RUNNERS: YEAH, WE’RE ALIKE

When he was running for president in 1988, Richard Gephardt would tell this story:

The Air Force had these bases up in Alaska, way up, Arctic, freezing up there. And they noticed, the Eskimos, the native guys, could work out there—three hours, six hours—whatever you needed. But the guys from the lower 48 states, you’d put ’em out there, and after an hour, they’d be finished, frozen stiff, just couldn’t do it . . . same clothes, same jobs, same everything. . . .

So they run these tests, physical exams, complete work-ups, everything. They couldn’t find any physical differences at all. So then they ran psychological tests, the whole battery. They had to find out: What was the difference? You know what they found?

The Eskimos, the natives . . . they expect to be cold!”

Gephardt told the story to induce in his troops the stoicism needed to soldier on during his candidacy. With the right attitude, Gephardt told them, you could do anything, no matter how improbable; given enough time, any steady stream will cut into the deepest rock, his mother had told him.

History buffs among us will note that Gephardt has yet to take up residency in the White House. Similarly, runners are sometimes defeated in pursuit of their version of a presidential bid, a good marathon. But reading about Gephardt’s Eskimos a few days after my latest failed attempt at marathon satisfaction, I thought, “Yes, this is why, without consciously trying to make it so, most of my friends are runners—we expect to be cold.”

SONG OF MYSELF ET AL.

That is, at the risk of taking a highly controversial stand, I offer the following observation: it’s really great to be around other runners. In large part, that’s because our mental outlooks distinguish us from our sedentary acquaintances of comparable physical gifts. We expect to be cold—or hot, or tired, or thirsty, or achy, or just downright sick of donning running garb for the 312th night in a row—and we carry on. And when we find ourselves in the company of others who think and live as we do, we rejoice, or at least relax.

Certainly, this was my experience at March’s Sutter Home Napa Valley Marathon, to which I had somehow weaseled/lucked my way into an invitation to be part of the race’s “Marathon College.” (Read: Talking heads of various levels of accomplishment, with my accomplishments being decidedly toward the bottom of the class.) Rather than cringing at the thought of enforced socializing, I actually looked forward to the gathering. What was up with that?

After all, I am not what the human-resources types call “a people person.” Riding Washington, DC’s crowded subway to and from work each day drains, rather than boosts, my energy level. So, too, does the amount of small talk necessitated by working in a 100-person office. Vacations? They’re for getting to as remote as possible a spot that still has good coffee. My Christmas present to myself last year was meeting a long-held goal of talking to nobody but my wife for one day. Bill Clinton, I’m not.

The above stems primarily not from misanthropy, but nature, nurture, and a modicum of existential angst. It’s not that I consider myself above talking with others. It’s just so much easier to live inside my head that I’d most often prefer to stay there than, say, come up with a few space-filling words in the office kitchen about a sporting event or news item that I have no interest in.

So what was different at Napa? Let me put it this way: one of the more esteemed members of the Marathon College was masters marathon world-record holder, Priscilla Welch. She once missed watching a Super Bowl because she was running in a pool for two and a half hours. I’ve done a two-hour pool-running interval session. From this one incident, Welch knows more about my personality than do the women who work on either side of my office 40 hours a week. Why would there not be pleasure in spending time with someone with whom so much can be unstated but still understood?

I felt similar bonds—and similarly immediately comfortable—with other of the weekend’s VIPs. A Shakespearean actor of British descent and of my parents’ vintage wouldn’t seem like an obvious social peer, but I reveled in the company of John Keston. (Keston, for the record, is not only the oldest person to break 3:00 in the marathon, having done so at age 69, but he also holds the world record for the finest 7:00 A.M. a cappella performance of “The Star Spangled Banner.”) Even mild-mannered Joe Henderson, unapologetic proponent of Gallowalking, came across as a kindred spirit.

It’s not just that, should the conversation hit a lull, there was always running to fall back on. (My wife, after all, who is not a runner, was also at ease amid the group.) Rather, it’s the shared experiences and expectations about life that we bring to running and that running instills in us. It doesn’t take much digging to unearth differences between Henderson’s writings and mine, but we have something far more important in common—in Henderson’s home, Eugene, it rains more than half the year. This is a guy who expects to get wet.

My race at Napa was a disaster. I effortlessly passed through 15 miles on pace for a huge PR. A few minutes later, a lifelong neck problem that had been plaguing me the previous three weeks twinged into full fruition, and I dropped out just before 16. (No, that’s not a typo; Don Kardong subsequently congratulated me for being the only person he knows who has DNFed at a marathon because of a neck injury.)

Being the mature sort, I mostly wanted to hide in my room, but that evening, we of the Marathon College were scheduled to eat together. What I dreaded as a desultory dinner became near-therapeutic—my new friends, having been there themselves in some way or another, knew my mental state exactly. Keston, for example, faced far more roadblocks in his several attempts to break 3:00 than just one bit of biomechanical bad luck. And who was I to play the despondent dropout in the presence of ur-survivor, Dick Beardsley? Why, by the time the 23rd glass of free wine was poured, I was even getting a little psyched about making another marathon attempt in May.

A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

Life, alas, isn’t always a junket in California’s wine country. Quite often, it’s rushed, task-filled, disjointed, and scarce in its allotment of doppelgangers. (No doubt some of my co-workers wish that someone more lively than that quiet, skinny guy occupied my office.) Enter the Internet. It’s not dining with Henderson or running with a good friend, but when it comes to connecting diasporic homologues, it ain’t chopped liver, either.

I spend too much time on a Web-based runner’s forum, the address of which I’m not going to give out because too many people might log on and ruin the intimacy of our little community. Yes, community. The word is probably thrown around too casually these days, and I used to hesitate to apply it to our ragtag band of posters, 99 percent of whom I could see on the street—or even the track—and not recognize. Then Tom died.

One unambitious Monday afternoon in February, I checked the forum’s message board from the office. (Let he or she who is without sin cast the first stone, etc.) A message from someone claiming to be posting on behalf of forum regular Tom caught my eye and then, when I read it, sunk my heart. At the Las Vegas Half-Marathon the day before, Tom’s cousin was reporting, Tom had been hit by a taxi while trying to board a shuttle to the start. He had suffered massive head injuries and was in a coma.

The forum quickly put on hold its usual debates about which top runners are on drugs and whether quarters or mile repeats are the path to PRs, and our wait for more news became a virtual vigil. Tom’s cousin promised to post updates, and we all checked back frequently, hoping to read good news.

Two days later, the message with the ominous subject heading “Final Post” contained the news that Tom was dead. The virtual vigil became a virtual wake, as most of us posted our thoughts about and memories of Tom. The same occurred off-forum, as members traded e-mails fleshing out their desperate search for meaning in such an event.

What I found most striking was the intense mourning that we experienced for someone most of us had never met. Upon reflection, I realized that, while technically I didn’t know Tom, in some important ways, he and I knew more about each other than we knew about many of the people we see each day.

Tom was 30 at the time of his death. He had begun running in earnest only five years ago, but he was quickly improving, from a 4:04 debut marathon in 1995 to a 2:34 at Chicago last fall. He was eager to get faster and was a voracious student of the sport, seeking any information that could help him shave more minutes from his PR. As a small part of that quest, he wrote me and asked how I had trained for my 10K and 10-mile PRs, marks that he wanted to try to get near to help meet his marathon goals. I copied out several months of training from my fastest years and figured that was that.

Tom wrote back with many questions. Why had I done this sort of workout? What would I think if he did that sort of workout? Had I been pleased with my mileage in those years? Should he do more? Less? When should he run twice a day?

A regular feature of our running forum is the weekly training post. Tom’s were always among my favorite to read. Like many others on the forum, he asked a lot of questions and debated a lot of training theory, but he also did something a lot more important: despite being a partner in a budding Internet company, he got out the door, every day, usually for extended periods of time. Soon before Las Vegas, Tom had run 105 miles, his biggest week ever.

Here, then, was someone who expected to be cold. (Well, figuratively speaking—Tom lived in San Francisco.) He lived deliberately, seeking to identify the many variables that affected his marathoning success, then working to have control over those that he could influence. “I wish, therefore . . .” not, “I wish, but . . .” guided most of Tom’s decisions. In that sense, most of us on the forum knew Tom very well, because we try to live similarly. The contrast between Tom’s purposeful life and random, sudden death was especially hard to take.

As I write this, Tom has been dead for two months. If the accident hadn’t occurred, he would now be tapering for Boston. In the interim, he would have left his office nearly every night and headed out in the dark for 10 or 12 miles. He might not have done so without complaint, but, as my seminary professors used to say, truth is expressed in action—the fact that he would have done the miles is the fundamental one.

At some point, it’s likely that Tom and I would have met in person, perhaps hooking up for a long run. After more than two decades of being a runner, here’s one of the aspects of this life I still hold most dear: I wouldn’t have given a second’s thought to wondering, “What on earth are we going to talk about for two hours?”

By the time you read this, my attempt at post-Napa redemption will have long been over. Obviously, I hope it goes well. (I wouldn’t have run 109 miles last week if I didn’t care.) But I suspect that, 20 years from now, what will be most important about running May’s Flying Pig Marathon is that I entered it. My older, wiser Napa cohorts knew this and were unanimous in their urgings that I quickly find a new goal to aim my fitness at.

Oh, and if any of Gephardt’s Eskimos are reading, even if you’re not runners yet, I suspect that we’re a lot alike. My wife and I would love to have you visit us for a few days here in Maryland, but I should warn you: expect to be hot.

Scott Douglas can be reached at scottdouglas@mindspring.com.