GETTING MYSTICAL

Well, evidently. You see, somewhere along the line a creative soul came up with the hypothesis that running marathons can be a life-altering experience. That being able to put one foot in front of the other for 26.2 miles can cleanse the mind of impurities, make us feel like complete human beings, and enable us mentally to conquer great challenges.

Some even go so far as to claim that marathoning is—shhh!—a mystical experience. To quote Webster’s, “mystical” means something that is “‘spiritually symbolic.”

I know this because I just looked it up. Until then, I had no idea what mystical meant. I just knew it lent an aura of sorts that made something seem beautifully cosmic. I remember feeling this way and almost crying with emotion after finishing my first marathon in Denver in 1983. I’d say that was pretty mystical, by Webster’s standards.

But, then again, I thought it was pretty mystical when I got a free massage after that first marathon. The pasta carbo reloading a couple of hours later seemed quite mystical as well. Plus, I recall a mystical dream I had after falling asleep in the back of the car during the 110-mile drive back home. I dreamt I was running along the ocean in St. George, Utah.

So, what do we know about mystical experiences, anyway? I’d say not a whole heck of a lot. But judging from personal experience, running marathons sure can make runners delirious, which causes them to act pretty strange. I guess in this strange world in which we live, we runners have found our own weird little mystical niche. Now that I think of it, that’s a catchy name for a marathon. The Weird Little Mystical Niche Marathon. I can see the Tshirt already. a

November/December M&B Sneak Preview Here are just some of the stories we’re working on for our next issue: * Quality Marathons on Little Down Time by Pete Pfitzinger and

Scott Douglas

e How to Pace an Ultrarunner by Theresa Daus-Weber ° Buddy Edelen Learns from the Brits by Frank Murphy * Jerry Dunn’s Marathon Madness by Barry Lewis e Race Profile: Making the Marathon Scene in Austin, Texas

Gary Franchi WHY DO WE RUN MARATHONS, ANYWAY? 1 97

f Hew Name For An Old Marathon

Marathon of the Americas™

Marathon Marathon 2 Person Relay | Mayor’s 5K Challenge Run Fitness 5K Walk Roger Soler’s Kids Klassic

| November 11, 2001 | (Veterans Day) Hotline (210) 246-9652 g www.samarathon.org www.marathonoftheamericas.org

$00 Marathon of the Americas

How Runners Talk

The Race Is the Culmination of Training, But When It Beckons, How Do You Respond?

WATCH runners, and I listen to runners. I go to races, too, mostly because

one of my children is running that day. I’ve had a child, at least one child, in the race for almost 10 years now. I also go to races because after all these years of watching, I don’t want to stay away.

I love to see packs of runners moving across worn courses, lines of solitary runners moving through dense rolls of early-morning fog. Sometimes I photograph the runners, their bodies dripping with effort, etched against blurred trees and lines of spectators.

T’ve learned certain things about the race after all these years. I’ ve learned that the faces at races never change. The race never changes either. I’m not a runner. I’ma mother who thinks a lot about the race. I watch runners, and I listen to runners talk.

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Every race tells the same story. The race is drama. The audience wants a hero. Today they are the heroes. The coach asks me to take the team picture. The eight young men, smiling in their pristine navy-and-white Reebok warm-ups, proudly hold up the plaque that proclaims them central Illinois’s Regional Cross-Country Champions for 1999. They are 15, 16, 17 years old. My youngest son is the captain, and he led the team today, placing third overall.

The coach, a 6’4″ former football player, is emotional, humbled, moved almost to tears by the team’s performance. “I can hardly talk,” he admits. His eyes are moist. His voice is close to breaking as he speaks to the parents gathered around the team. “I think we really have a shot at going to State.” He almost whispers this last part. To say it too loud might tempt the running gods. He hasn’t taken a team to State in nine years.

Last week’s conference race was a different story, a tragedy in the all-ornothing world of the race. The team placed third overall. Times were lousy. My son was sick the day before the race, and he lost his confidence, worrying

Christine White HOW RUNNERS TALK ® 99

(© CHRISTINE WHITE

himself into an 11th-place finish. The rest of the team picked up on his selfdoubt. The coach was merciless after the race, calling them “gutless.” There was no trophy last week. The boys were angry and ashamed. No one wanted a team photo. No one wanted to remember the day they were losers. * ES *

This is how runners talk.

“You can do it. You’re the smartest kid out there,” my oldest son tells my youngest son. My oldest son is a runner, too. It’s the race postmortem. Every race has this dissection.

“Whoever wins at State is the guy who has the best head on his shoulders that day. Write on a piece of paper: I believe in myself. Over and over. Hang it up. Just look at it. You’ve got to internalize this. You. For yourself.

“Remember that article in the paper last week about Peterson from South High saying he wasn’t ready for the race because he was thinking about homecoming? What a jerk! More than looking like a jackass, that comment tells you he doesn’t have a head. Peterson—you’ ve got him in the head. Chew him up and spit him out like a bad habit.

“You can be a stud if you want to. People will forfeit to you at the starting line. You’ve got the capability of being a monster. A monster. You can be a monster. Just stop being a head case. At the end of the race, whose head is on?”

* * *

“T thought he was toast,” my younger son said. He figured he had second place nailed down, thought he had overtaken the runner in red. Said he didn’t

realize that just yards short of the finish line when the crowd was going wild, the red runner had come back and was closing in on him, determined to reclaim his second place. “They tell you a runner shouldn’t look back. So I didn’t know he was coming. I thought he was toast.”

When my oldest son started running 10 years ago, I stayed on the race sidelines and tried not to get too close to the runners. I couldn’t stand to see their exhaustion and the pain of it all. I used to cry as I saw the runners come into the final stretch. The runners were staggering and vomiting, sometimes fainting. The spectacle of this all-out effort frightened me. I had never seen races before.

* * *

Often I arrive at the racecourse early, before the crowds gather. My mind races in the silence. The teams warming up are a panoply of color: red and white runners to the east, purple runners ahead of me, white to my left at the one-mile mark. Officials string rope along the entrance to the chute and hang flags to mark the beginning of the final stretch.

Going to the race helps me orient myself and analyze the course and direction of my life’s race. [have to figure out my splits. IfI live to be 80, mat about the two-mile mark today. Now that all the runners I have raised are grown, how do I approach mile three? What should my strategy be? How do I use my experience when younger runners have much more vigor? Where do I want to be at the finish?

With each race, the run in my head is different. But the runners are always here: red, purple, white.

Christine White HOW RUNNERS TALK M101

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Even high school racers sport an entourage of parents, friends, well-wishers. Mothers carry the Gatorade and usually hang with other mothers. Mothers take pictures of the team once the race is over. Most mothers aren’t comfortable with the race, it seems to me. The mothers’ faces are tense, and they don’t talk much about race strategy.

Mothers say, the doctor thinks she has a stress fracture and do you think this rain is going to turn to sleet? Someone might slip if the course gets icy and that poor girl with that asthma cough—she just fell down and had to crawl to the side of the course. Mothers don’t look the runners straight in the face. Mothers don’t like to hug their sons when at the race’s end, the boys are glistening with sweat and stumble out of the chute, drooling and panting like heat-crazed dogs.

Even if they understand the race, most mothers, at heart, don’t want their children to run this hard.

Fathers take races very seriously. Fathers look grim during races. Fathers want their kids to win or at least make a PR. Fathers hate to see their sons give up or succumb to pain. Don’t quit, they warn. Fathers don’t cut boys any slack, especially if the fathers themselves were runners once. If sons have a bad race, fathers say things like he disgraced himself out there today. He fucking gave up.

I’ve never heard a father say that about his daughter, though. Fathers are dazzled by the sight of their girls running the race. Good job, they yell. You can

(© CHRISTINE WHITE

do it! You can do it! Nice run, they say after the race to their girls. Even if the girl comes in last, the father will smile and say, nice run.

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Aristotle defined motion as “the mode in which the future belongs to the present . . . the joint presence of potentiality and actuality.” Surely he was describing a cross-country race.

On this late fall morning, the trees drizzle their orange and yellow leaves onto the racecourse as streams of young men and women surge and fall back, enacting an ancient ritual that has as much to do with time, and time running out, as it does with the time it takes a runner to finish the race.

The race is called by the elders, and the elders have come, as they always do, lining the course in an attempt to push age back one more day. In the passing runners, the spectators see themselves again, young and strong and swift, an apparition conjured up for this moment.

Spectators press around the runners before the race, wanting—no, needing—to make some contact. Good luck, they say. Messages are delivered. Aunt Mary couldn’t make it but she says good luck. It reminds me of some medieval spectacle like the Palio in Siena, where riders on horseback race around the plaza. Each rider carries the colors of his family. He races his horse for all of them, just as these runners race for all the well-wishers who pat their shoulders and say good luck.

Everyone’s acoach. Everyone thinks he knows what it takes to win the race. The runners tear by, and spectators scream out advice.

“Know where you’re goin’! Know where you’re GOIN’!” someone lugging a camera tells a stream of girls who are close to the one-mile mark. “Reel em in!” a fat man calls to the lead runner. The metaphor dangles like an empty fishing line. Who’s the fisherman at a race, I wonder?

“Keep your focus! Keep your fo-CUSS!” yells a real coach to his team’s lead runner.

Irun back and forth across the field, trying to meet my son several times on his loop around the park. My son is starting to tire. I can see it in the droop of his upper body.

“Arms! Arms!” I yell. “Work those ARMS!”

Ihear myself and wonder what I’ ve become. Or what part of me the race has revealed.

* % *

Isee in the race my struggle as a mother. I want my kids to be winners, in all that term naively suggests, but I don’t want them to know the pain or self-doubt or frequent defeat that inescapably mingles with their occasional victories.