SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

Quarter-Mile Intervals Aren’t Necessary, But They Are Surely Wonderful for Building Character.

Part 1 of Dr. Sheehan’s book appeared in our last issue.

Three RUNNING AND WALKING

Why is running the best exercise?

1. It is the easiest to do. Running requires a minimum of equipment, no companions and no athletic ability. It can be done almost any time and any place.

2. It is a physiologically perfect exercise. Running uses the large thigh and leg muscles in a rhythmic fashion at a personally controlled rate. This is the requirement for safely developing cardiopulmonary function.

3. It has predictably good results on the body and mind. Running has been proven to (a) increase cardiopulmonary fitness, (b) reduce weight, (c) lower blood pressure, (d) decrease the cholesterol and triglycerides associated with coronary disease, and (e) help psychological stability.

Why is running not the best exercise?

Only 10-15% of people are natural runners who will stick to it. Others who are more athletic and muscular will run only as part of another sport. Those who tend to be more broad than long will not run at all. Sport to them is walking, cycling, skating, skiing or swimming.

How will I know if running is my exercise?

If you ran in school, tend to be narrow rather than wide, have small wrists and weigh in pounds twice your height in inches, you will probably like to run. If you are a loner, have few friends and have been described as a dreamer, you can go out and buy your shoes right now.

What shoes should I use?

Shoes are the runner’s only significant expense, and should be good ones. Each major brand (Adidas, New Balance, Nike, Puma, Tiger, etc.) puts out a good training shoe. What you look for is a good-sized heel with a strong heel counter, a multi-layered sole (to handle shock) and a solid shank. The ones I have used and recommend are the Puma 9190, Adidas Country, Nike Cortez or Tiger Corsair and the New Balance Trackster III.

What clothes should I wear?

Winter training requires a base of long-johns or thermal underwear. Over this, cotton turtleneck shirts are usually enough, although a light nylon rain jacket also may be needed. Avoid bulky garments. Use several light layers instead. A wool ski mask and thermal mittens or socks for the hands complete the outfit. In the summer, cotton shirts should be worn and nylon avoided. For socks, the best are the tennis anklets now available with and without pompons.

How should I regulate my diet?

Solids should be avoided for 2-3 hours before running. In very hot weather, 10 ounces of one of the “Ade” drinks should be taken within 10 minutes of the start and every 20 minutes thereafter. Fluids with a high concentration of sugar should be taken well diluted. Otherwise, they will cause loss of fluid into the gut and bring on diarrhea.

How should I start my running program?

Running, whether you are in your first day or 10th year, should be done at a conversational pace—a speed at which you can talk with a companion. And the first 10 minutes should be even slower to allow you to reach your second wind. In the beginning, this may mean only a brisk walk or at best the old reliable scout pace—S0 paces walking, alternating with 50 paces jogging. As time goes by, the effort will remain the same, but your minutes per mile will improve steadily.

How far should I run?

Lifetime runners should not be concerned with speed or distance. Runners deal in moderate effort (determined by the “talk test’”’) over increasing periods of time. Start with 5-10 minutes every other day and work up to 30 minutes 3-4 times a week. This will achieve most of the results enumerated in question one.

What injuries can I expect, and how can I prevent them?

Ninety-five percent of runners’ overuse injuries (stree fracture, heel spur, runner’s knee, etc.) are due to weak feet plus muscle imbalance. Running shortens the calf, hamstring and low-back muscles, and it also causes relative weakening of the abdominal muscles. Support for the feet and daily exercises should give you permanent pain-free running.

What is gained by running more than 1.5-2 hours a week?

A good question. Dr. Thomas Bassler of the American Medical Joggers Association states that only by running an hour a day six days a week can you become immune to coronary disease. However, one who embarks on these efforts tends to leave other loyalties behind. He becomes a completely new person living a completely new life-style. Whether this is good or ill is at all times debatable. Running can break up families, destroy friendships and kill ambition. It can also, of course, rebuild families, create new friendships and inspire ambition.

Take a 30-60-minute run every other day. On the off days, try to fit in token 15-minute workouts. And if a leg or muscle injury develops, take a 30-minute swim until the injury disappears.

Sound impossible, or if possible something which only top-notch long distance runners would attempt? Not at all. Each day before or after work, thousands of individuals put on a sweat suit and a pair of sneakers or running shoes and take to the roads or country for an exhilarating jaunt. Although many of these runners are in training for weekend long distance races, the majority forget about the word training and are out for the fun of it. It’s amazing how the miles click by, especially if you’re running with a partner. I myself adhere to the 30-60-minute sessions and find that in addition to the fun aspect, the workouts lead to a slimmer figure, toned-up muscles, lower blood pressure, better sleep, greater work production and more relaxation.

I don’t suppose that the above benefits do much in the way of recruiting new members into the ranks of long distance runners. For the man who has done little in the way of activity after leaving the high school or college gym, the thought of running for 30-60 minutes straight is overwhelming—no matter what the rewards. Yet, what we are looking at in myself and others who do long distances every day is the end product of a program which may have started with a daily 10-minute walk mixed with slow jogging. Many people are already doing that without realizing that they’re on the first leg of what could become a daily 10-15-mile run. Why not find a walking or jogging partner in your neighborhood? You may find out that with time you will be running partners.

Starting a personal program of endurance training means following one general tule: “Train, don’t strain.” For example, don’t make the mistake of running up grades in the early sessions. I made that mistake. My over-enthusiasm resulted in a pull of the gastrocnemius muscle and my longest disability of four weeks.

The neophyte should start slowly by alternately walking and jogging a quartermile and then gradually building up to a mile after a period of about two weeks. At this point, start jogging a mile at a speed which would permit you to talk easily with a running companion. That pace may turn out to be quite slow for the first six to nine minutes, or until a “second wind” develops. Signaled by the onset of

sweating and a slowing of the respiratory rate, this new burst of energy or second wind will mean that you can try longer distances.

Running until the second wind develops is a sort of warmup exercise which signifies an ability of endurance. Elite athletes reach that stage in three minutes, but personally I feel it after six minutes like clockwork. Then I shift into high gear and start thinking of running 20 miles. However, this feeling of euphoria gradually fades as you put on running mileage. And then when you think you just can’t run another inch—after about 35 or 40 minutes—you get another lift which keeps you going for another 10-20 minutes.

Adolph Gruber, an Austrian long distance champion, once told me that anyone could run a marathon by observing this rule: “Hold back for the first seven miles, use it as a warmup, and then gradually increase your rate but never strain.” For the person just starting out, however, seven miles is in itself a marathon. But here’s some good news. Few of even the experienced runners try the marathon and most are content to get the physical and mental and spiritual benefit from an ordinary 30-60 minutes of motion.

Another trick to keep interest high in the early stages of a running program is to select different running routes. Bill Bowerman, who has been so successful in coaching track at Oregon University, has five or six different cross-country courses for his runners. Running the same route or track constantly can be boring and I frequently run different ways through my suburban town.

Dogs and cars are the main hazards, however. If you stick to the main roads, dogs don’t bother you. But you have to be especially careful of cars. One young member of our New York Road Runners’ Club was struck and killed one night while running near Kennedy Airport. And if you are going to run on the side roads, carrying a small stick, a cane or other visible object will usually discourage dogs.

Another precaution—don’t run on a full stomach. Wait at least two or three hours after a meal. And, if possible, visit the bathroom before starting the training session. If not, abdominal pain may develop, especially if you are determined to run over 8-10 miles.

Time of training is a matter of personal preference. However, in the hot weather and in periods of high humidity, morning or evening workouts would be better. If you’re not used to the heat, running in hot weather can lead to heat exhaustion or heat stroke. Because of the many problems associated with warm weather running, Ihave tried to get in workouts as close to 1 p.m. as possible in order to become acclimated. When acclimated, your sweat has a very low salt content and you can go long distances without using much water. In fact, I put most of it on my head and also douse myself liberally before starting to run. One has to be careful in a race that the spectators don’t get too enthusiastic in pouring water on you. If your shoes and socks get wet, you are a prime candidate for blisters.

Tea and honey is the accepted refreshment along the way, although I have found bouillon to be the best post-race drink, and probably orange slices are of some benefit. As few salt drinks are given along the way, some runners take them before the race. That has not been my practice, but I see no harm in it.

Cold weather requires special clothing. Thermal underwear is excellent. I also put on a pair of painter’s gloves and wear a headband to cover my ears. Painter’s gloves are inexpensive, but are quite warm and can be discarded in a long race at a trivial cost. Occasionally, in very cold weather I have used a ski mask. Also for very cold or rainy weather I have a light nylon parka which is rain-proof and retains body heat. Some people also use liniment on their legs in cold weather. I have found no particular advantage to that practice.

No matter how careful you are, you are bound to run into some injury. However, Ihave always maintained that a runner who trains and doesn’t strain automatically cuts down on the injury problem. My friend, Tom Osler, a leading eastern distance man, says that all injuries are unnecessary and result from carelessness or fatigue. It is the tired runner who makes a misstep and turns an ankle or gets

a bone bruised. Using slow warmups and avoiding speed in workouts usually cancels out muscle pulls, especially of the large thigh muscles, the quadriceps, the hamstrings and even the calf muscles.

When really serious injuries occur, head for the nearest swimming pool. Although I have had my share of injuries, I have maintained my overall condition by swimming (any style) for an equivalent time, usually 30 minutes, to my running workout. As I find swimming a bore and not quite the complete exercise, I am glad to get back to the roads.

Another hazard awaits the individual who is serious about his running. Many a runner has had to overcome the psychological roadblock resulting from the reaction of friends, neighbors and even family. However, as soon as they see that your running is not a passing fancy, jokes and jibes stop and you can go your way in peace. But I would urge you to have a private place for your gear. No wife wants her bedroom turned into a locker room.

If God had meant us to walk, He would have given us feet. And if He’d meant us to play, He would have given us a sport for these ordinary G.I. (God-issued) feet—a sport for rich and poor, for old and young and for either sex; a sport free from injury and interruption; a sport with physical exertion and mental relaxation; a sport that would not penalize ineptitude, but would reward excellence; a sport that is as natural as, for instance, walking.

There are a few thousand people who think this describes their sport: race walking. They are part of a ground-swell that may become the wave of the future.

The race walker, for one thing, can make do with ordinary feet. He can put miles and miles and miles on feet that would break down in any other sport. And he isn’t likely to get injuries further up in the kinetic chain that goes from foot to leg to knee to thigh to low back. Race walking is virtually injury free.

It is no coincidence that a race walker, not a runner, now holds the record for crossing the United States, on foot. Such a venture demands daily pain-free, uninterrupted mileage. And this is where race walking excels.

The main source of this protection is the walker’s swivel-hipped form. This prevents bounce and largely cancels out any shock on impact. His foot plant— starting with the heel, riding along the outside of the foot and delivering straight ahead—is just what the Creator planned. And the locked knee, a race walking requirement, keeps the kneecap in its appropriate place, the patellar groove, thus preventing the too-frequent knee problems seen in runners, tennis players and other athletes.

Why this form also wards off sciatica is more difficult to explain. It may be because, as one writer describes walking, “The hips slide into place under the torso, the belly muscles tighten, the spine straightens and toughens.” Whatever the reason, sciatica is almost unheard of in race walkers. And some who took up

the sport while in the throes of sciatic symptoms have had rapid cures once they started striding through their neighborhoods.

Indeed, race walking is a safe refuge for any injured athlete. It is the perfect sport for recuperating from some other sport. Much like an elderly lady of my acquaintance who was told whatever else was wrong with her would get better while she was having her cataracts out, the ailing athlete who turns to race walking will soon find himself on the mend.

The runner who switches to race walking for this therapeutic effect will discover other assets of the sport that he might not have suspected. A sure way to physical fitness, for instance. Work done by Dr. Michael Pollock at Wake Forest University has shown that it makes little difference on the cardiovascular fitness meter as to whether you run or walk. When intensity, frequency and duration are similar, results are similar.

Race walking, like other sports, takes technique, talent and character. And it has its own rewards. One of these must be in the realm of the mind and the spirit. Race walking has yet to be listed among the ways of reaching a natural high, the ways of altering your consciousness without drugs. But I suspect it is only a matter of time until some race walker mentions this. When he does, he will provide us with answers about other things than race walking.

After all, if God had meant us to understand this world, he would have made us view it at five miles an hour and given us the feet to hold that speed for eternity.

When some people seek contemplation or conversation, they prefer a seat near a roaring fire on a winter’s night. Others choose the seclusion of a sandy dune with the ocean murmuring in the background. Still others desire more commonplace settings. But always the conditions are the same: quiet, beauty, a sense of security and the world immobile.

This may be right for most people, but it’s not right for me. What I need is motion. Give me an hour’s run and I can rival Aquinas in contemplation and handle the great Sam Johnson in conversation. There on the roads, traffic or not, I have found inexhaustible supplies of two of the rarest commodities in the world today.

One of them, conversation, is rapidly becoming extinct. Man’s verbal instinct is to fight or preach. Argument is our forte, not dialogue. If that fails, we go into a sermon. Unfortunately, we find most other kinds of talk difficult. So what passes for dialogue or communication is the verbal ping-pong of the TV talk show, the small talk of the passing-in-corridor variety, or the chatter indulged in at innumerable cocktail parties.

At the least, however, this talking allows the use of the vocal cords and protects them from atrophy. This last is a present danger to the average US household

where the TV is on an estimated six hours a day—placing the average American family well on the way to becoming as mute as giraffes.

Running has none of these limitations or hazards. The second wind, which opens the runner to unknown and unsuspected physiological delights, also reveals unexpected insights into his psyche and his inner self. At the same time, it makes the conversational juices flow.

Ihave found this state of perspiration and euphoria can perform minor miracles, can eliminate those feelings of guilt which lead to sarcasm and bitterness, can rid me of the righteousness that produces sermons, and can even dispel the self-consciousness that limits me to talk about the weather and the state of my partner’s health.

Running frees me from the monosyllabic inanities of my usual tongue-tied state, liberates me from the polysyllabic jargon of my profession, removes me from the kind of talk which aims at concealing rather than revealing what is in my heart and what I mean to do and be.

For me, no time passes faster than when running with a companion. An hour of conversation on the run is one of the quickest and most satisfying hours ever spent. It is rivaled only by those solitary hours when I’ve been able to withdraw from the world and be inside myself. Such moments can open doors impervious to force or guile.

A midwestern psychiatrist once wrote me about a withdrawn patient who refused to talk to anyone about what was troubling her. It was only when they started to take runs around the institution’s grounds that she suddenly began to reveal her basic problems in great detail.

I’m ata loss to know why this happens to runners and those who run with us, but I surmise it has something to do with our deepest instincts about movement. That, at any rate, is the suggestion of Dr. Thomas Harris who wrote the best-seller, I’m OK—You’ re OK.

Harris divides each of us into three parts: Parent (which is life as it is taught by the rule book), Child (which is life as it is felt or wished) and Adult (which is life as we figure it out for ourselves).

The first Adult act we do, says Harris, is locomotion. The Adult in us begins when we take our first step—our first walk to think things over. From then on, we have the recording in our brain that movement is good, that it helps us to see more clearly what our problem is.

Harris is probably right. Walk to clear your mind. Run to clear your mind. If you do, you can see yourself, however imperfect, as a unique adult. When you accept imperfection in yourself, you accept others at face value, too.

My running friends call interval quarter-miles “character-builders.” William James, who once described character as completely fashioned will, would have

agreed. James saw effort as the thing we are. Strength, intelligence, wealth and good luck are all things we carry. The real question posed to us is what effort we can make.

Interval quarters ask that question. They are the little unnecessary exercises James recommended be done to make it easier for us to “will” what is right. And there are few things more unnecessary than interval quarters. These repetitions done at race pace with brief rest intervals serve no reasonable purpose.

Long slow distance, on the other hand, makes for aerobic fitness, an essential for physical ease and endurance, for general health and even longevity. Further, long slow distance allows moments when body and mind and will fuse in pure joy.

Interval quarters develop anaerobic fitness. They teach the body how to do without oxygen, how to handle lactic acid. This is a worthless skill unless you wish to earn your living running the mile. Only in the final stages do they harmonize the body and mind and will, and then it is a fusion bought with pain and frustration and hard work.

Where distance runs sometimes assure me of a heavenly home, interval quarters remind me that I am dust—a fallen creature who can do so much and no more. And in that, they become important. There may be no better cure for my despair than a 10-mile run, but there is certainly no better antidote to pride than a set of interval quarters.

The first one I find deceptively easy. There is almost no effort in the initial acceleration, the smooth stride down the backstretch, the lean into the turn and then simply holding form through the finish. The breathing quickly returns to normal. The pulse falls to 120. The two-minute wait seems too long.

Again, I’m on the line. Again, the easy first turn and the smooth backstretch. But now the turn is a strain and the finish seems farther away. This two minutes is just enough for breathing and pulse to reach the baseline.

Now the third one. This time I’m looser, my form is better, but the lactic acid is accumulating. Midway in the backstretch, my arms become heavy, my thighs tighten up. I manage to make the turn, but the run to the finish is as bad as an all-out race. Now the two minutes is not enough. I’m breathing 60 times a minute and don’t even bother to check the pulse.

Once more I start off. Once more the mysterious ease of the first 10 seconds, but from then on it is a struggle. With a full 220 to go, I feel as bad as I did at the end of the last one. My chest is rebelling at the impossible task of supplying air. The pain increases as I breathe faster and faster without catching up.

Somehow, I hold form. The heavy, cumbersome, slowly responding legs somehow manage a lift through the final yards. But now I am on my hands and knees, the stopwatch ticking away. I’m like a fighter taking his full nine count before getting off the canvas.

I get up with seconds to go and accept the final test. Within 50 yards, I begin to come apart. Lactic acid is engulfing me. The body has had enough, the will is ready to capitulate, the mind is seeking sanity. Somehow, I have to bring what is impossible and unnecessary and irrational into one “yes”—one affirmation that will carry me through to the end.

The only way I can succeed is by staking my whole self on the outcome. If Iam to enjoy freedom and ecstasy and fulfillment running on a country road, I must accept discipline and responsibility and commitment on a quarter-mile track. For those moments, the answer to the question “Who am I?” is in the pure and unnecessary effort of that final lap.

“T turned to teaching,” a college professor told a friend of mine, “for three reasons: June, July and August.” He was thinking of summer at Cape Cod—the sort of summer described by psychiatrist-author Robert Jay Lifton: “with the incomparable dunes and the magnificent ocean; the rhythm of the days and nights—the unparalleled purity of work and play devoid of interruptions, irrelevancies and necessities.”

A person could turn to running for those three reasons. June, July and August give you running at its best. Here also are those incomparable dunes and the magnificent ocean. The runner too can find the rhythm of the days and nights. And no one better can divest himself of interruptions, irrelevancies and necessities.

For him, the summer changes with the time of day. There is morning with the bright coolness of the new day and the smell of fresh cut grass. Or afternoon filled with a close, heavy heat and sweat dripping from elbow to wrist and salty in the eyes and mouth. And the soft warm evenings on a run to the beach and the first chilling plunge into the surf and the long floating wait under the surface feeling your body seal-like in the water.

And then there are the races. Monday evenings at Takanassee, the sun still in the west but more light than burning. Evenings perfect for an unhurried lazy hour of talking and getting your number and stretching and gentle ribbing and warming up. Then a cruel 20 minutes and a pleasant exhaustion. Evenings ending at the surfers’ beach and another swim more ritual than wanted.

And other races. The painful 10-milers. Westport, for instance. Battling distance and hills and heat and humidity. But no nectar the Greeks ever imagined could come up to a cold soda at the finish line at Westport.

So summer is the ultimate sensual experience in this basic human activity. Heat and humidity call upon the limits of human physiology. The runner in summer comes to know the human animal.

For that animal, June, July and August are white sand and green grass and blue ocean. For him, summer is shade and sun, the heaviness at noon and the cooling southeaster at four. But most of all it is water. Water taken in, water sweated out,

water jumped into, water thrown on you. It is rain water and sweat water and sea water. It is Coke and Gatorade and orange juice. It is cold showers and ice at the nape of your neck. It is dew in the morning and afternoon showers. In short, summer is an elemental primeval experience to the runner.

But now this season is over. The days are growing short. It is now dark before supper is done. Summer has gone. And with it the summer runs, the races, the expanded 24-hour cycle of light and dark, of days and nights. You might say the year is over—over for the college professor and the runner.

Or is it just the beginning? There are three other reasons for being a runner. September, October and November. Already there is a nip in the morning air. Soon the leaves will start to turn. Cross-country is just around the corner. Crosscountry. Its name hurls defiance to city and suburbs. Over the river and through the woods, says cross-country.

The lushness of summer is gone, the senses grow sharper. Autumn is all feeling and smelling. The crisp days. The cool nights. Now once more you need a warmup and a sweat suit. These are the best days for training. Forty-five to 50 degrees makes the body go best. And races everywhere every week. The runner knows again the sights and sounds and smells of Van Cortlandt and Warinanco, of Fairmount and Central Park. Autumn is no time to leave.

And what of December, January and February? Winter is a season of contrasts. Long runs in frigid weather and five-hour car trips for a five-minute race in a smoke-filled gym. Winter is all adrenalin and starters’ guns, bone-chilling afternoon runs and nights with afghans, quilts and comforters. The hot shower is back. Winter is a season no one would miss.

But if you stopped, it couldn’t be in springtime. March, April and May put it all together, the marathon and the mile. Boston and the Penn Relays back to back. Exhaustion two ways, the one aerobic and legs gone, the other anaerobic and the chest in agony. Spring is getting dressed in front of a TV camera in the Hopkinton Gym and in front of a girl sprinter having a thigh pull massaged in a Franklin Field dressing room. Spring is running with a thousand people at Boston and 10 in Philadelphia. Spring is wonderful and you must be there.

Four RUNNERS AND WALKERS

I am a runner. Years back, that statement would have meant little more to me than an accidental choice of sport—leisure-time activity selected for reasons as superficial as the activity itself.

Now I know better. The runner does not run because he is too slight for football or hasn’t the ability to put a ball through a hoop or can’t hit a curveball. He

doesn’t run primarily to lose weight or become fit or to prevent heart attacks. He runs because he has to. In being a runner, in moving through pain and fatigue, in imposing stress upon stress, in eliminating all but the necessities of life, he is fulfilling himself and becoming the person he is.

Ihave given up many things in this “becoming” process. None was a sacrifice. When something clearly became non-essential, there was no problem in doing without. And when something clearly became essential, there was no problem accepting it and whatever went with it.

Whatever I gave up—whatever innocent indulgences, ordinary pleasures or extraordinary vices—I gave up from some inner compulsion, not in a mood of self-sacrifice or from a sense of duty. I was simply doing what came naturally.

For the runner, less is better. The life that is his work of art is understated. His needs are little, his wants few: one friend, few clothes, a meal now and then, some change in his pockets, and for enjoyment his thoughts and the elements.

I see this simplicity as my perfection. In the eyes of observers, however, it appears completely different. My success in removing myself from things and people, from ordinary ambition and desires, is seen as lack of caring, proof of uninvolvement and failure to contribute.

So be it. A larger view of the world might include the possibility that such people are necessary. The runner who is burning with a tiny flame on some lonely road does somehow contribute. A world composed solely of runners might be unworkable, but a world without them would be unliveable.

When seen from car or bus or train, the pedestrian awalk or ajog seems much the same. Except for attire and speed, the walker and runner seem to be brothers under the skin—solitary and cerebral rebels in silent and meditative protest against our modern ways.

And, in part, this is true. Both walker and runner have found fulfillment in pursuits this jet-age world finds ludicrous. In an affluent society, we must have affluent leisure-time activities. If we are being paid in multiples of $5 an hour, our leisure time should be worth that and more. If we have invested in cars and boats and stereos and other marvels of leisure technology, our recreation must be spent with these expensive toys.

Paradoxically, the more time we have off, the less time we have to ourselves. Time and space are the new luxuries. And avocations like walking and running—which occupy so much time and demand so much open space—are too slow and costly for our high-priced leisure economy.

The runner and walker alone seem to find satisfaction in this slow transport of the human body across the countryside. Their delight with a pace of 3-10 miles an hour must be considered atavistic in times when cars cruise at 70 and planes at 600.

But despite these common joys, the runner and walker are entirely different persons. The runner is still concerned with the conquering of space and time. He logs miles the way lesser men build their savings accounts. He has 50-mile weeks and 100-mile weeks and 150-mile weeks. He runs with a goal and a purpose, training himself with gradually increasing loads, preparing himself for the ultimate effort, trying to reach his own perfection.

All of this calls for constant attention—attention to breathing, to arm movement, to the rhythm of the thighs, to the acceleration of the straightened leg. These details must continually occupy him, for only through this unnatural awareness can he attain the classical yet instinctual form of the champion.

The walker is past all this. For him, observation and thought dominate. His qualifications, according to Emerson, include vast curiosity, good speed, good silence and an eye for nature. Like Hawthorne, the walker looks for enough to feed the human spirit for a single day. Like Hawthorne, he is a peaceful outlaw “plunging into a cool bath of solitude.”

If this suggests that walkers are mature men with a capacity for observation, men with empathy for their environment, it is because it always has been so. Walkers have been the philosophers, the thinkers, the artists of their age. The Greeks had their peripatetic (walk-around) school of philosophy set up by Aristotle. And Demosthenes was said to have perfected his elocution while walking the beach. The most ardent of more recent walkers was the poet Wordsworth, who was said to have logged 175,000 miles during his daily 3-4-hour jaunts. This is a mark possibly equaled by Thoreau but few others.

It was Thoreau who wrote, “I think I cannot preserve my health or spirits unless I spend four hours a day sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields.”

Health and fitness, then, are part of the values of walking. But for intellectual creativity and enjoyment, walking is unsurpassed. “In walking,” wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, “the will and the muscles are so accustomed to working together and perform their task with so little expenditure of force that the intellect is left comparatively free.”

Where all other athletes must be in attention to the way they move, the walker can retire into a reverie of complete detachment. The walker can find his inner world (and outer world, too) no more than a short stroll from home. He steps out his front door, views the universe and knows it is good. The walker has found the peace that the runner still seeks.

While on a mid-morning run, I had a narrow escape from serious injury. A driver coming up behind me saw me in his path at the last possible second, and by maximum use of his brakes stopped in time. The reaction of a group of teenagers closeby was hilarity. They found this near-catastrophe highly amusing.

I wasn’t surprised. The runner knows of man’s inhumanity to man first-hand. Taunts, bottles and other objects are thrown at him from passing cars. Some drivers deliberately backfire as they go by, or even try to run him down. A few runners have actually been set upon and beaten up.

Why is this? Why is the runner a lightning rod for the anger and aggression and violence of others? Why does this hapless, vulnerable non-combatant bring out these qualities in his fellow men?

Precisely because the runner is nobody’s fellow man, and his fellow men know it. There is a metaphysical lawlessness about running. The runner puts himself above law, above society. He is a law unto himself. And men in gangs and crowds and mobs know this and react accordingly.

The runner follows no one’s law but his own. He cares for little but the workings of his own mind and body. He would, as one runner told me, rather give up his best friend than give up running. He cares even less for the institutions that protect and support him. He despises authority and, if anything, agrees with Auguste Comte, who wrote that participation in government is fundamentally degrading.

He further alienates those who see the crowd as carnival where everyone joins in, becoming one happy, amorphous glob. The runner is an ascetic. Pleasure is painful to him. Singing and dancing and even talking to another human being are avoided at all costs.

When he runs on the roads, he is making a comment about life. He is, in effect, criticizing the life-style of everyone who sees him. He may not want to do this, but he does. He is putting down those who smoke and drink and socialize and call everyone by their first name. He has given up on that world and those in it, and has gone inside himself. No wonder those who live by the rules, or live by community, feel threatened by him.

Seen this way, what happens to runners is the just wrath of a society pushed too far. Those who believe we should all be one, as citizens or brothers, see the runner as a loner who will never contribute to the common good. That, they say, is man’s real inhumanity to man. And they may be right. In this world, no one is innocent.

What Jim Bouton’s Ball Four did for baseball and Dave Meggysey’s Out of Their League did for football, Hal Higdon’s On the Run from Dogs and People has done for long distance running.

Not that Higdon has a best-seller on his hands. Distance running is not a spectator sport, which limits his audience. Besides, he has not spiced it up with revelations about drugs and sex, and the only four-letter word which recurs with any frequency is “pain.”

But he has accomplished what he set out to do. He has explained these healthy, happy, somewhat remote and more than a little peculiar runners to themselves and their fellow citizens.

This explanation is made easier because Higdon is himself the prototype distance runner. Which is to say that he has made steady progress since his college days as a lean, hungry and mediocre miler to his present status as a lean, hungry and mediocre marathoner (although he did once finish fifth at Boston).

He also went through the necessary conversion from dilettante to true believer, but only after he had sunk, so to speak, to the gutter—stopping after 14 miles in his first Boston.

“At the age of 26,” he writes, “I found I was a quitter.” Route 9 from Hopkinton to Boston became his Road to Damascus. There the dilettante died and the true believer, the fanatic, the free man, was born.

Now in his 40s and the distance runners’ author-in-residence, Higdon tells in his and their own words what manner of men they are and why they act the way they do. Characteristically, he belittles the importance of running in his introduction. He leads a balanced life, he says.

“Running occupies but one hour of the day. Many people spend that much time working on crossword puzzles.” But no one is likely to accept the sophistry that running is simply an incidental part of Higdon’s Good Life. By the same standard, Sir Laurence Olivier spends only an hour or so a day in the theater.

This explanation won’t wash, and Higdon doesn’t really expect us to believe it. It is normal for the runner to be subtle. He hates the obvious, or to be obvious, which is one of the reasons running on the road in sight of his neighbors bothers him.

What should be obvious is the philosophy of these introverts: “I run, therefore Iam.” And that, explicit or not, is the message of Higdon’s book. The distance runner, he tells us, is using his sport to survive in a hostile, competitive world he didn’t make and is not made for him.

It also is apparent on these pages that this survival means growth, and the peculiar phenomenon of growth with age. Age, it seems, holds no terrors for these thin, bony people with their alert, bird-like faces. For them, youth has no special charm.

What these cadaveric specimens dread are such things as forcible socializing (they adjust to stress by withdrawal), encounters with dogs (they make bad initial impressions, especially with animals) or police (they usually have had inferior feelings before authority figures since childhood), and aggression (they are hypersensitive to pain, both psychic and physical, and would rather run themselves to oblivion than be punched in the nose).

Where, then, is happiness for these late-maturing running machines?

The backbone of the runner’s day and life is that daily workout—Higdon’s “only one hour.” Some run marathons because, as one runner stated, “I forget how terrible the last one was.” But everyone runs workouts because they remember how pleasant or exhilarating or relaxing or rewarding the last one was.

This is why runners find contemplation, identity and a degree of happiness in those long, solitary hours on the road. Unfortunately, they have a genius for being misunderstood and rarely express these thoughts except under pressure.

Higdon tells of one such incident. An Ohio runner got some icy stares while passing a congregation leaving a church service one Sunday morning. He finally said to one church-goer, “Look, I’ve seen more of God in the last seven miles than you’ll see in that church the rest of your days.”

me “s

Michael Hughes

“The introduction to the Mass of the Runner,” said the Jesuit seated at the living room window overlooking the ocean and the dunes, “will be from a passage by Amby Burfoot.”

The distance runners of every age strewn on chairs and stairs and floor gave a sigh of assent. They conjured up the figure of the stork-like Burfoot as he won the Boston marathon in 1968.

“Trun,” the non-running Jesuit read, “because I enjoy it—not always, but most of the time. I run because I’ve always run—not trained, but run.”

Beyond the priest in slacks and sweater, the runners could see the narrow boardwalk where they had run five miles to start the celebration.

“What do I get?” The words of Burfoot, a Connecticut Yankee, came in the Boston accent of the priest. “Joy and pain. Good health and injuries. Exhilaration and despair. A feeling of accomplishment and a feeling of waste. The sunrise and the sunset.”

The first hymn followed. It was James Taylor’s “On a Country Road.” The young knew the words. The elders knew the feeling. The congregation of loners were beginning to come together. Showered and content after the run and a festive meal of hamburgers and Coke, they were bound by one tie: running.

Tell me a man is a runner, I thought, and I know more about him than if you said he was a Christian. Say he is a football player and I know more about his creed than if you told me he was an agnostic. Tell me he plays the horses and it says more than the fact that he’s an American.

Why do people run? The pain, the pleasure, the sunrise, the sunset, said the Jesuit, are enough to answer why we do anything. Love, marry, work, bear children, raise families.

“Ts running,” he asked, “merely a symbol?”

The runners attempted to answer. “I ran away from things all my life before I started running,” said one. “Now I’m happy and I don’t know exactly why.” Another, presently injured, said he had been unable to replace running in his daily life. Others saw themselves as different, more complete. One looked to the day of no more competition, when there would be no winning or losing, just running and the enjoyment of it.

The priest blessed the bread and wine. There was silence and a rush of feeling.

The Mass was ending, and the runners rose to greet each other. Men, it is said, live together and die alone. Runners live alone and die or suffer together. Only after a race does their reserve dissolve. In that common agony, they can reveal themselves to each other.

“We are completely happy,” said someone near me, “doing something that would drive other people crazy.” And vice versa, it seems.

“Go in peace,” said the Jesuit. And we did. We truly did.

Five RACING AND CHASING

The race is the beauty part. Practice is fun, and laughs, and even tough with those interval halves. And there are those days when you don’t even know you are running, like when you drive to work and don’t remember passing familiar places along the way. Practice can soothe you or exhaust you, but it’s never the same as the race.

The time you put it all together is the race. For one thing, there’s the anxiety, the apprehension that must be minimized but not avoided. Or else you come to the starting line completely flat. But you can get too much of that peculiar empty feeling—the tightness in the stomach, the urge to yawn. The answer is enough adrenalin but not too much.

Next comes the warmup. An easy six minutes and the sweating starts. You search for indications. Will the day be good or bad? The warmup tells nothing.

On the starting line for that one silent moment. Then the start. Always faster than you remembered. The mind goes through the instructions. Relax. Push off with each stride. Run from the hips. Belly breathe.

At the half-mile mark, you settle for a pace that keeps breathing just bearable. Everything makes a difference. Every change in footing—grass, cinder, dirt or stone. A grade that would escape a surveyor adds its toll. The environment occupies you completely. Wind speed and direction, temperature and humidity can either aid or hinder. Forget the watch; the course runs different every time.

A mile past and the first hill. Quite suddenly every step is an exquisite effort. The slope steepens and each foot takes its interminable time. The top comes and there is relief to burning chest and aching legs. Now they come in series. Toil up and fly down. Then out onto the flats for the three-mile mark. There are the stop watches and your friends—an occasional face sharply seen. The hearing is keener than the eye. “They’re dead up ahead. Get tough.”

You’re alone again, remembering now is the time to make your move. Relax, the race is in front of you. So you push off. Run with your thighs. Use that trailing leg. And now comes Cemetery Hill with its easy winding approach. And then 100 yards straight up. The legs are gone, the breathing impossible. Your face is at your knees. Your thoughts turn to survival. But finally there is the crest. But not before an additional rise not seen from below. The incredible oxygen debt is finally paid off in a halting downhill stagger.

The flats once more. The finish in sight but you are beginning to come apart. Pain is now your companion. It warns you to a point that must not be passed. So you wait and endure until the moment for the final drive to the finish. Now! Now there is no tomorrow. The world and time have narrowed to this agony. Where the

legs hurt, you hurt them more. But the chest can’t be helped. The light is starting to go out. And then you’re over the line.

Ten minutes later, you wonder why you didn’t push harder going up Cemetery Hill.

“T traveled the whole world looking for adventure, and found it in my own body,” a writer friend of mine told me shortly after completing his first race. He is not one to use words lightly. His adventure is the true adventure.

My friend had made the leap from running to racing, from play to sport, from child to man. His training runs had prepared him for the challenge, but they were not the challenge. Those runs were pure play. They had no start, no finish. They had no rules, no officials. They began and ended by whim or boredom or pleasure.

The race was sport. It had a start, a finish, rules and officials. It began and existed through the will and commitment of the athletes. It was life in a bounded situation, filled with effort and risk, uncertainty and tension. Here, a decision to quit—of little moment in a practice session—could become a statement of yourself, your character.

My friend finished far back in the race. No matter. The race allows for this. The struggle that the Greeks call “agon” (from which comes our “agony”’) is there for winner and loser alike—as are those briefly splendid moments that accompany them when we realize our finest potential.

Only the race allows for this. The runs may be meditation and all that implies. But the race is experience—the transformation of you or me meditating to you or me as we are, to knowing who we actually are and what we actually can do.

The training runs may put us in touch with the source of inspiration, our creativity and our intuitive flashes of understanding. But the race is reality. Here, we are stripped. Here, even name, rank and serial number are irrelevant. In this seemingly artificial situation, we put ourselves to the practical test.

The race allows us to push ourselves to the absolute limit, to share however briefly and symbolically in the tragedy all around us. And more than that, in this advent, this new birth, I not only become a man but accept the man I am.

The race is one place where two contradictory ideas about life can exist. The first is that everything done well is inherently a criticism of anything done poorly; the second, if a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly. In a marathon, the winner’s perfect race is a criticism of anything less well done. Yet a middle-aged runner who finishes two hours later can sit and cry with happiness.

Defeat, then, can be as revealing as victory and seen for what it is—a learning experience. If we are to invent a plot for our existence, we must know exactly who we are. Untried, unchallenged, we would never know. And we know in our bones that the poet Robinson Jeffers was right when he said, “In pleasant ease and security, how soon the soul of man begins to die.”

Iran a mile for Roger Bannister. I relived the 3:59.4 Bannister ran at the Iffley Road track in Oxford 20 years earlier. I ran a mile for all milers, for all those who have accepted the challenge of the perfect distance and have sought to run that perfect race.

I didn’t want to run it. I wasn’t ready to run it. And the mile is not to be entered lightly. When Bannister was to race one, he looked according to his friends like a man going to the electric chair.

“Few understand,” Bannister wrote, “the mental agony through which an athlete must pass before he can give his maximum—and how rarely, if he is built such as I, he can give it.”

But this was a special day, and something special had to be done. My stomach had that all-gone feeling, and when I thought of the race my chest would tighten with anxiety.

Why this worry? Why be nervous when other distances are a lark? I’m not sure, but all milers know this feeling. For one thing, the mile is the true measure of a runner. It demands a unique mixture of your maximum speed, strength and endurance, while in other races any one of these will do. And it is the classic confrontation with the stopwatch, where moments no more than a pause in a conversation damn you as a runner and a man.

If you come to a mile with less than your own perfection, the mile will search it out. The mile is a lonely and painful and beautiful place. And it must be run, as the poetess wrote of love, “to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.”

So this is no ordinary race that can be run again and again. Milers run few miles in competition and none in practice. The mile is the culmination of months of training, the final accomplishment of the athlete’s year. That year starts in September with long runs over the autumn countryside, and continues through a winter of further extending the body’s endurance, and then finally a spring of quarter-miles that would test a saint.

These quarters are voluntary acts of torture with two short minutes in between that leave me on hands and knees, my breath coming in gasps, my groans audible to bewildered spectators. And the thought goes through my head that I never want to feel this way again.

But these quarters teach the mind and will to accept pain. They teach the body to provide energy without the use of oxygen. They teach it to convert lactic acid and delay an inevitable collapse. Bannister worked this out. He formulated the training and convinced himself it could be done. He put his life into this onemile race. And by April of 1954, he was running 10 consecutive quarters in 59 seconds.

I came to my mile 20 years later without those interval quarters, without the preparation the mile deserves, and without those companions Bannister

had—Brasher to pace him that first half and Chataway the third quarter. I wasn’t ready for the race, but I gave it the respect due it.

We set out together, myself and five freshmen who looked like my acolytes, lifting easily through that first quarter in 74 seconds. (“I slipped in behind Brasher,” reported Bannister, “feeling tremendously full of running.”) We reached the half in 2:32, a respectable pace for 14-year-olds and anyone in his 50s.

But then the altar boys disappeared in my wake, and I was left with the tightening legs and burning chest and the taste in my mouth that I get when I am running faster and longer than I actually can. So I came to the end of the three-quarters already eight seconds over my 5:00 pace and with nothing left. (“At the end of three-quarters,” Bannister stated, “the effort was still barely perceptible.’”)

But because the mile is what it is and milers are what they are, I ran that last quarter as perfectly as I could. I staggered here and there, the body protesting that the whole thing was ridiculous, but the mind and will somewhere safe from pain demanding I do more and more. (“In the last 50 yards,” Bannister revealed, “my body had long since exhausted its energy but it went on running just the same.”

Then it was over and I was kneeling, feeling the soft earth, the sun warming me, the grass friendly in my hands.

“Tf I faltered,” wrote Bannister, “there would be no arms to hold me and the world would be a cold and forbidding place.” But he had not, nor had I, and on this day the world had its arms open wide, and it was a soft and warm and friendly and wonderful place.

What makes the Boston Marathon great? Is it, perhaps, April? The Boston has pre-empted April, leaving other and lesser months to other and lesser marathons. It has taken the April of Chaucer’s gentle showers, when people “long to go on pilgrimages.” It has seized the April of T. S. Eliot: “The cruelest month breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land mixing/Memory and desire.”

The poets tell it all. Scatter-brained April, so unpredictable but still our best hope. Behind lies the long, hard and possibly futile winter. Ahead, a perfect day and a perfect marathon?

What makes the Boston Marathon great? Part of the answer is April. The rest, if the runner in me is right, is the course. Runners have spent their lifetimes observing, analyzing, dissecting and running marathons. They should know what makes a great marathon course. They have made Boston “the mother of marathons.”

Wind, heat and humidity add to the natural contours, which make the course a continually changing challenge. Boston has that quality of real greatness. It is a course that may be beaten but never defeated. Challenge the Boston and you must be at your peak. Accept your limitations and, with care, the thinking runner will have a comfortable, creditable race. But go for broke and prepare to be broken.

The key to all of this is the hills. They are an ever-present consideration. The first slope is downhill. It comes immediately, stretches for over a mile and lures both veteran and tyro into an abnormally fast pace. Even should one recognize the danger to his pace, he is powerless to prevent the attrition on his previously unused (in practice) checking muscles as downhill follows downhill during the first two-thirds of the race.

But these are merely banderillas. The death blow, if it is to be struck, comes at the 20-mile mark—Heartbreak Hill. Heartbreak is fourth and longest and steepest of a series of long, steep grades which begin at 17 miles. Heartbreak is not only fearsome in itself, but it comes at the very moment when the body reaches the physiological (and probably psychological) make-or-break point. Here is, if it is anywhere, the moment of truth.

Tragedy, which is man wanting to be more than he is and failing at it, is upon you, and Heartbreak magnifies it to heroic proportions. April is indeed the cruelest month.

But if hills can be your downfall, cannot hills be your salvation?

Hills do many things for a runner. They force him into the most economical style, a great asset for the distances. They strengthen the muscles needed for the assault on these obstacles in a race. And they allow him the grandeur and euphoria of that finest hour when he goes floating through the Newton Hills and then takes the last downhill at Boston College, entering Boston full of run.

The day may come when all that will be past—when marathons are uniform and we have a Tartan track, absolutely level and extending 13 miles 192 4% yards out and then back. The statisticians who like their records neat and tidy and without asterisks will take over.

Until then we all have Boston and April, and a race worth a lifetime of running.

“T learned how much the body can stand,” said Dr. Fred Blanton, a 40-year-old Florida ophthalmologist, after running the Boston Marathon. “You don’t know what pain is until you get up around 21 or 22 miles. You just hurt like hell. You’d give anything in the world to quit, but you just keep going. The people who run these all the time must be masochists.”

Others, besides Blanton, have taken this position. Olympian George Young, who qualified for the Mexico City Marathon as insurance for making the team, experienced the same pain. When asked later whether he expected to better his time when he ran the marathon again, he answered, “Anyone who would run more than one of these is nuts.”

Why would anyone run more than one? It’s a good question, especially if the marathon is in Atlantic City. In weather, crowds, course and coverage, the Atlantic City/Road Runners Club Marathon is strictly Class D compared to Boston. At

Atlantic City, the competitors outnumber the crowd. The temperature is usually out of good running range and the humidity excessive. But the course is the main hazard.

To the first-timer at Atlantic City, it appears to be the place to run your personal best marathon. I doubt if there is a grade of more than one foot on the entire route. You go out and back three times—which gives you three chances to stop right where the sweatsuits and blankets and hot showers are. On an out-and-back course, when you hit the turn at a little over 13 miles you feel at least relieved that you’re heading home. And at Boston every step is taking you closer to the finish. But leaving friends and warmth and comfort at the 17-mile mark and starting out again is often more than a non-masochist can stand.

Atlantic City may look easy, but it never is. Those who came to break three hours, or 3 4, or four all find that leveling the course is no panacea. The pain and agony are built into the 26 miles, not the terrain.

This pain and agony is sometimes expected and accepted. Ron Hill says, “The fear of running a long race can come from the fact that you know it’s going to be physically painful. And unless you are a masochist, nobody likes pain. And if you dwell on this, it can make you nervous.” According to Hill, he can talk about where the pain is going to come and how distressing it’s going to be without actually “thinking that it’s the guy who’s speaking who will be in that position.”

But it also is a pain that is sometimes forgotten, like the pains of childbirth. So a runner moving surely and confidently in those final miles reaches that 21mile mark and suddenly the pain is there. And for the first time he remembers how terrible it was the last time, and how terrible it’s going to be now and in the forever that is this race.

Sooner or later, he will think about running the marathon again. Not, perhaps, slumped in the locker room, or on his hands and knees taking a shower, or even on the long painful ride home, but sooner or later. The perfect marathon is like the

Michael Hughes

perfect wave, and every marathoner keeps looking for it. On that day, he will run his best pace all the way, and when he comes to the 21-mile mark he will feel as if he just started and what he has gone through was just a warmup. Then he will float through those last six miles, strong and full of running. And even when he finishes he will feel like running and running and running.

What makes cowards of all of us is not conscience as Shapespeare suggested, not fatigue as Vince Lombardi claimed, but pain. Pain and fear of that pain is our undoing. Nowhere is this more evident than in athletics.

For the trained athlete, pain is his major enemy. Already disciplined to the long training schedule, the curtailment of social life and the separation from other interests, the athlete even at the top of his powers still must endure pain beyond his imagination and capacity if he wishes to get maximal performance.

“Your stomach feels as though it’s going to fall out,” writes Don Schollander, “every kick hurts like hell—and suddenly you hear a shrill internal scream. Then you have a choice. Most swimmers back away. If you push through the pain barrier into real agony, you’re a champion.”

Runners have told of the same tortures. The muscles gradually hardening up into painful leaden stumps. The breath shortening to convulsive gasps. The chest filled with dry fire. The stomach threatening to explode in agony.

And again the difference between athletes is the peculiar ability—Roger Bannister describes it as a capacity for mental excitement—which enables the runner to ignore or overcome discomfort and pain.

“Tt is the psychological factor—beyond the ken of physiology—which sets the razor’s edge between victory and defeat,” Bannister says, “and which determines how closely an athlete comes to the absolute limits of performance.”

The barrier that pain puts up to the absolute limits was known as far back as the days of William James. “Beyond the very extremity of fatigue and distress,” James wrote, “we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”

Being a physical coward of long standing (I was once sent home from a dentist’s waiting room never having gotten into his chair) the expectation of pain is, alone, enough to unsettle me. I am living testimony to Mary Baker Eddy’s claim that “disease is fear made manifest in the body.” And all I had for encouragement for those final suffering seconds of a race was the alarming advice of two great coaches, the late Pete Waters and the irrepressible Percy Cerutty.

“Any race you can walk away from,” Waters used to stay, “is a bad race.”

And before I passed out, I could remember Cerutty’s words: “If it hurts, make it hurt more.”

Help for this coward came from an unexpected source. Grantly Dick Read. Read probably doesn’t know who Cerutty is, or even that 50-and-over people tun races. Pregnant women are his specialty and natural childbirth is his game. Childbirth Without Fear is the Read text—and I was going to change that to Racing Without Fear. Surely only labor and delivery among daily experiences could come up to the pain I was enduring in the last quarter of a race. And only that among life’s common experiences exposes us to the same fear and apprehension. Grantly Dick Read, the man who made childbirth a conscious joyful act, was about to make his debut in athletics.

So here I was on the line—looking forward with joy and happiness instead of dread and apprehension. The race would not only be painless, I told myself, it would be a wonderful human experience. (Suggestion and autohypnosis, according to some painless labor advocates, can raise resistance to fatigue by more than 20%.)

Oddly enough, it was a wonderful experience. The first three-quarters was beautiful. Down the backstretch I started to get the signals in the chest, the legs and the stomach. But now I knew. These were not pains; they are the feelings of any body when it is functioning at its best. Into the last turn, and now what in the past was pain was a warm spreading feeling something like a hot shower after a workout.

The last hundred yards was the best. I was past pain. I won driving and in another world. For which I thank Grantly Dick Read.

“There is no man,” writes Loren Eiseley, “there are only men.” Each of us lives a life unpredictable by any other—and unfortunately as concealed from its owner as it is from the observer. We are constantly trying to find what our life is and how to live it. This discovery entails taking risks, accepting challenges, going to the very edge of our capabilities. There is no other way. We can pick the time and the stakes, but we must find our game and play it.

My game is the marathon. For me, this is the supreme challenge. In this race, I reach the absolute edge of what my mind and heart and body can do. It is to me what the sheer face of a cliff is to a mountain climber, what white water is to a canoeist.

My risk seems nothing compared to those faced at high altitudes or on raging rivers. People are dying in those places, more than a few because of James Dickey’s novel (and movie) Deliverance, which popularized this kind of risk-taking.

Dickey is an advocate of the if-your-life-bores-you, risk-it school. What most of us need, he thinks, is a full shot of adrenalin brought on by the proximity of danger. “Then everything,” he says, “takes on enormous significance.”

For Dickey, adrenalin is an addictive drug, but benign and life-restoring rather than destructive. It restores, he claims, a sense of consequence to what we do. Given

the temper of the times, the lack of challenges, the absence of risk, it is no wonder people are trying themselves out in white water and dying in the attempt.

Dickey deplores this. Foolhardiness has no place in any adult search for yourself. It will not help you find the edge between yourself and self-destruction. To arrive at that place, you have to have preparation in strength and speed and endurance. You have to know what to do and when to do it. You must come to the test a whole man.

After the test comes that marvelous calm that follows completing a marathon or climbing a mountain or running the rapids. And with that calm comes the real reward—“the gentle, sentimental things you can do,” Dickey tells us, “because of the extraordinarily brutal and painful things you have endured undergoing the risk.”

In that calm, I become the man I would like to be—and perhaps I am.

Dr. Sheehan On Running will continue in our next issue.