Running with the Pack (20 page)

It is common to think of life as a process of development. In growing older, we will come to understand what is important in life. With age comes wisdom, and if we are sufficiently assiduous and skilled in the use of this wisdom, perhaps even the meaning of our lives will reveal itself to us. Youth, on the other hand, is the time of immaturity: an existential prequel whose importance lies only in equipping us for the adult life to come. It is paradoxical then, as Moritz Schlick once remarked, that ‘the time of preparation appears as the sweetest portion of existence, while the time of fulfilment seems the most toilsome'.

This paradox is, perhaps, a sign that we have misunderstood youth. It is a sign that what is important in life is not a destination towards which we are heading, but is scattered around a person's life, and exists most fundamentally in these moments when joy warms us from the outside in — moments of dedication to the activity and not the outcome, to the deed and not the goal. Joy is the recognition of something that is worth doing for its own sake; it is the recognition
of intrinsic value as it makes itself known in a person's life. It is true that these moments of joy cluster together most noticeably in youth. Children and their dogs are much better at knowing what is important in life. They understand that the most important things in life are the things that are worth doing for their own sake. And the things not worth doing for their own sake are not worth doing at all. They know intrinsic value instinctively, effortlessly. For me, it was hard work. It has taken me half a lifetime to rediscover what I once must have known. Even now, there are times when I find it difficult to understand this joy, let alone feel it. In these times, I understand my fall from Grace, my exile from Eden.

Nevertheless, there are also times when my exile is temporarily rescinded. ‘The meaning of life is youth,' Schlick once wrote. But youth, in the relevant sense, is not a matter of chronology, of one's biological age. The lines on one's face do not necessarily banish a person from the garden of youth. Youth exists wherever action has become play. Youth exists whenever there is doing for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. Youth exists whenever there is dedication to the deed and not the goal. With this dedication comes joy, because joy is nothing more than the recognition of intrinsic value in life. This is a life where we all return to the
maïre
. And what redeems this life is the intrinsic value we find in it, if we know how to look.

7

The Borderlands of Freedom

2011

The race started around eight minutes ago, and I'm just crossing the starting line. I was about ten thousand back in a field of 20,000 plus — at least, that was the rumoured figure circulating in starting corral G — and there are still plenty of people behind me. I hope it stays that way. As they say: there's always someone slower than you — but they might not have shown up today. The shuffling walk turns to a scuffling jog, I cross the starting line and then … I have to quickly make my way across to a strip of grass at the side of Biscayne Boulevard. It's not the calf- so far, so good with that — it's my bladder. Dehydration increases the risk of cramp, which increases the risk of a muscle tear, so I made sure I drank numerous bottles of Gatorade between my 4 a.m. train ride and the 6.15 a.m. start. So far, everything was going precisely as planned, and as a consequence I was beginning to feel quite sanguine about my prospects today. On my final prerace visit to the Port-a-Loo, at a time when I was supposed to
be in the starting corral, the queues were so deep and were moving so slowly I had to relieve myself in Bayfront Park, in full view of Metro-Dade cops who would have, at the very least, Tasered me if I had done this in any other circumstances. I am far from alone on this little patch of grass by the starting line — there're probably around a hundred or so men and women. We were all hanging around in the starting corrals for more than thirty minutes, and many people seem to have had the same problem as me.

With the necessaries taken care of, I get back in the race and begin the gentle ascent of the slip road up onto the MacArthur Causeway. I've more or less reached my planned full marathon pace by now — I would estimate it to be a dizzying five and a half miles per hour — and, so far, the calf has held together: now for the first tricky bit. The first part of the MacArthur Causeway provides the biggest gradient on the entire course. Some people decide to walk up it — which makes perfect sense: the small amount of time you save by running is more than offset by the extra energy you expend, energy that might be crucial from, say, twenty miles and beyond. I'm quite happy to run up it. My problem is different. I don't want to run down the other side. The calves have to bear more weight during a descent. That, of course, was how my long history of calf issues began. No one could compare the gentle gradient on the MacArthur Causeway with the hills of Kinsale, of course. But my most recent calf affliction announced itself when I was running down a tiny, barely discernible, slope where the road had passed over a canal. So I am taking no chances. I knew this was coming — I have studied the course video obsessively since I picked up my registration package on Friday — and I've always planned to walk down it. And that's what I do. When I get to the
bottom, calf still in one piece, it feels like victory. I'm starting to believe that everything is going to be okay, at least as far as my calf is concerned. My general fitness and ability to run 26.2 miles — that's an entirely different matter.

As I see it, I have two strikes against me at this point. First, my training was severely truncated — I have about half of the recommended first-time marathoner's training under my belt, and I have been able to do nothing for the last two months. Second, I am not a good runner. I have no natural aptitude to fall back on. All I can do, therefore, is be smart, in other words ultra conservative, at least for the first half of the race. So I tuck in behind the 2.30 pace runners. This was not planned: before the race, I didn't even know there were such things as pace runners, let alone that they were kind enough to hold up signs for the entire race indicating the times they were running. What a wonderful idea — whoever first had it deserves canonization. I make myself as comfortable as I can behind the signs that read ‘2.30': the plan is now to stay there for the first 13.1. I lose them for a while at the other end of the MacArthur — there is another descent there, as we cross over into South Beach, and I walk that too. But after that, I speed up a little until I find them again, then just keep my nose down, drink four cups of water or Gatorade at every aid station — there is roughly one every mile from the three-mile mark on — and just generally relax and enjoy myself. As we enter South Beach, the new sun hangs low like a golden promise over the towered skyline. I am relieved, excited and happy.

I have lived in Miami for four years, but rarely ventured to South Beach, with its bars, restaurants and nightclubs — that's what happens when you have two young children and you are the sort of parent who has an unyieldingly authoritarian
attitude towards their 6 p.m. bedtime. In fact, as I run up Ocean Drive at around 7 a.m. on this cold — by Miami standards, it's around 18
^o
C — but bright morning, it occurs to me that this is probably only the third time I've been here. Here, there are lots of smiling faces lining the streets, shouting and hooting at everyone — me included! Apparently, it's encouragement. Americans like being encouraged and the louder the better. Me — not so much. No doubt it is a British thing. What am I supposed to do? I could ignore them — but that just seems rude and ungrateful. I could flash an appreciative smile at each of these shrill supporters, perhaps proffer some small waves or even high-fives; but that just seems distracting and onerous. I have enough to contend with already. I'm tempted to speed up a little, to get through this part of the race as fast as I can — increase the cadence to escape the stridence. But I know that would bring disaster later on. And so I take the first option: rudely and ungratefully onwards I puff and thud.

Up Ocean Drive, with its empty cafes and restaurants, east along some streets I don't know. North past Lincoln Road, more streets I've never seen before. Then we meet the Venetian Causeway that takes us away from the beach and back to Downtown. The Causeway is a series of short bridges interspersed with small islands. Over to my left, I can see the towering hotels that line Biscayne Boulevard — the finishing line of both the half and full marathons. Eight miles gone, five to go until the end of the half marathon. The pace runners, bless them both, are spot on. At around 2.20 clock time, I find myself at the 12.8-mile mark. Now it's decision time. I can stop at the half marathon. I'm registered for the full, and have been since my faux-gouty episode back in September. But stopping at the half is an available option — I think they would even give me a half-marathon finisher's medal.

A brief perusal of my condition yields ambiguous results. I am tired — there's no getting around that. I'm certainly not bone-weary: there's still some gas in the tank, but I'm not sure it's enough to see me through the next 13.1 miles. But I suspect this conscious appraisal is really epiphenomenal, merely a pretence in which my conscious mind likes to engage, a game it likes to play. I always knew, deep down, that unless my calf went, or my legs were about to give way under me, I was going to go on and attempt the full. It's the knowing: I want to know what will break me. I can just imagine myself during the next week if I stop here — hating myself for my contemptible caution: all week wondering ‘what if?' I would be insufferable. If I try and fail — if the second 13.1 is too much for me — then at least I'll know that I gave it everything I have, and I'll know exactly how far everything I have will take me. Sometimes it is enough to know.

The left lane turns off to the half-marathon finish and so I run down the right lane. The contrast is glaring. The half-marathon finish — that is a swarming lane of smiling faces and happy shouts, of fist pumps and raised arms, enveloped by the cheering throngs of friends and families. The marathon lane is largely empty, mostly silent: the road of the damned rather than the saved. I give Emma a quick call — my mobile phone was tucked away in my running belt for just this eventuality — and let her know not to bother coming in to meet me for another few hours. And then I run on over the 4th Street bridge to my fate.

I may not have been able to train for this marathon, specifically. But I have been doing the long run for many years. I did it at the beginning of December — twenty miles — and I did it back in France last summer, at least that run was not too far
away from twenty miles. And I've been doing it, off and on, all the way back to my days in Alabama. When the pack that ran with me was young, I would run long and hard, because that is what they needed. Sometimes they would wake me up in the mornings, bouncing off the walls and I knew we were going to run twenty miles today just for fun. As they grew old, our running would taper off — maybe five stolid daily miles. And after that, just gentle walks. When they die, the pack eventually becomes young once more and the cycle begins again. These two decades of running, even if intermittent, have got to count for something today, I tell myself, and I'm sure they will. But for how much, exactly, is something I am just going to have to find out.

When you are starting to run, or working your way back after a long lay-off, your run is likely to contain multiple episodes of what I, quite recently, decided to call the ‘Cartesian phase' — after the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes. According to Descartes, the body, which for Descartes' 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, made up 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.

The Cartesian phase and I go back many years together. Today it makes its first appearance — no doubt there will be others — sometime after the fourteen-mile marker. Just get me to fifteen, I tell my legs, then you can walk for a while. But of
course I must make sure I am just as much a liar today as I was in November, when I was working on getting my long run back up to twenty miles. There is nothing wrong with walking on the long run — at least as far as I am concerned, although others may disagree — as long as you absolutely have to. One way of approaching a marathon when one is in an inconveniently under-trained state is by deliberately inserting periods of walking into the race. For example, one might run for twenty minutes and then walk for five — that was one of the pieces of advice I was offered when I picked up my race packet on Friday — or, if you prefer, run for five minutes and walk for one. For some, this may be excellent advice but I do not think it will work for me. I'm far too undisciplined. Walking, for me, is simply too addictive. If I start walking now, I'm not sure I'll be able to start running again. There may come a point when I am going to have to walk. But I need to postpone that point as long as I possibly can. And so, sometime after the fourteen-mile marker, the lies begin. But who is the liar, and who is the lied to? It certainly seems as if my mind is lying to my body. It is my body that is suffering. It is my body that needs convincing. But how can my mind lie to my body if they are not two different things? It was this kind of intuition that decisively set Descartes on his course.

In some ways, I suppose I should find these dualist intuitions surprising. For much of my professional life, dualist intuitions have simply been things to ignore. Descartes' dualism is beset with empirical and logical problems as long as one's arm. Few, these days, think that mind and body are two different types of being. Generations of philosophers have made it their business to construct persuasive arguments against dualism, or failing that to invent catchy slurs —
for example, ‘the ghost in the machine' — with which to disparage the view. Descartes cannot be right. I know that. And yet sometimes on the long run I can almost believe he is. Nevertheless, erroneous or not, these dualist intuitions, these Cartesian meditations if you like, are just the beginning. The illusion of spirit is merely one way that the long run can unfold.