Something out there was ready to explode. Outside my window, Philadelphia slept under a blanket of November grey, but in the cold morning quiet, you could hear a sizzle beneath the silence. There was an unsteadiness in the city air, as if a far-off storm was collecting itself and turning for here. I woke and laced up my sneakers and hurried out the door, and I followed a hum that built to a buzz that reared up and roared as I turned a corner and discovered the starting line, where a nervous cloud hovered above a shuffling throng of thousands. I shouldered myself into position, my feet pushing through a mud of nerves and anticipation, the tension squeezing us all breathless until bang, the morning came unstuck and the crowd poured forth. And it was time for me to do what I had been training to do for years. I stretched, reached, and crack, the vented widemouth came unstuck and the lager poured forth. Beer always tasted better on race day.
As I guarded my plastic cup of Heineken from the outstretched hands of passing runners, I began to wonder where tailgating a marathon ranked on my life’s list of sins against fitness. I recalled the five-on-five basketball tournament that I played with a Marlboro Light clenched in my teeth, the NordicTrack I left in the box, and the time I forgot my golf shoes but remembered the cooler. There was the morning I set out for a run, ran straight to the corner deli for a bacon and egg sandwich, then returned home where my wife asked how my run was, to which I replied, “Good.” As I watched the marathoners’ glistening legs and bony frames bound past me, I imagined myself bare-chested in front of a mirror, pondering the precise definition of cleavage, eyeing a belly that seemed to spill forth like a fallen soufflé. I thought of my blood pressure that rivaled a day trader’s, and my total cholesterol that would be admired as a batting average. I listened as thousands of heels slapped the asphalt, sneakers that were snug and quick and light as slippers, while mine were four years old and in good enough shape to be returned for store credit. I had danced with physical wellbeing in my life, but they were wild and fleeting tangos, and never did fitness feel farther away than on the sidelines of the Philadelphia marathon, where I chewed my bratwurst and understood that, although I was separated from the racers by a thin yellow rope, our two worlds were galaxies apart.
26.1 to Go is a quest to close that gap, and to make amends. This endeavor, and this blog, is about a gang of outsiders taking a journey into the dark heart of fitness, a group of tenderfoots on a trip to a strange world where people run without panic or pursuit. Accompanied by a team of like-minded road running novices, I will endeavor to understand why so many people choose to imitate a two thousand year old trek traveled by a runner who dropped dead at the finish line. Millions of Americans sacrifice their knees, dollars, and free hours in order to travel in a circle at a slightly elevated rate of speed, and the causes of this condition have too long been ignored. Distance running has seen an increase in devotion unparalleled in the history of sport—over the last thirty years, participation in the Boston Marathon is up an astounding 6,000%--and somebody needs to explain to the rest of us, to the sprawling mass of the sedentary, just why that is. Some people run marathons for cancer or diabetes or animal rights. I’m running for anyone who has ever lied to get out of a 5K, or gotten a get well card from their gym, or has ever felt winded after watching a Bowflex infomercial. I’m running for the fitness fallen. For seven months, my friends and I will drag our bodies across thousands of miles of pavement, covering enough distance to have jogged ourselves across the country, all in search of an answer to the greatest mystery in modern sport:
I want to know what the runners know. And in less than a year’s time, I hope that a few more of us will.
So in order to pry open the inner workings of fitness, expose its hard underbelly, testify to its prophecies, and take its finish-line epiphanies to task, a group of first-timers are going to cross that thin yellow line and take a spot on the starting line at the 34th International Paris Marathon on April 11, 2010. While distance running is the ultimate in athletic solipsism, this story will be about the hopefuls, the champions, the coaches, trainers, dieticians, doctors, and scientists of the running world. On this blog (and in the forthcoming title from Gotham/Penguin Books), you will get to know a group of committed strivers as we work our way to Paris, and you will be able to follow our progress as team members grow, change, quit, and wrestle with a new pastime.
In just forty years, distance running has gone from an obscure New Zealand import to perhaps the most popular fitness activity in the country (jogging in America claims to trace its roots to a 1962 rendezvous between the University of Oregon track team and a New Zealand running club). 26.1 to Go will explore that phenomenon, and in doing so, tell a story larger than that of sneakers and starting lines. As one segment of our society swells to new widths, a whole other side of America is determined to accomplish a feat of endurance once considered reasonable for only an elite few. How has the marathon become the stuff of school teachers and accountants and golf writers—how did 26.2 miles become a hobby? Is it the endurance high or the joy of accomplishment? Is there actual fun being had behind those zombie gazes cast downward at the asphalt? Is the marathon a chance to achieve something genuine in a culture that makes us all want to achieve, but gives us few avenues to do so? Is it the finish line flash of celebrity? A chance to leave a stamp, to do the uncommon, to say I was here, I ran, I have the medal? Is it a chance to blast through the noise and artifice of our world and feel something absolutely real? Or is it just a chance to hang around midriffs and curvy lycra? 26.2 miles feels like plenty of space to figure it out.
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