LONG LEADS

There’s a particular brand of frustration inherent in print publications. We call it “long lead time.” That is, to get the contents of a magazine to its readers, editors must assemble manuscripts long before the issue clunks into the subscriber’s mailbox. For instance, this editorial is the last piece of written matter being churned out for the November/December 2001 issue. I’m writing it on August 4, the day after the men’s marathon at the Edmonton World Championships. If I were sticking strictly to our production schedule, this piece should have been to the copyeditor a month ago. The issue is scheduled to go to the printer on September 13. It will be put into the mail around the middle of October to go to subscribers.

All this goes far toward explaining why Marathon & Beyond is designed as a “timeless” rather than a “timely” periodical. Today’s “timely” news is received via radio, television, or the Internet. I hope you’re not picking up your M&B to find out what happened yesterday, as you’ll be disappointed every time.

Since American TV wasn’t carrying the race and since I don’t live close enough to the Canadian border to intercept CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) signals, this morning I relied on the local newspaper to inform me who won last evening’s World Champs men’s marathon. My local newspaper included a three-inch piece telling me that Khalid Khannouchi had dropped out at roughly 15 miles and that it was 82 degrees at the start of the race. The paper didn’t bother to report who won the race or how the other Americans did.

For more information, I turned to Runner’s World on-line, a service I check out almost daily. It seems the finish of the World Champs was a real barn burner, coming down to a furious sprint after 26.1 miles were rolled off.

I would like to make some comment about the World Championship marathon(s), but that would be sort of fruitless since the women’s marathon isn’t run for another week and I need to get this piece to the copyeditor by early Monday morning or else be fired.

The frustration with all this immediacy is, of course, self-induced. I’m not going to die or implode or anything from not knowing instantly the outcome of the men’s marathon. It’s just that I want to know. I’m not alone in this. Most people I know have been programmed to want (need?) instant gratification. Not tomorrow or an hour from now. Now.

But why? Shouldn’t we know by now that the stuff we can get instantly is pretty hollow stuff?

Much like fast food or e-mail letters. Or rather, e-notes. “Messages” we call them. Yes, they’re quick, they’re efficient, but it’s the rare e-mail message that’s worth reading twice. What we tend to do is scan e-mails, not read them. Because typically these messages aren’t labored over and considered, as letters used to be, and occasionally still are.

Some e-mail messages come in all capital letters. Others come in all lowercase letters with no punctuation. Spelling isn’t correct. Little attention is given to saying what we want to say well. E-mails are thrown off like parting comments. They are often flippant and easily forgettable. And that’s how we want them to be. If someone tries to hold us to our words, we want the easy excuse, “It was only an e-mail.” What we’re really saying is “I didn’t think much about what I was saying. Isn’t that okay?”

We expect more from letters that arrive in the mail, longer magazine articles, and books. These are more like marathons than sprints. Rather than a rapid communication that ends too fast, thoughtful writing tends to be well considered by the writer and savored and digested by the reader. There’s some delayed gratification involved.

This all leads us into the topic of this issue’s editorial: a long run of delayed gratification.

This issue completes five years’ worth of Marathon & Beyond. Many of you who have attended our open houses and such have heard the story of how M&B is the bastard offspring of The Marathoner, a quarterly, perfect-bound magazine I came up with while I was at Runner’s World back in 1978. The Marathoner lasted a mere five issues. Not because it wasn’t popular (we had a 10,000 circulation by issue number two) but because it was joined, in its profit-and-loss statement, by a fortnightly tabloid that bled money at an alarming rate.

Maybe because my wife and I recently returned from crewing a friend at the annual 135-mile Badwater Ultra Race in Death Valley, I’m ultra-aware of the differences between our sports, marathons and ultras, and other more instantly completed sports. In our sports, you’re out there for quite a while: long enough to look around while you’re running over the landscape and actually see the scenery, gawk at the moon, try to count the shooting stars that slash through the night sky.

In a way, so it is with completing five years of this magazine. What has happened in the two sports and in the magazine over the past five years?

• After a long stall, both the men’s and women’s marathon world records were broken—twice each.
• Marathons continued to grow in size at the rate of roughly 10 percent per year.
• A good dozen new marathons appeared on the scene, and others are planned for the near future.
• A whole new wave of runners moved up to ultras, some well-known marathoners and others going for the long stuff.
• Besides M&B, another magazine, Trail Runner, joined the thundering herd covering our sports.
• The average finishing time in marathons continued to slow.
• Only one American man and one American woman ran the Olympic Marathon in Sydney.
• Although M&B grew from 120 pages to 180, we didn’t run out of story ideas, as people were predicting five years ago.

As we look back five years and look ahead to the next year, what’s on the horizon on these pages?

Some pretty interesting stuff.

In the next issue, Dick Beardsley tells the tale of his 1981 course record run at Grandma’s. Mary Nicole Nazzaro reports from China on the 2008 Olympic bid (she was in Tiananmen Square when China got the news it had secured the 2008 Games) and on the rising crop of Chinese marathoners. Roger Robinson gives us the first installment of a lengthy five-part review of running in literature through the ages. We have a new/old marathon training program for you to use. The list goes on and on as we continue to bring you the long and the not-so-short of the sport and lifestyle of marathoning and ultrarunning.

There will even be some news items that don’t get cold the minute after they’re released. Like this one: Marshall Ulrich—whom you’ll recall wrote “My Most Unforgettable Ultramarathon” in the July/August 2000 issue, taking us through his self-contained assault on the Badwater to Mt. Whitney run in 1999—has pulled off another astonishing feat on the Death Valley course. He ran the first true “Quad” this past July: from Badwater (lowest point in the Western Hemisphere and hottest spot on Earth) to the peak of Mt. Whitney (at 14,494 feet, highest peak in the Lower 48) then back to Badwater—and then he turned around and did the out and back again.

He started at 6:10 A.M. on July 20 and completed the first out and back in a course-record time of 96 hours, 7 minutes, beating the old record of 105 hours by nearly 9 hours. He then got a good night’s sleep and on the morning of the 25th, along with 71 other athletes, started the annual Badwater Ultra as his third of four legs. While the Badwater race stopped at Whitney Portal, Marsh kept going to the peak, then turned around and returned to Badwater, for a total of 584 miles over some of the toughest real estate on Earth. He finished the Quad in 253 hours, or 10 days and 13 hours.

Although the first two legs were in relatively mild temperatures (for Death Valley) of 114 degrees, the return trip was in the mid-120s.

Marshall did not complete the run without overcoming some major difficulties. Twenty-five miles into the third crossing, Marsh came down with tendinitis of the left shin. He bandaged an icebag onto the shin to reduce the swelling and pain. Twenty miles later, the same thing happened to the right shin. Every 20 to 30 minutes, his crew had to re-attach icebags. He then developed blisters on the sides and balls of his feet.

But finish he did!

Marsh did the Quad to raise money and awareness for starving children. No, it wasn’t an easy way to raise money, but Marsh doesn’t bother with easy challenges. Our congratulations to him on another sterling performance. If you want to learn more about his work on behalf of starving kids, check www.helpingthekids.org.

Meanwhile, here we are in August, bidding a fond farewell to 2001. We’re already looking ahead to the January/February 2002 issue. Such is life in the magazine game.

—Rich Benyo