DEFINING SCRIPTS

LOS ANGELES, February—Four days before the 12th annual City of Los Angeles Marathon, while I am in the streets filming portions of the course for our TV show of the race, a Hollywood cops and robbers shootout is taking place in the next neighborhood. Like a scene from Pulp Fiction, the robbers run out of the bank dressed in commando gear and, in sickening disregard for human life, begin blasting AK-47s at the cops who have encircled the bank, at cars, store fronts, passersby, and even the overhead traffic helicopters filming the drama. Ten policemen are injured, two robbers are killed, and one escapes, prompting house-to-house searches while huge armored vehicles rumble menacingly up and down deserted suburban streets.

Back in the studio for a marathon meeting, we watch the drama replayed on TV, including the death of one of the robbers. We keep muttering, “This is a show, right?” “No, this is LIVE,” we hear back. Larry Rawson, Toni Reavis, Tim McLoone, and I huddle together in the meeting, chastened by the chance circumstance of violence so near and relieved to be a part of TV that would cover human joy and striving rather than depravity.

The headline in the Los Angeles Times the next day proclaims “A Violent Script That Defines Our Lives.” I’ve been thinking about that headline for days now. Does violence really define our lives? Or does it just define the lives of the people in Los Angeles? While I haven’t been to the infamous cities of Montrovia, Capetown, or Lima, no city I have visited (including the equally infamous Bangkok, Manila, Sao Paulo, and New York) frightens me quite like LA. So when I’m there, violence—or rather the fear of it—indeed becomes a defining factor for me, too.

That is why the LA Marathon is so spectacular. For one day a year, the city is as safe as it can get. Twenty-six miles of streets—ostentatiously rich and poor-to-the-point-of-prideless neighborhoods alike—are closed, closely patrolled by friendly police and filled with runners, bicyclists, walkers, and this year, in-line skaters. Neighbors who don’t even speak on Christmas stand in the sun chatting for the first time in a year.

Parents who normally don’t let their children out in the front yard are all standing as a family, dressed in official T-shirts, handing out cups and spraying garden hoses. The tiny kids, wearing T-shirts that drag on the ground, all look like Sweet Pea in the old Popeye cartoons. The kids stand for hours holding cups, with hopeful faces beaming when someone takes one. They squeal with joy when a runner, ANY runner, touches them.

The downtown area, normally deserted on weekends, is surging with bands, restaurants, and an influx of about 100,000 people all having a wonderful time. The economic impact is tremendous, and there is no price that can be placed on this kind of emotional value.

I’m probably not the only person walking slowly back to my house or hotel, kicking through a sea of empty paper cups, thinking about the day and feeling sorry that it has to end for another year. There is a big message in all of this. We can do it. We have the technology, which in this case is the human capacity for caring. This is the normal definition of our lives, not violence and fear, and we should refocus this energy into a year-round legacy to rewrite that script the way we want.

That is the good news. The bad news is that it is time for the LA city council to let the race organizers paint the blue line that they’ve been asking for on the course. Twenty-eight wheelchair racers go off course when someone moves a traffic barrier. In the women’s race, the situation is worse, and a lot more controversial: Russia’s Nadezhda (“Nadia”) Ilyina, one of the favorites, runs a brilliant tactical race by following well behind the leaders and then blasting by them at mile 23 to “win” by 10 yards in a sprint finish. The race is marvelously exciting and makes great TV. Unfortunately, somewhere between mile 21 and 22, Ilyina cut a big corner by running through a gas station. Ilyina claims she was looking for a toilet. After the race, I interview her as the winner. Then the referee disqualifies her, so I interview the new winner while Ilyina sits bawling like a baby. The story makes great TV, but I don’t like it at all.

It’s hard to imagine that Nadia Ilyina would be stupid enough to cheat, especially since she was explicitly told not to cut corners. Besides, she is a really nice and very popular young woman, seemingly full of integrity, and the leaders she was after were her teammates, not her cutthroat enemies. I felt unsettled about this ruling.

Referee Basil Honikman, a thoroughly fair, precise, and experienced man, helped me understand it: “She saved 30 yards [by cutting through] the gas station; she won by only 10 yards. That should make it clear.” But I was nettled by other questions: How do you prove her intentions? Do they matter in this case? Was there a language barrier problem?

When something like this happens, everybody has an opinion, and views are spewn out in sometimes ugly, jingoistic ways. I heard this one a lot: “It’s always the Russian girls. They do this all the time.” Or, “They can get away with this in Europe, but we won’t tolerate it here.” Yep, that’s right. So how about marking the course so there is no chance of mistake? Maybe a blue line wouldn’t have saved the day, but it wouldn’t have hurt, either.

Late that night, after an indicting phone call from a man who ran behind her from mile 14 onward, Ilyina came to race organizers and confessed that she had intentionally cut the course—not once, but several times. I’ve been running for 38 years, and this sport still astounds me.

The bigger issue, however, is the same bugbear I always come back to: We have to promote and organize our sport professionally. To specify just two things among many, we need standard course markings and athlete expectations/understandings that are mandated around the world so wherever athletes are from or wherever they go, there is no doubt of the rules of the road.

WASHINGTON, D.C., January

The governance of our sport is still archaic. How interesting—and progressive—that the sport’s intrigue and petty politics became the story line for a major motion picture, Prefontaine. Unfortunately, the film closed in about two weeks. So much for public interest.

Still, I loved the movie and thought Jared Leto was really good. He can run, he obviously worked hard at imitating Pre’s running style, and in the only scene in which Leto is without his shirt (oh, come on!), he’s conspicuously fit. The acting is mostly fine, but neither that nor the staged running events can ever match the drama of the real documentary footage included in the movie, particularly from the Munich Olympics. It’s uncanny how real footage suddenly brings back every moment, while I had to search the archives of my mind to recollect the scenes that were reconstructed.

My husband and I are the only ones in the theater besides four teenage girls who sit down front and giggle almost the entire time. The next day I was telling my 14-year-old niece about the film and said she probably wouldn’t be too interested since she is a swimmer. “Oh no,” she says, “all of my girlfriends and I are going next week! We wouldn’t miss it! Jared Leto is what you older people call a ‘teenage heartthrob.'”

Another friend of mine was explaining to her kids that “Steve Prefontaine was the James Dean of running,” only to realize that they didn’t know who James Dean was either.

LEVIN, NEW ZEALAND, February

Anyway, James Dean smoked cigarettes, and he didn’t run through the forests of Oregon to soothe his soul. I was thinking of this a few weeks ago when I was soothing my own soul by running through the forests of Levin, a small farming community in the North Island of New Zealand. That was something else the film could have done—emphasize more the stunning nature in the Eugene area, and how Prefontaine is memorialized by a wood-chip trail called “Pre’s Trail,” which was laid where he used to run. In the film, there is one too-quick scene of mists rising from the Oregon forests; they are not dissimilar to those rising at 6:00 A.M. from the trees and the adjoining sheep meadow, where we park our car in Levin. This is a unique race called the Great Forest Marathon and Half Marathon.

While New Zealand boasts many famous mountain, coast-to-coast, and multi-sport events for the intrepid, this is the first race in New Zealand that uses the traditional distances, but it gets the runners off the road and into the woods. The entire race is run on hard-packed dirt and sandy logging roads, mostly flat, with a few woodland hills, and a stretch that encompasses a famous estuary full of rare and wild birds.

Registration is in the wool shed, illuminated at this early hour by lanterns so we don’t crack our heads on the low beams. I guess wool sheds don’t need high beams since shearers spend the whole day bent over.

Happily, all the manure has been swept out, and all the registration takers are smiling in their natty new race T-shirts. New York could take a lesson in charm from this race. The air is full of the smell of dry straw and lanolin, as comforting and familiar in this country as popcorn is in ours.

Outside, there are three porta-toilets, and three real, honest-to-goodness “long drops”—a deep hole cut in the ground, with a wooden seat fashioned from planks, surrounded by tarpaulins. You hold the flapping tarpaulin shut with one hand and keep your balance with the other. All the women opt for the commercial porta-potties, even if there is a long wait. I hear two guys walking away from the tarpaulins, talking: “Wow, that was a looooonnnng way down!”

Cars continue to pour into the field, and race organizers, planning on 300 entrants, have 900. Still, the event starts on time. I thought the race would be weird without spectators and possibly monotonous without scenery changes, but I am totally wrong. There are plenty of us having fun. There are vocal crews and plenty of water every three kilometers, and there are funny signs throughout the woods.

We are our own best spectators, anyway, and the scenery changes all the time, a moving environmental travelogue. Long before I finish and smell the sausages grilling or join friends who have brought along blankets, umbrellas, and picnic hampers, I know this race is a “keeper” on the annual itinerary. “Pre” would have loved it.