“So you want to do it?” Mike asked in an over-excited way, like a kid on a school yard planning to jump off the roof and looking for accessories.
I smiled, but secretly I almost threw up.
Run another marathon?
“Uh, no,” I told him, and he looked disappointed. “I want to live.”
Mike works with me and he took up running several months back because he doesn’t like his knee caps and liked the thought of heat stroke combined with the kind of hyperventilation that putting one foot in front of the other for multiple miles brings on. Now he has gotten it in his head that running a marathon might be a cool idea. He’s already registered for the Marine Corps Marathon in D.C.
I wish him all the luck in the world and hope he survives.
I’ve run a marathon before, several years ago when I was younger and lacked common sense, or a cluster of brain cells. One day I will run another one and have sworn to complete the New York Marathon. But it takes a certain mindset to convince yourself that going out and pounding yourself for 26 miles is a sane idea.
And it also takes the kind of innocence of that kid on the schoolyard who believes that jumping off a one-story building somehow might be a good idea, and won’t shorten him by 18 inches.
That’s the way I was when I first got the cockamamie idea in my head. Twenty-six miles? Ah, what the heck. I’ve driven that far.
Little did I know that once you get about 15 miles into it, it no longer has the same kind thrill you expected. At mile 22 your brain has turned into overcooked broccoli and you’re threatening legal action against yourself. Find a way to finish and then you spend the next three days in a fetal position uttering strange variations of “mamma” with every foul word you’ve ever learned.
Running, itself, is an odd sport, remarkably addictive for something that originated thousands of years ago when our ancestors decided there had to be a better way of evading saber tooth tigers than just lying there and getting eaten.
But I love it. I love the so-called runner’s high you get, which many people attribute to endorphins, but in truth is just a lack of oxygen getting to the brain. Running has the same effect on you as sniffing glue, only you don’t get in trouble for it — people actually encourage it!
It’s not necessarily fun, like soccer or surfing. Sometimes the only highlight is seeing a squirrel or women who whistle sarcastically at you. (I pretend they find me cute and aren’t just making fun of the fact that I look like I’ve been stuck in a microwave or that my legs are skinny like bread sticks.)
Yet, there’s something about the agony, the abuse, the sheer masochism about running that makes it a fantastic sport. It’s you and your legs getting up off the sofa and going out unassisted to pound the pavement. The more extreme it gets the better: I ran cross country for a year in college and our coach (who shall remain nameless since this probably violated the Geneva convention) once took us out to the beach, had us each tie a rope from our waist to a tire, and then drag it down the beach at full speed for a mile.
It was excruciating but also a story I will be telling until the day I die. Just like running that marathon.
In that sense, running is like getting electrocuted: If you survive, it makes the world’s greatest story and is always capable of sparking reactions like, “Wo! You sure are an idiot!”
Run another marathon right now? Uh, no. But as soon as that cluster of brain cells weakens its grip on me, I’m sure I’ll get back out there and start training again.