gout?’
About a week before, I had woken in the middle of the night and noticed that the big toe on my left foot had stiffened up. The next morning, walking was painful. And then it just got more and more painful. In a few days time, my entire foot had swollen up and was far too painful for me to wear shoes. I hobbled barefoot into the doctor’s office to see what was up. If my question was a simple one, its answer was deceptively revealing; not so much in what it said, but in what it showed.
‘Well, it does look like gout. We can’t be sure without a blood test to find out your uric acid levels.’
‘I don’t have gout. Old, overweight people get gout.’
‘Well, it is true that obesity and hypertension raise your risk of gout, but they’re not prerequisites.’
‘But gout! That’s Henry VIII — a diet of goose legs and gallons of wine, that sort of thing. I’m a vegetarian you know.’
‘Well, yes, a diet that is high in purines, like meat and fish, increases the risk of gout. It’s interesting that you’re a vegetarian. Do you drink much?’
‘Drink much, me? Well … you know, a little dry sherry at Christmas time. Look I’m a writer; I think I’m contractually obligated to drink. I’ll be honest. In my formative years, yes, I could put it away; but not any more, not since the boys came along. They show no mercy, you know. If I wake up a little fuzzy-headed, they can smell weakness, like sharks smelling blood. It’s going to be a long, long day for me. It’s just not worth it. I might have a glass or two of wine with dinner, after the boys have gone to bed, but that’s it. Occasionally three, occasionally one: never more than three, though.’
‘Ah, aversion therapy: interesting. Would this be every night?’
‘Well … you know, most nights. Unless I’m going out or something — then I have to drive, so I don’t drink, of course. But I don’t go out much.’
‘Alcohol consumption is shown to be implicated in gout attacks nearly half the time.’
‘So I need to give up?’
‘No, nothing drastic like that. But you might want to take a night or two off, every now and then. Give your kidneys a break.’
‘Okay, that certainly doesn’t sound unreasonable, doctor. But, you really think it is gout?’
‘Well, it might be something else. Have you ever damaged this toe, broken it, dislocated it?’
‘Actually, now you mention it, I seem to remember dislocating it years ago, back in my karate days.’
‘Oh, that’s unfortunate. If there’s joint damage, there’s a possibility of it being osteo-arthritis. You wouldn’t want that. It’s nasty. Gout is much easier to manage. The other thing it might be is a stress fracture. You said you run?’
‘Yes, but not so much lately. There were times when I would run forty miles a week, a long run of twenty miles, stuff like that. But those days are gone — well, at least in Miami. I hate running here: too hot, too humid, too flat, and you’re under permanent assault from mosquitoes. But I do have a young dog that needs a lot of exercise. So we do a few miles most days. Nothing drastic, though. I don’t run marathons or anything like that.’
‘I suppose there’s an outside chance that it’s a stress fracture, which would be very unfortunate — difficult to get rid of. But I really don’t think so. It’s usually the twenty-somethings that come in here with stress fractures. And it does look like gout. So, what I’m going to do is give you a cortisone shot in the joint. That’ll kill it dead.
‘Will it hurt?’
He smiles: ‘It’ll hurt like hell.’
And it did. But it certainly did the trick. Cortisone is good shit.
So gout, Wikipedia tells me, is the result of a build-up of uric acid crystals in the joints. Uric acid comes from urea, a by-product of protein breakdown. If your kidneys are not doing their job properly, then urea will not be eliminated from the blood quickly enough and will form into crystals of uric acid. These collect in the joints — the joint at the base of the big toe is typical — and will be treated as foreign bodies by the immune system. The resulting melee causes a gouty attack.
But that is not important. The truly revealing part of this little chapter in the book of my general demise is the background of assumptions it reveals. I’ve reached that point in life where gout is the best-case scenario; gout is what I should be hoping for. And so, in my primary care physician’s office, the monstrous nature of life was illuminated for me once again. As if I needed it. One day you are running twenty miles for fun. The next, you are keeping your fingers crossed for gout.
I entered myself in the 2011 ING Miami Marathon the next day, and embarked on a strict training regime — part of a new policy of showing my failing body who was boss. A few months later, around the time my calf was making its protestations known, I received the results of the blood work. My uric acid levels were normal. My painful toe was almost certainly not gout. In fact, it seems a far more likely cause was the running I had been doing to keep Hugo happy. So I had apparently upped my running to address a problem that was caused by running. My entry into the world of marathon running was, in this sense, a deeply ironic one.
But the toe, that is only a symptom — a gentle scratching of the surface of a more global decline. Some horror stories are true. What young person would not be disgusted by their older self? It was a promising start, a few halcyon years of thrusting, burgeoning vitality. But they didn’t last long. Then it was all downhill, physically and intellectually. There is life and there is death. That’s the way people usually think of it. Death is the end of life, and so is not a part of life. Death is not an event in my life, as Wittgenstein once said. I suspect the truth is a little more complex.
First, instead of thinking of life as one thing and death as another, I tend to think more in terms of a gradual process of disappearing. Life, fundamentally, is a process of erasure. After a promising, but as it turns out essentially disingenuous, first couple of decades or so, I slowly become less and less of what I was. Death is an admittedly significant point in this process — a late and irreversible stage of my disappearance. But erasure doesn’t stop there. Not content with my destruction, the process rumbles on until every trace I might have left, any indication that I was once here, is also obliterated. So, instead of thinking in crude dichotomous terms — life—death — I apparently like to think in crude trichotomous terms instead: decline + death + deletion = disappearance.
Conversely, it would be an error to think of death as an event safely cordoned off in the future. Death is impatient and insists on putting in little appearances before the curtain goes down; little cameos that gradually increase in their frequency and transparency. As the outstanding, and perhaps for that reason largely forgotten, Hungarian phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai pointed out: the basis of all disgust is death in life. Our decline is really death creeping up on us in various ways, sneaking us various little previews of what lies in store. My apparently gouty toe is a swollen, putrid corpse appendage. The hard body of my twenties slowly becomes soft and slack, like an orange that has sat in the bowl a few days longer than it should. The hairs that sprout from various parts of me, parts from which, I would have thought, they have no business sprouting, these are opportunistic colonies of mould that have made this overripe orange their home. In these ways and others, my death likes to exhibit itself long before the end of the show.
Perhaps these little cameos should produce in me nothing more than a wry smile. Death does have a sense of humour, I might tell myself. Julian Barnes tells a story of a former soldier, worn down by life, who asked Julius Caesar, his former general, for permission to end his life. Caesar replied: what makes you think that what you have now is life? Caesar also had a sense of humour, just not a good one. No doubt he was being a little harsh, a little premature. But we are all now aware of the idea of a person disappearing before the end of their biological life. This is a recurring horror of mine. I’ve seen the closing years of enough lives to understand the levels of fear and confusion embodied in them. To approach death is gradually, progressively, to become un-homed. ‘I just want to go home now,’ my dying grandmother once said to me from her nursing home. And so I imagine myself in years to come telling some person I do not know that I just want to go home now. But in this future there is no home. Soon, I’ll not even remember what a home is.
So I am running this marathon, perhaps, because some horror stories are true. There is a part of me that likes this explanation. There is a comforting familiarity — even nostalgia — that accompanies it. Circumstances have seen me live much of my adult life outside Britain, but I’m still enough of a Brit to recognize the age-old tradition of taking an activity that someone does and finding ways to denigrate it — ideally by casting aspersions on the motives or character of the person doing it. I appreciate this tradition for the cultural art form that it is — even when I am the person whose motives or character are thus aspersed. Now I know why I’m running this marathon. It’s a midlife crisis, mate.
And yet I am far from alone in my new avocation. I’m part of a rapidly growing cultural phenomenon — the forty-something who has become obsessed with testing the limits of his or her endurance. In this respect, my efforts are embarrassingly feeble. Forget marathons: ultra running events — foot races of fifty miles, a hundred miles or more — are springing up everywhere. Possibly the hardest is Badwater. This is a 135-mile foot race that incorporates a significant chunk of California: beginning in Death Valley, at 282 feet below sea level, and finishing 8642 feet higher, at Whitney Portal — the trailhead of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the state. In the early parts of the run, temperatures can reach 130oF. If you take bread into the open air at that temperature, it begins to toast. The tarmac is so hot your shoes will start to melt, and so you have to run on the white line at the side of the road — cooler because it reflects heat. Then there is the Marathon des Sables, a six-day 151-mile foot race across the Sahara Desert. Runners have to carry anti-venom syringes with them, because of the numerous snakes that litter the route. Or, if you are tired of the heat, there’s the Hardrock — 100 miles run at altitudes of over 14,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies — a slow and difficult race that involves scrambling up and down improbably steep hills, and where the principal medical problems include high-altitude cerebral oedema. Many of the finishers take over forty-eight hours to complete this race, which means — given that the start is just before dawn — that they will see the sun rise three times during their time spent running. Then there is Leadville — another Colorado Rockies 14,000-feet, 100-mile offering, centred on the USA’s highest city — where the completion rate is lower than the Hardrock.
I must admit: I have been bitten by the bug. Those races are monsters that may always be beyond me. But if I can get my calf right, I do have my beady little eye on some softer fifty-milers for later in the year. Are we endurance freaks all suffering from our own midlife crises? Did it use to be — as caricature would suggest, at least for men — inappropriately young women and sports cars, whereas now it’s the Badwater or Marathon des Sables?
I suppose, if this interpretation is correct, we would have to expand the idea of a midlife crisis, make it more inclusive and gender-neutral. This ‘crisis’ is far from an exclusively male thing. As many women as men have been bitten by the endurance bug. And in their resulting avocation, they can compete with men on a more or less equal footing. Apparently, no woman is going to give Usain Bolt a run for his money. But the longer the distance of the race, the more the gap between men and women narrows. Ann Trason wins 100-mile ultras outright, at least she used to. It is true, I expect, that women have midlife crises too. But the main problem is supposing that the label ‘midlife crisis’ explains anything at all.
Labelling something is often done to stop thinking about it, just when the hard thinking should be starting. We need to dig deeper. What is a midlife crisis? What is its essence? In particular, does the Hardrock or Marathon des Sables type of midlife crisis have anything in common with the classic but clichéd younger-woman/fast-car midlife crisis? Perhaps there is something that the two alleged crises have in common. But until I can identify precisely what that is, the label ‘midlife crisis’ means nothing.
There is a way of thinking about a midlife crisis that ties it closely to the idea of achievement. A midlife crisis is the result of the realization that your abilities are on the wane, and consequently that your reach is henceforth condemned to exceed your grasp by an ever-increasing, and perhaps ultimately embarrassing, margin. The younger-woman/fast-car response is an attempt to reassert youth’s authority of grasp over reach. Is this what it is all about?
Of course, I can only speak for myself. But the reassertion of grasp over reach hypothesis — the idea that running is all about achievement — just doesn’t convince me. I think one of the things I quickly learned from running was the futility of achievement. Most of the running I have done in my life has not been about achievement anyway — not as far as I can see. It was just something I did, for a variety of reasons. Entering this race, I suppose, does introduce an element of achievement into the mix. But, even then, the achievement in question is of a peculiarly self-undermining variety. When I started training for this marathon, six miles in the Miami late-summer heat would nearly kill me. Slowly I built up the distance. I could barely sleep the nights before my long runs, I was so eager to get out on the road to see if I could do the extra distance. But as soon as I did, the immediate feeling of satisfaction was quickly replaced by restlessness. Twelve miles, okay — but next week I’ll do thirteen. Learning to run distance is all about setting reasonable weekly goals — goals you can achieve if you put in the work — and then achieving them. This seems to be hard work followed by achievement: one strand of the American Dream. But, for me at least, I don’t know how it is with others, this is a very special sort of work-achievement cycle. It is a work-achievement cycle that reveals the futility of all work-achievement cycles. Running distance is goal-based achievement that reveals the bankruptcy of goal-based achievement.
Imagine you are a little kid outside a sweet shop, penniless, staring in at all the sweets you can’t buy. God appears next to you and says:
‘You know, kid, one day you’ll be able to buy everything in this shop.’
‘Really, God?’
‘Yep, and you know what? When you can, you won’t want to anymore. That’s life, kid!’
Any worthwhile achievement, I suspect, changes you in a way that makes what you achieve no longer important to you. If by some miracle I actually finish this marathon, I’ll have a celebratory late brunch — aka a bucketful of Mojitos — on South Beach. But I guarantee you that by dinner time my initial surge of satisfaction will be replaced by restlessness. The first thing I think will be this: well, after all, I did it, and on the back of a seriously curtailed training regime as well — I mean, how difficult can it be? Then, I’ll start thinking about the Keys 100 — an ultramarathon (with 50- or 100-mile options, take your pick) from Key Largo to Key West that’s happening in May. Then, I’ll start thinking about some altogether more challenging things that are in the pipeline for late 2011 and 2012. But the goal of this is not to achieve things. To think that it is would be to misunderstand everything. I don’t want a stack of race completion certificates I can put on my living-room wall or medals or belt buckles that tell people: I’ve run this, I’ve run that. The sense of satisfaction that goes with knowing I have finished a race? I don’t even want that. Achievement, for me at least, is a process of making the things I achieve not matter any more. I run not to achieve anything — not in this sense of acquiring something — but to be changed by the process of achieving. Of course, I have to achieve things in order to be changed by a process of achieving things. But achieving things is just a means to an end. I run because I want to be changed. The question is of course: how?
Another way of thinking about the midlife crisis is as an attempt to reclaim the freedom of youth. This I think is partly right, but also wrong in at least one crucial respect. Running distance is about freedom — I’m convinced of that — but it’s not the same sort as the freedom of youth. Both the traditional midlife crisis and the endurance-based alternative are, in their own ways, about freedom. But where they differ — and they do differ crucially — is that they have a very different conception of what freedom is.
In the high-velocity sports of my youth — rugby, cricket, boxing and tennis — the distinction between body and mind was at its most attenuated. In those endeavours, where missiles or hands or entire human bodies were hurtling towards me intent on mischief, there was no distinction between mind and body. In those days, in those sports, I was my lived body. Sometimes I wouldn’t even know I was doing something until after I had done it. I remember the best cricket shot I ever played. I was facing a quick bowler of the Lansdown Cricket Club in Bristol. It looked like he had sent one down the leg side. I drew my feet together, looking to clip it off my legs down to the fine-leg area. But it was a full-length ball and swung late to the off side. I opened up — I still don’t know whether I went forward with my leading leg or backward with my trailing one — and hit cleanly through the ball, which went like a bullet to the mid-on boundary. I think it may have been the only time I ever successfully executed a perfect on-drive — the most difficult shot in the book of cricket. And it was more or less an accident. I had no idea what I was doing until after it was all over. At that moment, there was no distinction between what I was and what I did: I was embodied mind in action.
According to Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, to be free is to act in accordance with necessity. In a similar vein, Taoism identifies freedom with wu wei: acting without acting. In a high-velocity sport, when you’re ‘in the zone’, you act without acting. What you do is a perfect match with what the situation requires. Your actions are in accordance with necessity; you do what must be done. This almost accidental shot I played when I was fifteen years old, that is the most free I’ve ever been on the cricket pitch. If Spinoza is right, perhaps I have never been freer than at that moment.
The classic midlife crisis is about freedom, but of a specific sort. Certainly, it is about escaping the cares of an adult life, a life that may be slowly grinding you into a fine dust. But the form this escape takes attempts to replicate the freedom of youth. It is all about youth, in the form of a younger woman, and speed in the form of a sports car. This freedom is about running from old age: it is about reproducing the high-velocity freedom of youth — the freedom of a life that is flying at you intent on mischief. This is the freedom of Spinoza, the freedom that comes from acting in accordance with necessity. The freedom embodied in running distance is very different — it is not the freedom of Spinoza, not the freedom of youth.
The freedom of Spinoza collapses the distinction between mind and body. Indeed, Spinoza thought of mind and body as merely two aspects of the same thing. But in the freedom of running distance, the distinction between mind and body is likely to be augmented rather than effaced. This, at least for me, always starts the same way. When I was training for this race, the early part of the long run would take me up Old Cutler Road, from SW 152nd Street to SW 104th Street. By the time I’d reached 120th, I would be having a little conversation with myself: ‘Just get me to the corner of 104th — then you can walk for a while.’ But who or what is this ‘me’ and who or what is this ‘you’? Who is giving permission to whom? It is my body that is suffering, not my mind. The mind might proffer a little encouragement every now and then, supply a little pep talk or two, but fundamentally it is my body that will get me to 104th, not my mind. It certainly seems as if my mind is giving permission to my body — and how can this be unless my mind is distinct from my body? This is the intuition that set the seventeenth-century philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, ‘the father of modern philosophy’, on his way.
According to Descartes, the body, which for his purposes incorporates the brain, is a physical object, differing only in the details of its organization from other physical objects. But the mind — or soul, or spirit, or self, Descartes was comfortable thinking of these interchangeably — is very different. The mind is a non-physical thing, composed of a different substance and obeying different laws and principles of operation than physical things. The resulting view — Cartesian dualism — sees each one of us as an amalgam of two very different things: a physical body and a non-physical mind. It is very unlikely that Descartes’ view of the mind is correct. Nevertheless, the most obvious freedom of the long run is the sort of freedom envisaged by Descartes rather than Spinoza. It is the flesh that is weak. The key to building distance in the long run is the ability of the mind to lie to the body — and be convincing. When we reach 104th Street, we must continue on. I must make sure my body is still putting one foot in front of the other at the steady pace I have set. The successful running spirit is sometimes, of necessity, a mendacious one. Self-deception lies at the heart of endurance.
There is so much more to the freedom of running than this. This Cartesian phase, where one lies to one’s body and so seemingly — but presumably erroneously — demonstrates one’s distinctness from it, is just the first phase, the first face, of freedom. There is another, entirely more interesting face to unveil: an old friend of mine whom I shall meet again today, assuming I last long enough. But without wishing to endorse Descartes’ more general views of the relation between mind and body, it still seems true that whereas the freedom of youth effaces the difference between mind and body, the freedom of running distance accentuates it. The freedom of Spinoza is the freedom of youth. What do we say of the freedom of Descartes? How do we characterize it? Cicero, the ancient Roman philosopher, once said that to be a philosopher is to learn how to die. Cicero was a dualist in roughly the same sense as Descartes. The mind or spirit is a non-physical substance, and it survives the death of the body. According to Cicero, a philosopher is someone who knows how to die to the extent that he or she is someone who knows how to spend time with the mind — the part that, Cicero thought, survives death. A distance runner knows how to spend time with the mind — whether it does or, more likely, does not survive death. To run distance is not to run from old age; it is to run towards it. Far from a crisis, it is an acceptance of the point one has reached in life. And so the freedom of running distance is, it seems, the freedom of age. Far from reclaiming the freedom of youth, the freedom of distance running involves claiming, perhaps for the first time, an entirely different sort of freedom.
I’m still in corral G. Some men, local politicians of some sort I gather, are giving speeches now over a rather indistinct loudspeaker: ‘You’ve trained for this for months, you’ve missed lunches, you’ve missed dinners, you’ve missed meetings …’ Yeah, I wish I had. I continue to distract myself from my worrying lack of preparation with some further rumination on the nature of the midlife crisis, and the sort of thing it would have to be to explain why I am doing this. I think there is a type of freedom that is embodied in running distance, but not the sort of freedom embodied in youth, not my youth anyway. So it can hardly be a matter of reclaiming the freedom of youth. But, still, there is something in the idea of reclaiming that strikes me as correct and important. Running distance, I have come to suspect, is about trying to reclaim something from my youth. But, I have come to think, it is not freedom that is reclaimed: it is knowledge. That is the transformation I have been trying to identify.
Once upon a time, I knew something — something that I later forgot in the business of growing up. I didn’t just forget it: I had to forget it — forgetting was part of the great game of becoming someone. I knew value. I did not know that I knew this, of course. But I knew it nonetheless. Caught up in the game of becoming, at first I didn’t understand what I had lost in this forgetting. But, slowly, I came to feel this loss, and after that taste it: an aching in the bones and then a sourness in the blood. Running distance brings me back to what I once knew.
Most people who are not philosophers think that most people who are philosophers spend most of their time thinking about the meaning of life. But, as an example of the sort of historical irony that has characterized the development of philosophy in the last three centuries, that is precisely what philosophers do not do — not any more. Some of us may think about it, in our quieter moments, but we tend to keep it to ourselves. The meaning of life — that is something for a simpler time. We have moved beyond all that. Now we spend our time talking about things that cannot possibly be understood by anyone who has not had an extended formal training in philosophy. Philosophy has, in other words, become professionalized: it is a way of keeping out the riff-raff. When it comes to our own lives we are, as Julian Barnes once pointed out, all amateurs. And so the question of the meaning of life smacks of the sort of lack of professionalism that philosophers have tried to excise on the path to becoming a mature discipline. I am not endorsing any of these ideas — far from it — merely recording them. Thankfully, in the last decade or so, I sense attitudes are changing, the question is no longer necessarily taboo, even for the most dyed-in-the-wool professionals. But this is the way it has been for a long time.
Sentences have meaning; life is not a sentence; therefore life does not have meaning. Once upon a time, when philosophers had become so weary of philosophy they had come to hate it, they tried to get rid of philosophical problems rather than solve them. These philosophers thought that the claim that life is not a sentence was important. But in reality, of course, someone who asks ‘What is the meaning of life?’ doesn’t really think that life has a meaning in the way that a sentence does. To ask ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is a way of asking another question: what is important in life? The question of meaning is a question of significance — not in the sense of semantic content but, rather, in the sense of importance. What is valuable in life? What makes life worth living? How should I live? — that is another way of asking the question, on the assumption that the way I live should reflect what I regard as important in life.
The use of the definite article in the question ‘What is the meaning of life?’ suggests that we are trying to find one thing that will answer the question — a miraculous truth in the light of which everything will make sense. But when we replace this question with its alternative form, ‘What is important in life?’, this presumption disappears. A nihilist might answer: nothing — although I suspect few nihilists ever really believe themselves. A more plausible answer is: there are many things that are important in life. Perhaps what these are will vary from person to person — what is important in life is, in this way, relative. But this merely raises another question. What is it for something to be important — whether for you, for me or someone else? And this is just a way of asking: what is value? What does it mean for something to have value?
The questions are the hard part. To even see that there is a question — there is the hardness, the difficulty, of philosophy. The answers: they are a mixed bag. It is rare for them to be unutterably complex or fiendishly difficult. On the contrary, Wittgenstein once claimed that the problem with philosophical truths is that, once you state them, they are so obvious that no one could ever doubt them. I think this claim is, to some extent, correct. But — and this is the strangest thing about the answers to philosophical questions — their banality is no guarantee of their intelligibility. To understand a philosophical answer, you need to understand how to work it out yourself. To do that, you need to see where it comes from. You need to understand the force and urgency of the problem to which the answer is a solution; you need to understand the allure of the alternative solutions to this problem, and perhaps have succumbed to one or more of these alternative solutions at some point. In this respect, philosophical answers are utterly unlike the answers of any other domain of human knowledge or inquiry. If someone tells me that E = mc2, for example, I might say, ‘Thank you very much; I now know that the energy contained in a body is the product of its mass and the square of the speed of light.’ To understand it, I do not need to know how to derive this equation — which is fortunate, as I haven’t the faintest idea. Philosophical answers are not like this. Unless you know how to work them out, you will not really understand them.
When the philosophical question is a question about life — about what is important or valuable in life — the power and urgency of the problem is something that you have to feel in your life. The allure of alternative solutions to the problems, the succumbing to this allure, these are things you feel and do in your life and not, fundamentally, in your head. Unless you can feel the problem of the meaning of life — the problem of value in life — you will not understand any answer that might be given to it.
In the end, it is not in our minds that this answer is to be found. It is in our blood and bones that we understand value. It is only through living that you feel the problem of life’s meaning. Through living you come to understand what life has in store for you. You understand this not just intellectually; you feel it viscerally, you taste it, an aching in the bones and a sourness in the blood. An answer to the question of what is valuable in life would tell us what redeems this life — what makes it worth living. To understand redemption in life, you need to understand from what, precisely, life needs redeeming. This is what you understand when you feel yourself growing old, feel your blood become thin and cool, feel your physical and intellectual powers begin to slide. If there is a meaning in this life, there is something that makes it, as Albert Camus once put it, ‘worth the trouble’. That is why the question of the meaning of life — of value in life — is the most important question there is.
There is a Platonic dialogue — The Meno — in which Plato teaches a slave boy, the eponymous Meno, some of the theorems of Euclidean geometry. Plato argues that he has not taught Meno anything new, but merely helped him remember something that he once knew but had forgotten. We are all born with this sort of knowledge, Plato claimed, but forget it because of the trauma of birth. ‘Anamnesis’ is the name he used for this process of remembering what we once knew. For Plato, the idea of anamnesis was bound up with the Pythagorean idea of reincarnation, and I certainly do not believe in that. But the systematic forgetting of some of the most important truths, I think, is real. It happens not when we are born, but as we grow up. Any child knows value — they know what is important in life — although they do not know that they know it. And they know it in the way children know things, a kind of knowing that the adult finds very difficult, and has to learn all over again. Once I knew value. I knew it in my body and not in my mind, and so I did not know that I knew it. Running takes me back to this thing that I once knew but had to forget. Running puts me in contact once more with a certain kind of value that is easily lost to the adult. Running is a way of remembering — a way that the body remembers what the mind could not.
On the long run, there is an experience of freedom, of a certain sort — the freedom of spending time with the mind. On the long run, also, there is a certain type of knowledge: a kind of knowing that once permeated the lilting days of a life that was still young. This is knowledge of value, of what is important in life and what is not. The experience of freedom I find on the long run is not the experience of being able to do whatever I want. It is not the freedom that goes with absence of constraint. On the contrary, one of the things the long run teaches me is just how far I am removed from freedom in this sense. There is, however, another kind of freedom: a freedom that goes with knowing, a freedom that accompanies the absence of doubt.
The speeches are over. There is the gun, and we go … absolutely nowhere. We’re ten thousand back, and it’ll take almost ten minutes for us to get across the starting line. A cheerful older gentleman who has been standing next to me in the corral, who told me his goal time was two hours — I did a double take until I realized he was running the half marathon not the full — whips off his tracksuit top and throws it backwards over his head into the crowd. He turns around to watch the result of this, and cackles when he sees, in the meagre light afforded us by the streetlamps, the confusion of the person on whom it has landed. So that’s how you stay warm: you bring clothing with you that you don’t plan on ever seeing again — next year, maybe. There is a lot of hooting, hollering, yipping and possibly even a little yodelling. We start moving forward. There is a shuffling walk, which slowly, almost imperceptibly, turns into a scuffling jog.
At some, perhaps not entirely determinate, point in this process, we shall find what we might think of as my first step in my first marathon. Here it is — I push off on my left foot and as I do, I find myself thinking: that is it. It has begun. That is the magical thing about first steps. Before that step I was outwardly calm but inwardly riddled with doubt: psychologically, a shifting, wriggling frame of confusion and uncertainty. Will my calf hold together? Will I be able to go the distance? How painful will this be? How humiliating? But with that first step, all my doubts are washed away by the quiet calm of certitude. According to Descartes, and a tradition instigated by him, to know something is to be certain of it, to have no doubts about it. We sometimes talk of being ‘free of doubt’, and I think there is a deep truth contained in this expression. Freedom and knowledge are closely entwined. The calm, quiet certitude that washes over me as I take this first step is the experiential form of a certain kind of knowledge. If I were more influenced by Spinoza, as I was when I was a younger man (and who, when they are young, could fail to be influenced by Spinoza?), then I might have been tempted to describe this understanding as the knowledge of how things have to be, of how things must be. But that would not be quite correct. Even as I take this step, I understand all too well that things did not have to be this way. My certitude consists in an understanding of how things should be rather than how they must be. But ‘should’ is a value term: a term that prescribes rather than describes. The experience of how things should be is an experience of value: an experience of what is important and, correlatively, implicit in the experience, an understanding of what is not. When the terror of doubt and indecision turns to calm, quiet, certainty, this is grounded in an experience of value.
As I take this first step, I understand that whatever happens today, however far I get, I should be here. I am doing what I should be doing. The experience of freedom I find on the long run is, in fact, the experience of a kind of value that I once knew but came to forget. Running is the embodied apprehension of this value. The first step is taken. The long run begins. I hope.