Run Wild Children, those little sacks of raw energy, left to their own devices, resemble wild animals in their enthusiasm for life and movement. Watch a litter of puppies or kittens, and their every waking moment consists of roughhousing—everything from gnawing on mom’s ear to wrestling with a sibling to running around in circles for no discernable purpose. Toss a half-dozen kids into a room and walk away, and their antics are similar. They run around randomly, cavort, jump up and down in the same spot, wrestle with each other, squeal with the joy of just plain living, existing, moving. Of course, concerned parents quickly attempt to squelch such innerdirected, spontaneous nonsense. These parents spend thousands of dollars on ridiculous imagination-robbing toys and games and “educational” mindnumbing videos, while all the kid wants to do is play with the boxes the expensive stuff came in. Raw wilderness—the third rail of humanity—is usually beaten or bribed out of us: beaten by corporal discipline or bribed by parents who aren’t disciplined enough themselves to impose discipline on their offspring. It’s all on behalf of the sane preservation of civilization as we know it, or as we would like to envision it. Certainly we need to control, to some extent, random acts of random8 l MARATHON & BEYOND l JAN/FEB 2008

ness. Society needs rules and limits or it faces ruin from anarchy and insanity. In every sort of formal sporting arena, the most that can be accomplished comes in the wake of serious and methodical practice. The young gymnast practices the dismount from the parallel bars over and over and over, until it becomes second nature. The swimming competitor logs endless hours in the pool developing endurance and form that would make a dolphin jealous. The runner builds endurance and strength and speed in hopes of bringing them all together on the day of an important race. For an event like the marathon, that process may encompass 16 or 18 weeks of carefully laid-out combinations of long runs, tempo runs, speed work at the track, easy runs toward muscle recovery, carefully scheduled rest days, and often training in other sports in hopes of continuing to build endurance while preventing injuries. To be successful, careful training to a plan is not an option. It is everything. And for the obsessive runner, it is anything but a chore. The process of filling in the blanks in a training journal as the workouts progress brings incredible satisfaction. Certainly, training too hard for too long can become mind numbing and burdensome. But such training does not go on at the same level year-round. If it did,

the running body would soon become the broken body. There are usually two off-seasons: the heart of summer (when it is too hot to run too much) and the depths of winter (when it is too foul outside to do more than maintenance running). These periods provide welcome relief from the regimen of regular training. And they provide an opportunity to be a child again, to live like an animal, to burn off excess fitness, to run wild, and to make the transition from one training period to the next. Think of it as burning the rice paddies. By that I mean getting rid of the period of training you just left in a manner similar to how rice farmers—once the crop is harvested and the remaining stubble has died and dried out—start a fire and let it burn until it consumes the chaff so that after a period of rest, the planting and growing process can begin again. This burning of the rice paddies can be a glorious period twice a year when the excess training the runner has done so carefully can be burned off in runs that are too fast, too long, too meandering to be part of any sane running program. The end of your season is a time to finally run as you feel, because there are no dire consequences to your racing program if you do, because your racing program, for this portion of the year, is behind you. The end of the fall marathon season was always a wonderful time to get into the woods and do a long, fartlek-style cross-country run, being careful, at least

when I lived back in Pennsylvania or was visiting home, to wear red while romping through the woods because the period corresponded with hunting season. It is a glorious time on the razor’s edge, between the end of autumn and the coming of winter, when the air is chilly, the leaves have fallen, the sky is leaden, and you run into a cloud of your own expelled breath. When the legs are a bit tired from the just-passed racing season, but they still have a little spring left that you want to leave on the trail before the snows come in. Some runners burn off whatever training effect they have left from the autumn and then go into a whole month of absolutely no running, giving the legs a chance to heal before resuming easy, longer training in preparation for the spring season. The same process can be incorporated into the late spring when the season is ending and you are headed toward maintenance running through the hot, humid summer months. One last, hard, long, sweaty wild run to cap off the racing season is a terrific means of closing down shop, burning off the fumes of the just-passed season, and changing gears toward going easy before beginning to rebuild. As long as on that season-ending hard run you don’t run yourself into injury, you can consider it a freeing of the animal side of your running, while putting an exclamation mark on the season. Call it what you will—running wild, burning the rice paddies, running

as you feel—it can be one of the most memorable and meaningful runs of your entire year: the very antithesis of running under control. * * * One of the most outrageous sporting events of the 20th century was the C.C. Pyle International Transcontinental Foot Race of 1928, better known as the Bunion Derby. Pyle was the P.T. Barnum of the sports world, a hustler and promoter who promised $25,000 to the winner of his Los Angeles-to-New York footrace. The race was put together in part to promote the opening of Route 66 between Los Angeles and Chicago by Tulsa businessman Cyrus Stearns Avery. On March 4, 1928, 199 runners, from hoary professionals to rank amateurs, left the West Coast on an 84-day, 3,400-mile odyssey that would horribly try their souls and soles and raise some of them to the status of legend in an American era overrun with excess. Charles Kastner, a Seattle-based writer who has been a frequent contributor to Marathon & Beyond and who wrote a major feature for us on Edward “The Sheik” Gardner (M&B, July/August 2001), one of the five African Americans who ran in the original Bunion Derby, has put his research on the race together in a delightful book, Bunion Derby: The 1928 Footrace Across America (University of New Mexico Press, 256 pages, $24.95). As in any such major, far-reaching contest, it is usually the nobodies who make for interesting reading, and that is certainly the case here. It wasn’t

the professional runners who stole the show; it was the colorful minor players. There is no doubt that Chuck’s favorite contestant is the aforementioned Ed Gardner, who finished eighth with an elapsed time of 659:56:47. Eddie Gardner was a tall, long-limbed runner who made quite a name for himself in the Seattle area as a very accomplished athlete, three times winning the famous Ten Mile Washington State Championship between 1921 and 1927. Because of the racial climate in some sections of the United States during the 1920s, the Negro runners were sometimes reviled and castigated by locals as they ran through town; at the other extreme, their progress was breathlessly reported in Negro newspapers. (Chuck has contributed profiles of the African American entrants to An Online Reference Guide to African American History.) The race was eventually won by a young Oklahoma Indian, 20-year-old Andy Payne, who averaged 10-minute miles for the entire race. He used his prize money to pay off the mortgage on the family farm, to speculate on Oklahoma real estate, and to go to college. Chuck Kastner’s tale of the Bunion Derby is told in a straightforward, chronological manner. He manages to bring the vast array of characters alive while maintaining an easy-to-follow, day-by-day account of the increasingly wearying spectacle. An additional benefit of Chuck’s book is his extensive research; between the copious footnotes and the huge bibliography, no stone is left unturned or unmarked.

it, he was no longer a pusher, always pushing to be first, but rather he became a puller. “Pullers put resistance behind them; leaning forward in the running stride, pullers allow gravity to help,” he writes. Ultramarathons were no longer competitions, but rather they became opportunities to meditate on life, opportunities to allow the miles to mellow him out, to find the self hiding behind the daily grind. Mike put together accounts of 25 of his ultras in a self-published book titled simply Ultrarunning: My Story: Personal Accounts of 25 Ultramarathon Events (210 pages, $13.99, at amazon.com). He breaks his ultra experiences—of which, by the way,

We tend to be amazed at some of the running feats that we hear about these days, but most of them pale when put up against this grueling march into running history. * * * Mike Bouscaren doesn’t run for his health. And he doesn’t really run for sport, either. He runs more for the spiritual uplift that comes with going very, very long—out there in ultramarathon land, where the hype is minimal and the spiritual highs are maxed. He’s a graduate of Yale and of Harvard Business School, and running long distances was one more form of competition, of trying to be first, trying to be best. But when Mike moved beyond the standard marathon, as he puts

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I counted 39—into seven chapters, beginning with “Flashback” and ending with “Heading Home.” You can get the gist of Mike’s approach to ultrarunning by grazing through his bibliography, which he breaks into five categories: Running, Adventure, War, The Edge, and The Center (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki, for example). It is pleasant to travel with Mike from one race to the next, to listen in on his insights, and to anticipate what revelation will come next. For the runner who wants more from his running experiences, Mike is a good guide; one of the byproducts of the book is that Mike gives readers a good review of the ultras he has run, their high and low points, and how they may have been improved or canceled since Mike’s visit. The philosophy that Mike has developed from his ultrarunning comes across in this insight: “Now I understand to let things simply happen, that I cannot make them or me into something that isn’t, and that circumstances work out better when I remove selfish wishes from imagined outcomes.” Amen. * * * Running for Their Lives (Xlibris, 169 pages, $20.99), by Karl W. Gruber, is an account of his successful effort in 1997 to run 52 marathons in 52 weeks to raise money for the fight against leukemia. Running 52 marathons in 52 weeks isn’t necessarily unique; the challenge was first started in the late 1970s and

continues today, since surpassed by the 50 marathons in 50 states in 50 days accomplishments of Sam Thompson and Dean Karnazes. What makes a book like this work is the personality of the author. Karl Gruber is a likable fellow runner whose positive spirit, self-sacrifice, and low-key approach to the year’s occupation of a marathon a week don’t become boring or repetitive. He keeps his chapters short and produces a nice mix of his travels to and from races, along with tales about the races—most of which he finished in the four-hour range. Karl hoped to raise $1 million to help the fight against leukemia; he fell far short of the goal, but as with many such efforts, the journey is what mattered most. “The greatest victories you achieve in your lifetime will always be the ones you dreamt the most about, visualized clearly, and worked the hardest for,” Karl concludes. And of course he’s right. If you can imagine it, you can do it—if you’re willing to dedicate yourself, your resources, and in this case a year of your life to it. Karl did. As he

summed it up in a recent letter: “It was an amazingly intense year of running and traveling. . . . It was a year of victory, defeat, fatigue, inspiration, and perspiration, but mainly, as it turned out, it was a discovery of the great people along the way helping me to accomplish this great goal.” —Rich Benyo