seemed important. Caring for each other, seeing commonalities instead of differences—these were the lessons of those months after September 11.

Returning to Durham was like walking out into a blindingly sunny day after seeing a depressing matinee. No more smell of smoke, no more “missing” posters, no more first-person stories to hear of horrors and secondhand accounts of lives disrupted beyond belief.

I returned to a flashing answering machine. One of the callers said her name was Liz S. She said she had run the New York Marathon that Sunday and that when she crossed the line—in under four hours—she told her husband that at the end of the race she was so exhausted she had been hallucinating. She had read that this sometimes happened. Liz told her husband that she had imagined that an angel had come down from heaven to run the last six miles with her.

“That was no angel,” her husband laughed. “I have a photograph of the two of you running together.”

Thad told her only my first name, that I lived in Durham, that I had written a book on college admissions. She tracked me down because she wanted to thank me, to thank me for helping her make her dream come true.

I listened to that message five times.

And What | Learned From It

| thought not of the smell of smoke, the impromptu shrines that had appeared all over the city, the “Portraits of Grief” section of the New York Times that daily told the stories of the lost. Instead | thought of how the course of the New York City Marathon goes through five boroughs, and in running it you see the flavor of neighborhoods change by the block: Irish and Italians waving their flags; Hassidic Jews, prayer-shawl fringe flapping as they clapped their hands; Spanish speakers from legions of different countries; African Americans who have lived for generations in this city; newly arrived immigrants from all over the world; Arabs, Asians, blue-blooded Park Avenue ladies, college students. They all came out to cheer us on. They cheered for Liz,and they cheered

for me as | cheered for her, by her side. Our voices blended in unity, at

least for a handful of hours.

SPECIAL BOOK BONUS

You Can Sometimes Take the “Human Body Is Like a Car” Analogy Too Far. Part 2.

The first two chapters of Don Kardong’s book appeared in our November/December issue.

EPTEMBER 1983 MY OLD BUICK

Thad gone through ten miles of the Twin Cities Marathon in fifty-two minutes. Nothing spectacular, but nothing to be ashamed of. A final time in the 2:16 range seemed likely.

A minute later, I was hunched over at the side of the road, hands on my knees, stomach churning, and speaking to Ralph, as we used to say. I was thinking about my old Buick.

The Buick, a powder-blue Skylark that carried me through high school and college in admirable fashion, was zipping through Northern California one day in 1971 on its way back to Washington, with myself and fellow runner Duncan Macdonald inside, when it began lurching in syncopated fashion. We pulled off the highway, opened the hood, and looked at an engine that had suffered some sort of losing bout with the heat. Water from the radiator had sprayed the underside of the hood and was dripping from the water pump.

We waited for things to cool down a little, then took the next freeway exit to a service station.

“I’m sure it’s the thermostat,” said the attendant. “Those things clog up in the winter and get stuck when they’re supposed to open.”

He replaced it, we drove happily down the highway, and twenty minutes later the engine overheated again. We found another station.

“Td guess it’s the thermostat,” the attendant said.

“We just replaced it,’ I told him.

“Well, sometimes even the new ones stick. I can replace it if you want.”

He did, and we headed off again. We overheated, found another service station, and heard a familiar story.

“Probably the thermostat,” the man said.

“We’ve replaced the thermostat twice,” I said.

“Well,” he replied, “maybe you should just take it out. That way the coolant will be sure to circulate.”

We left, drove, overheated, found another station.

“Probably the thermostat,” the man said.

“T’ve replaced it twice and finally took it out altogether,” I said, overheating myself. “There isn’t even one in there.”

“Not one in there?” he said, surprised. “No wonder you’re having trouble. You’ve got to have a thermostat.” He put one in.

Twenty-four hours and a few futile, costly repairs later, we deserted the car and caught a bus to Washington.

And now, a dozen years later in Minneapolis, with my hands on my knees and my stomach in revolt, I was remembering the feelings of frustration I had faced in trying to get that old car going again. Sometimes, it seems, no matter who you consult or what you do, the same old problem keeps rising to the surface, bobbing and weaving in an elusive attempt to avoid getting fixed. And in running the marathon, whatever slight maladjustment might be in one’s system is bound to become a major obstacle to success. The old Buick had finally succumbed to a flaw, not unlike the one that hit me at the ten-mile mark in Minneapolis. The Buick’s flaw was in the gurgling innards of its system. So was my own.

The first time I remember experiencing midrace nausea was during the 1976 Baltimore Marathon. At the prerace pasta feed, local runner Marge Rosasco asked whether I had ever had trouble with my stomach during a race.

“T used to have trouble with a side stitch,” I told her. “Two-thirds of the way into a five- or ten-K race I’d get a really sharp pain in my side. One of the reasons I switched to running marathons was because I don’t have the problem in the longer race.”

“How about nausea, though?” she asked. “I keep running marathons where I get to about twenty miles feeling fine, right on the pace I want, when all of a sudden I get sick to my stomach. I’ve tried all sorts of things to cure it, but nothing seems to work. Have you ever had anything like that?”

I was no help to her. The problem with the side stitch had been a recurrent one in college, especially on cross-country courses. I had altered my diet, adjusted my breathing, strengthened my stomach muscles, and tried taking medication to prevent spasm of the colon. Nothing really helped much, though, except moving on to another event.

But throwing up during a race?

“T haven’t had that problem since high school, Marge, when I was totally out of shape.”

The next day I spent ten minutes next to the road at the nineteen-mile mark, stomach heaving uncontrollably, eyes bulging, knees shaking.

“There must be something in the water in this part of the country,” I told Marge later.

An old car may perform beautifully for years, dutifully chauffeuring its owner from place to place, never showing great signs of distress, only to suffer a major breakdown when asked to push to the limit on the open road. Runners are not much different, which is why the marathon tends to bring out the worst in us.

Not everyone suffers from midmarathon nausea, but it does seem that most of us have some sort of frailty that peeks its problematic head up during the excessive stresses of the marathon race, or at least during marathon training. At the Twin Cities Marathon the second-fastest American of all time, Dick Beardsley, was suffering through a prolonged absence from his specialty and was working on TV coverage of the race instead. Beardsley’s achilles tendon has been his achilles heel, and an operation to correct the problem had sidelined him for months.

“The doctor told me I could be running up to ten miles a day by November,” he said.

I didn’t tell him about the thermostats.

In fact, injuries incurred during training and racing are much more common than sensitive stomachs in interfering with people’s marathon attempts. Many runners find that the amount of training necessary to allow them to feel comfortable running the marathon is well beyond the amount they can handle without sustaining an injury. Usually it’s a knee, a hip, an arch, or, as in Beardsley’s case, a bad tendon or two that become wrenches in the marathon machinery. And the exact cure is often elusive.

For years I suffered from a sharp pain in my left knee, which was especially acute during downhill running. After five or six years of flirting with ice, aspirin, and cortisone treatments, the pain finally subsided with the development of better running shoes. Apparently the problem was bursitis, but knowing that didn’t seem to help much. And though doctors in recent years have gotten better at treating the well-hidden glitches in human athletic machinery, they’re not always sympathetic to the excesses of long-distance runners.

A college teammate of mine who had injured his knee complained to his doctor that the joint would tighten up when he tried to run more than five miles a day.

The doctor was incredulous. “Well then, don’t run more than five miles a day,” he said.

It made sense, of course, unless one was tempted by longer distances. And when we pursue faster times at the marathon distance, we generally end up asking doctors to cure things that most people have enough sense to treat by avoiding

the cause. Fatal athletic flaws tend to lie outside the realm of ordinary medicine, and as a result we runners often end up speculating about the root of the problem ourselves.

After my first bout with nausea at Baltimore, I was convinced that the only problem had been in the city’s water supply. The next year I decided to run in Hawaii. By then, I had forgotten about the nausea.

On the night before the race, Duncan Macdonald and I went out for Mexican food. The next day, I wound up with my hands on my knees at nineteen miles, and Duncan won the race. I suspected foul play.

It seemed reasonable, though, given my own penchant for enjoying an outrageous diet, and given the delicious complexity of our meal the night before, that something in the Mexican dinner was at fault. If not, perhaps the aid stations were to blame.

Thus began the dietary phase of my problem solving, when I adjusted everything on the menu to avoid stomach complications during the race. I passed up electrolyte fluids at the aid stations, then stopped drinking anything at all. I avoided excessive carbohydrate loading the night before the race and stayed away from spicy foods. The next year I won the Honolulu Marathon. My problem, it seemed, had been solved.

Remember the Buick, though? We had deserted it in Northern California, frustrated to the hilt with trying to fix it. But after a week or two, I had it loaded on a truck and shipped home. A local mechanic installed a new engine, and everything seemed to work fine.

“Tt still runs a little hot,” he confided. “But I don’t think you’! have a problem with it.”

Thad my doubts. After repeated service-station stops along the highway in California, my confidence in fixing flaws was not high. I drove slowly in the cool of the night when I headed back to California in the fall. In spite of my caution, the car showed signs of overheating. Before long, I was aware that it wasn’t truly fixed and that I would have to avoid long, hot drives if I didn’t want a recurrence of the problem.

My marathon “solution,” careful attention to prerace and midrace diet, worked out better for a while. I ran several races without hearing much from my stomach. In its place, other problems, mostly muscular, cropped up.

During my two successive Boston Marathons, I developed severe tightness in my calves from the early downhill running, and I realized that a tall runner was destined to have trouble on the Boston course. The second year I proved it to myself by cramping acutely and dropping out at the sixteen-mile point.

It may be that muscular quirks are the fatal flaws of marathon runners more than all other weaknesses put together. Could there be more convincing evidence of the impropriety of human beings racing the marathon distance than the fact

that our muscles tend to run out of glycogen at twenty miles? Even I wouldn’t expect my Buick to continue down the highway without stopping to fill up every now and then. But I do seem to expect my body to continue running indefinitely on empty.

I’m not sure how many marathons I’ve run where I’ve “hit the wall,” the phrase we all use to describe muscular despair during the latter stages of the race. But I remember two in a row that, in retrospect, seem typical. The first was in the fall of 1980, when I dodged traffic in the tunnels of Rio de Janeiro for thirty kilometers before slowing precipitously for the final 5K along the beach. With blisters (“the size of Buicks,” Woody Allen would say) on both feet, I was told by a spectator that all I had to do was keep moving and Id get third. I kept moving and finished sixth.

The second, a few months later in Japan, saw me standing at an aid station just past twenty miles, pouring down one cup of juice after another, desperately trying to restore my blood sugar level. After my third cup, the spectators began to chuckle. Embarrassed, I hobbled off toward the finish line.

A friend of mine was once in a similar wasted condition in the last few miles of a marathon, and he convinced himself that he was making progress down the road by sighting objects up ahead, then monitoring his progress toward them. At one point he spotted a pedestrian several hundred yards ahead and made that person his immediate goal.

Staring down at his feet, he ran for a while, then looked up. Not much progress. He looked down at his feet again, ran some more, looked up again. Unbelievably, he still didn’t seem to have gotten much closer. Was it possible someone was walking faster than he was running? Finally after concentrating on his feet and running as long as he could before looking up, he recognized some progress toward his goal. And as he got closer, he suddenly realized that the pedestrian had been walking toward him the whole time.

Muscular fatigue, cramping, and depletion, though, no matter how drastic, are just part of the game. Proper training and adjustments in the diet can help alleviate these flaws in our makeup, but can the same be said of regurgitation?

To correct my problems with muscular exhaustion, I went into my next marathon after a full program of carbohydrate depletion and loading. I felt confident of having stored plenty of glycogen for the final miles of the race, convinced that I wouldn’t be frustrated by a lack of energy. I was right. Instead, I threw up again.

This time, a woman runner and physiologist I talked to suggested that the nausea was actually a symptom of heatstroke. I had suffered from the heat in Rio de Janeiro, she said, and when you’ve been knocked down by the heat, it can throw the system off for months and months. The body’s ability to regulate its temperature is thrown off, sort of like having a problem with . . . a thermostat.

Well, why not? The cure, then, was to avoid marathons for a while, let the body reestablish its ability to control its own internal heat. This was fine with me. I was planning to give up the event altogether.

For a year and a half I passed up all opportunities to run the twenty-six-miler. The rest did me good, I’m sure; but the attractions of the marathon are many, and by the fall of 1982 I was back in serious training. After months of preparation, I jumped back into the fray at Honolulu. I suffered some nausea at the twentyone-mile aid station, but the results weren’t drastic. I finished ninth, and vowed to try another. In January, I ran 2:16:41 at Houston. Some nausea again, but only briefly. My confidence was returning. For my third marathon attempt after the layoff, I had hopes of something below 2:15. Instead, I stopped at thirteen miles, hands on my knees, stomach rebelling.

I was discouraged by the relapse, but by now I thought I had narrowed the problem down to two main things. First, stomach acid seemed to be present as an irritant. Second, an accumulation of phlegm at the back of the throat seemed to act as a trigger. For my next marathon attempt, at the Twin Cities, I took medication to inhibit the problem of stomach acid.

But by ten miles I was thinking about my Buick.

By the time I abandoned that old car in California after repeated attempts at repair, I had learned an awful lot about how a car works. I had eliminated a few suspected causes in its flawed cooling system. (The thermostat, for example, was fine.) And after having learned so much about the problem, I was more determined than ever to find a solution. A new water pump didn’t do the job. A new head gasket proved useless. Even a new engine didn’t seem to help the car stay cool.

And similarly, after ten minutes of vomiting in Minneapolis, I was more angry than frustrated. I had thought the problem was solved. My stomach disagreed. But I knew I had to be closing in on the culprit. Stomach acid didn’t seem to be the real problem. Diet and liquid aid were important, but not central. Heat and humidity were important issues, but was my thermostat really defective?

If you’ve ever agonized like this, searching for the key to an injury, a quirk, or some other flaw that upsets your running plans, you know how obsessive the quest becomes. After years of struggling with unsuccessful remedies, though, you begin to think that maybe there is no solution, only an inability of the body to perform the task at hand.

My newborn daughter, for example, has been unable to keep food down much of the time. Where most parents would say, “She has your eyes,” or “She’s got your nose,” my wife says, “She’s got your digestive system.” After trying several things to help her keep the food down, we’ve finally discovered why she throws up so much. She has “gastroesophageal reflux.” This means, of course, that she throws up a lot.

Is the solution, then, as easy as finding the right name? Do I have gastroesophageal reflux? Hearing a name for my daughter’s malady put my mind at ease. Perhaps the solution for running problems could be as easy. Let’s call those otherwise unnamed flaws in our human anatomy “zekes,” “geeks,” “weasels,” or whatever. That way, instead of telling someone, “I feel sick to my stomach after running halfway through a marathon, and the feeling often leads to vomiting,” Ican just say, “I have a stomach zeke,” or “I suffered from an intestinal geek at twenty miles.” A friend of mine who has had groin pain that’s kept him from running for two years can finally stop consulting doctors and offering multiple possibilities for what’s wrong. From now on, he can just complain of having a severe groin weasel. Giving the problem a name may put him on the road to recovery.

Once again, though, I have my doubts. My daughter still throws up and, so far, so do I. Finding the name hasn’t yet suggested a solution for either of us. Does the final episode of the Buick story offer guidance?

After virtually giving up on fixing the old car, I had resigned myself to driving only in cool weather for short periods of time. Within bounds, then, the car worked fine. Having accepted its fate as a short-distance vehicle, I stopped worrying about it.

As I got in the driver’s seat one day, though, I felt a rush of inspiration. Had I ever really checked the radiator? I disconnected it and took it to a radiator specialist.

The most obvious solution of all turned out to be the right one. The lousy thing was so rusted inside that water could hardly circulate. That had been the root of the problem all along. But why hadn’t I thought of it earlier?

I’m not sure I appreciated the full extent of the Buick’s lesson as I stood on the side of the road in Minneapolis. I only remember the frustration of having another supposed solution prove ineffective. Back to the drawing board.

Now, though, I think the old car’s message is clearer. It may be true that some problems, no matter who you consult or how hard you try, keep surfacing like whales, gigantic and immovable. And it may be that our flaws are irreparable. But sometimes, just when we’ve accepted them, a solution appears, simple and obvious. I hope so.

After the radiator was fixed, the car ran beautifully for years. May we all be so fortunate.

SUMMER 1980 COLLISION COURSE

Most of Stanford University’s campus sits comfortably, sedately, on flatland. Classrooms, libraries, dormitories, and athletic facilities are almost all built on a

small segment of Leland Stanford’s old 8000-acre farm, a parcel that belies the true geography of the area. One does not need to venture far to notice a change.

To the west, a five-minute run brings the beginning of foothills that separate the San Francisco Bay Area from the Pacific Ocean and from the atrocious fogbanks characteristic of the coast.

Like the first tiny scratchings of an EKG recording of an awakening heartbeat, the hills behind the university signal the beginning of larger foothills, the pulse of different landforms and an active geological region. The San Andreas Fault is nearby.

We spent little time, as Stanford distance runners, in the flatlands. Typically, we headed for the hills.

In the late sixties, the running boom was unborn. We ran, solitary figures, through the Stanford outback, enjoying our loneliness, our camaraderie, our competitive urgings, and our association with the hills. The schizophrenic hills, with their combination of cows and radiotelescopes, horses and antennas, angry farmers and engineers, had not made up their minds what, exactly, they were. Neither had we.

And who were “we’’? We were members of the Stanford cross-country team. Members today of a common collegiate mythology only “we,” I suppose, can enjoy.

We were Arvid Kretz, a delicately constructed music major who was stopped by police while running late at night dressed in white shirt, black slacks, black shoes, and white socks, carrying his alto sax. In the middle of a run home from music practice, Arvid had trouble convincing the police of his membership on the Stanford track team. For a week, he was the prime suspect in the robbery of a nearby health spa.

We were “Large” Al Sanford, who joined and quit the team at least four times, usually in futile attempts to improve his social life. A horribly embarrassing episode, in which a fragrant love letter, composed, perfumed, and delivered to his mailbox by “friends” on the team, led him to open his heart to the girl who supposedly wrote the note, ranks at the top of a long list of Large Al stories. Nowadays, “Large” usually tells the stories himself.

We were Dan Cautley, a middle-distance runner and Dragnet devotee who once, on the way home from a movie, walked up to the first-floor window of a late-night student, showed him his ID, and said, “Hello, I’m Officer Friday. I’d like to ask you a few questions.” The student was unamused and Dan left, but the next morning he got a call from a real police detective. The officer found the ID, which Dan had inadvertently dropped, outside the window. A stereo system had been stolen from one of the dorm rooms, and Dan’s ID on the ground suggested his involvement. Dan explained about Dragnet, Officer Joe Friday, and his routine

the night before at the student’s window. The real officer listened intently during the intricate explanation.

“That’s the best story I’ve ever heard,” he finally said. “And I don’t believe a word of it.”

Dan, like Arvid, became a prime robbery suspect.

We were Tom Teitge, who ran workouts with his dachshund, Wolfgang. Tom received his diploma from Stanford dressed as Captain American, proudly flashing his garbage-can lid to an appreciative commencement gathering.

We were Brook Thomas, articulate, cynical, and cheap. A student of literature and mooching, Brook once spent a summer camped in the bushes behind one of Stanford’s dorms, his clothes hung neatly on hangers in the branches.

And we were Brook’s older brother Ramsay, a fugitive from medical school, history grad school, and the Peace Corps, who had competed well in middle-distance events at the University of Maryland. Ramsay, in the throes of indecision as to his future, came west to spend time at Stanford, and ended up sleeping in late most mornings and napping most afternoons in Brook’s dorm room. When it finally came time to have letters of recommendation written for a new career possibility, Ramsay asked Brook to fill one out. In answer to the question, “In what position did you know the applicant?” Brook dutifully wrote, “Horizontal.”

All in all, we were an extended family with a common interest in competitive distance running. We spent a good portion of our college years honing our racing skills, searching for the right combination of speed and endurance, ingredients that could produce personal records and team victories. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.

Training in the hills behind the university, we often traveled Sand Hill Road, running parallel to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, or “SLAC.” SLAC looked like a two-mile-long garage with a cluster of large buildings on one end. It seemed perfectly level and perfectly bizarre in a flat section of the field next to Sand Hill Road. Occasionally we saw white-tailed deer nearby. When we ran next to SLAC, it seemed to take a long, long time.

In the collegiate climate of the late sixties, we were distrustful of the damned thing, which seemed to be an offspring of the unhealthy relationship between government and academia. Since no one, or at least no one I knew, seemed to be able to explain what went on at SLAC, speculation about its purpose ran wild. It was an atom smasher. It used as much electricity as the whole Bay Area. It had something to do with radioactivity or weapons or something. It was certainly dangerous. None of the myths in particular, though, seemed to stand the test of time. After the student unrest of the sixties began to ease, while I spent my last year in the area before moving back to Seattle, suspicion of SLAC was replaced by a different response.

There should be a race around the thing.

Whenever I found myself running near the facility, I enjoyed the notion of what a SLAC road race would be like. A two-mile straightaway, one turn, a twomile backstretch. No hills, no scenery. Racing the electrons. Accelerating, using energy, hitting the wall.

It never happened. With the facility off-limits to the public, with the kind of secretive and dangerous (or so we thought) work scientists did there, there seemed little chance of something as frivolous as a road race being allowed nearby.

I left the Stanford hills, most of my college friends, and SLAC behind in 1972 to return to Seattle.

“What is this race?” Brook asked me. “Nobody I’ve asked seems to know anything about it.”

“It’s not a race,” I corrected him. “It’s a fun-run. Around SLAC.”

Brook scowled and said something I can’t seem to remember.

It was August 15, 1980, two days before Ramsay’s wedding, when “Large” would stand watching and comment, “Ramsay getting married . . . . This is quite an event.”

To which one of the guys, one of the old friends, would add, “It’s the end of an era. The sixties are finally over.”

We would all laugh.

Brook and I were running, chasing trails in the Stanford hills that he had shown me for the first time more than ten years earlier. Now, though, we weren’t solitary figures. A steady line of joggers, like a path of ants, wound up into the hills from the campus, past the cows, past the radiotelescope, over the sacred paths of our collegiate days.

To Brook, the hordes of other runners in the world are distressing. I sense that he tries to erase them from his perception, to focus on his own form, his own breathing, his own thoughts, and his own attempts at maintaining quickness during a run.

The trendiness of running, the media hype, the self-indulgence and narrowmindedness of many new runners appall him.

“Tf I were in high school now,” he once said, “I know I wouldn’t turn out for cross-country. I’d do something else.”

To Brook, I think, running is a skill to be sharpened, an engrossing but not overwhelming part of life, and an activity that should have been kept a secret among friends, not shouted from the tops of the Stanford hills to people who might not understand.

I was intentionally irking him when I called the run around SLAC, the run that I had once thought improbable but which was now scheduled for the same weekend as his brother Ramsay’s wedding, a fun-run. Because Brook the racer

feels the same way about fun-runs as Brook the English professor would feel about a Comics as Literature class. A waste of time.

We continued to run quickly up and down the hills, passing joggers and discussing our current lives, loves, and hopes, until I thought I could ask the question.

“Are you going to run at SLAC Sunday?”

Brook hesitated. I’m not sure what he was thinking, but I imagined he was trying to decide whether the SLAC run would be an event worthy of the sport or just a gathering of people uninterested in the upper realms of foot-speed.

“Maybe,” he said at last. “I’ll see.”

“When I was in high school, I was intimidated by athletes.”

The speaker was Carter B. Smith, an afternoon “jock” at KNBR radio in San Francisco. I was talking with him near the administrative offices at SLAC on the morning of the run, while a handful of people from KNBR and SLAC were getting things organized for the carloads of fun-runners who would soon arrive.

“T think a person can lead a complete, normal, happy life,” he said, “without ever running.”

Carter was baiting me, I realized. He knew my background, my interest in racing, my position with Running magazine. I found nothing wrong with his statement, though. I’ve said almost the same thing myself.

He looked at me with intense blue-gray eyes that could either smile or challenge. Now they challenged.

“T don’t give a___ if anyone runs or not.”

I found myself liking this man a lot.

We were discussing KNBR’s interest in running, their promotion of events like the SLAC run, and Carter B. Smith’s own history as a runner.

“T’ve given up almost every vice a person can have,” he told me. “A few years ago I weighed two hundred and thirty pounds.” I looked at him, and for the life of me, I could not imagine where he would hang all those pounds. “Now,” he added, “T’m at a hundred sixty.” Thus spoke a man who cared not for running.

A few years ago one of the KNBR disc jockeys offhandedly invited listeners to join him for a run at a specified location on the weekend. The event was a success, the idea caught on, and soon the jocks had formed “The Amalgamated Joggers,” a loose-knit collection of people interested in getting together for fun-runs at sites around the Bay Area. The station now helps sponsor one run a month.

“We’ve run at Angel Island,” read the letter I received from Isabelle Lemon, KNBR and Amalgamated Joggers spokesperson, “a winery (we got chilled chenin blanc at the end of the run—now that’s real class), a cheese factory, et cetera.

“But the general theme is fun. And the people who join us are super people. And we even had two Amalgamated Joggers who met at a run, subsequently got married, and we’ve never seen nor heard from them again.”

Carter B. Smith and I were discussing his T-shirt collection, which is 1800 in number and growing daily, when his wife walked up. She was the only one of the organizers I had noticed who looked very worried about getting things organized.

“Where are the release forms?” she asked Carter. “And where are people supposed to sign them and who do I put in charge of that?”

“Those are all good questions,” he replied, “none of which I know the answer to.”

She was displeased with the response. Carter began helping her search for the release forms among the assorted containers of picnic foodstuffs. I switched my interviewing to Bob Adamson, a senior designer at SLAC and the man who helped put the event together.

Bob is a pleasant man who looks like Bonanza’s Ben Cartwright, even when he isn’t wearing his cowboy hat. With the hat on, the similarity was distracting, and I had to keep reminding myself not to ask about Hoss and Little Joe. “God doesn’t really like people,” he told me. “You train like hell for a year, take three weeks off, and you’re out of shape again.”

He proceeded to tell me, in a patient, mellow voice, about his own association with running, his fortuitous association with a Stanford research team that was studying cardiovascular fitness, and his “membership” in The Amalgamated Joggers.

“They’re a fun group,” he told me. “That’s the whole point. Fun.”

“Did you have any trouble convincing the SLAC administrators to allow you to hold a fun-run here?” I asked, fishing for something.

“No. We don’t do any classified work here,” he responded. “There’s no reason for them to object.”

Reluctantly, I felt some of SLAC’s mystique begin to fade. Nothing classified?

I turned suddenly, noticing a familiar face on the scene. Brook had arrived.

“You decided to run,” I said, honestly surprised.

“T will if I wake up in time,” he replied. He did a few half-hearted stretches and went to warm up.

I didn’t tell Brook about my discussions with Carter, about Carter’s contention that racing was counterproductive to what this event was all about. Nor did I tell Carter about Brook’s feelings about fun-running. I just watched the two of them jogging and walking around, warming up. Opposite ends of the spectrum.

Ina few minutes Brook and I were racing side by side down the longest straightaway I had ever seen, matching strides, leaving a mass of fun-runners behind.

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, as I discovered during a lecture after the run, was completed in 1966 at a cost of $114 million. It is a facility used by

nuclear physicists to study the smallest particles of matter known to man, particles that are called “quarks” after an elusive fictional character in James Joyce’s novel Finnegan’s Wake.

Quarks are smaller than molecules, smaller than atoms, smaller than neutrons or protons or electrons. Smaller, even, than Volkswagens or Datsuns.

“In high-energy physics you have to have bigger and bigger machines to see smaller and smaller things,’ SLAC’s director W. K. H. Panofsky, once remarked. The statement suggests a distortion of logic with which physicists seem to be at home in making sense out of elementary particle research.

Scientists use SLAC today to study particles that were totally unknown to man ten years ago when I first began running the Stanford hills.

“Actually,” said our tour guide, a theoretical physicist named Bruce Sawhill, “what you ran around today was a government hiding of a two-mile-long KNBR antenna.” We laughed, and Bruce went on to explain what he and his cohorts were trying to do at SLAC.

It went something like this: Physicists use different kinds of accelerators for different kinds of research. For a while they bombarded known elements with accelerated electrons to produce new elements. Unfortunately, though, most of the new elements were around for less time than William Henry Harrison. The physicists lost interest in atom smashing after a few good collisions.

Later, facilities like SLAC were conceived and constructed because, unlike circular accelerators, in which electrons lose energy going around turns (like runners on an indoor track), the linear path allows electrons to be accelerated at speeds more closely approaching (to within .00000001 percent) the speed of light.

Einstein taught us that anything going that fast increases in mass. The accelerated electrons at SLAC are 40,000 times more massive than the ones that make your socks stick together in the dryer. When they collide with something, they hit hard.

For a while, scientists used SLAC electrons to bombard protons, trying to bust the little buggers apart. They were unsuccessful, but in the process they determined the existence of the first three quarks, which they called “up,” “down,” and “strange.” Later, “charm” was identified.

A major adjustment occurred at SLAC in 1972, when the accelerated electrons and their antimatter buddies, the positrons, were separated at the end of the twomile tunnel and sent in opposite directions around a circular vacuum tube and finally made to collide. In the resulting pure explosion of matter and antimatter, electron and positron, a fifth and sixth quark were identified.

“They were originally named ‘truth’ and ‘beauty,’” Bruce told us, “froma poem that says truth and beauty cannot be found in this world. Later, it was decided that that was a little obnoxious, and they were renamed ‘top’ and ‘bottom.’”

The final change in the SLAC design was the addition, in 1978, of an enormous circular ring many times larger than the one installed in 1972. Now, electrons and positrons are accelerated near the speed of light down the linear accelerator, sent in opposite directions around the larger, more efficient storage ring, and made to collide with even greater explosive energy. Truth and beauty sometimes result.

We left the lecture room and boarded buses for a tour of the facility. As we headed along the path of that morning’s run, Bruce explained that the actual accelerator tunnel was well underground. The part we ran next to, the two-mile-long “garage,” is actually housing for the klystron gallery. Klystrons are machines that emit huge bursts of microwave energy, accelerating the electrons, as Bruce told us, “like waves accelerating surfers.”

We ended our tour by viewing the collision end of the facilities, where one of the runners asked, “Is there a military use for any of this?”

We were assured that there was not, that SLAC was engaged in pure research, in spite of the fact that accelerators were being studied elsewhere for possible military application.

I refrained from saying so, but in my heart I was glad to know that if accelerators were ever aimed at the sky, at least I was privileged to have the klystrons on my side.

The tour ended, the crowd dispersed, the KNBR picnic was winding down. Brook had left a long time ago.

How was I to make sense of all this?

Thad had a weekend of nostalgia and high-energy physics. Racing and funrunning. Was there, somewhere, as in scientists’ attempts to find a common ground among the diverse forces known to physics, a synthesis of it all?

There had been no terrible collision between the opposite philosophies of fun-running and racing that day. Was it too obnoxious to think that if there had been, truth and beauty would have resulted? Or would we even have known up from down?

I thought back to the race. Brook and I were charging down the accelerator homestretch, following the path of the electron beam, clipping along at five minutes a mile. The straightaway seemed endless, and suddenly we seemed to be running in a moment of suspended time.

Brook and I, friends for years, who had raced each other countless times, were racing again. In that moment, while we struggled to achieve the top speeds our bodies would allow, we also ran for Stanford teammates who weren’t there with us. We ran together, straining against limitations, trying to discover something elementary about life.

I glanced over at Brook, and I thought of something that had once happened to me at a Sunday fun-run back in Spokane. The organizer had always stressed

health, cardiovascular fitness, and easy running, and was dismayed at those of us who ran fast.

On that morning he cornered me after the run, striving to be good-natured, and said, “What are you doing, running like that? This is a fun-run, you know.”

I looked at him, and said words that came back to me as Brook and I sprinted along the electron path at SLAC.

“Tt’s fun to run fast,” I told him.

Brook and I, fast fun-runners or fun fast-runners, ex-members of the Stanford cross-country team, went on to finish the SLAC run together, sprinting at a speed considerably slower than accelerated electrons.

He left almost immediately to take a nap.

I stayed to take in a tour of the SLAC facilities and enjoy a picnic lunch, graciously supplied by The Amalgamated Joggers.

Thirty Phone Booths to Boston will continue in our March/April 2005 issue.