A First Marathon Taught Him More Than How to Run a Race

Age brings expertise and wisdom, but it can keep us from going all the way

By
March 28, 2022 at 11:20 a.m. EDT
(Rune Fisker for The Washington Post)
27 min

Thirty thousand people will run the Boston Marathon on April 18, and I’m not going to be one of them. So no obsessive pre-race monitoring of food and water intake for me this year, and no exquisite timing of the crucial final visit to the bathroom. No dawn bus ride out to Hopkinton and non-nap on the grass and long walk to the starting corrals at an energy-conserving slow pace that’s hard to maintain when my body wants to start going fast right now. No starting gun, and no crystalline sense of setting out to do a difficult thing with many others and yet all alone, the pure joy of moving through the world under my own power rising inside me to eclipse both the deep confidence that comes of capability and the shallower but sharper worry that I’m going to screw up the race somehow.

Runners talking about their injuries are even more tedious than tech zillionaires talking about the future, so suffice it to say that I’ve been injured lately and haven’t been able to run much. But even if I wasn’t hurt, I still wouldn’t be running Boston this year. I took up and then put down marathoning in middle age, and along the way I learned something not only about myself and life but about the nature of lessons.

The first marathon I ran was in Burlington, Vt., in 2008. I was 43, and I didn’t know what I was doing or what I was getting into. In the months leading up to the race, I had continued to run my usual leisurely few miles on most days, and I had tried a couple of longer runs and a couple of sessions at the track, but I had not done anything like the concentrated distance-extending and speed-building training routine a marathoner should pursue. I had intended to prepare in a more urgent and systematic way, but I was busy with work, and this and that other thing came up, and then a few weeks before the race I got a giant splinter from sliding in my socks on an old hardwood floor. The barbed hunk of wood disappeared so deep into my heel that my doctor decided he couldn’t dig it out. I had to stay off the foot until it worked its way out on its own, which happened not long before race day.

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I had apparently decided not to think about how unready I was to run a marathon. My mind shied violently from the subject whenever I tried to force it to focus on what would happen during the race. This wasn’t like me — I can usually face up to whatever’s coming, especially if it’s bad — but part of avoiding thinking about the marathon was avoiding thinking about why I was avoiding thinking about it. My instincts seemed to be telling my reasoning mind to stay away. To the extent I let myself think about it at all, I settled for a general sense that I had done a lot of cross-training, broadly defined. When I took my daughters for a bike ride, walking or jogging while they pedaled in crazed spirals around me, I usually came home carrying at least one girl and at least one bike. When I had a lot of work to do, I couldn’t think of a way to get out of it that wouldn’t be humiliating, so I did it.

I had lost what little speed I’d had when I was younger, but I had gotten stronger and more sure of what my body could do. If running a marathon was a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, I assumed I could probably handle whatever came up.

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I went up to Burlington from Boston, where I live, with Charles, an old friend who had persuaded me to run a marathon with him. We walked toward the starting line on a bright late-spring morning through an army of runners doing their getting-ready routines: stretching, standing in line at the porta-potties, sipping from water bottles, staring into space with headphones on, pacing aimlessly, greeting each other and making too-loud jargon-intensive small talk in the way that people will do when they’re trying to convey that they know the score and are totally at home in a situation that might cause novices to be nervous. There were placards on poles showing expected finishing times — faster as you approached the start line — and you were supposed to find the one that represented your likely pace and start there.

Charles, who knew exactly what he was doing and had trained to do it, was looking for the three-hour sign, which was way up near the front. He had never run a marathon before, either, but he thought he could get in under three hours. That meant averaging 6 minutes 52 seconds per mile. There was no reason to believe I could keep up with him. I’d taken up running a few years before, when my daughters arrived, because running at night when the girls were asleep was more feasible than hanging around a basketball court all afternoon. I could run eight-minute miles without any special effort, and, though I’d strung together no more than 18 of them at one time — out to my mother-in-law’s house on Thanksgiving as a prelude to heroic displays of trenchermanship — running 26.2 of them didn’t seem impossible to imagine. An eight-minute pace, which would produce a 3-hour 30-minute finish, was what I naturally fell into when I was listening to a book on my iPod and didn’t pay attention to what I was doing. I took off the headphones and paid attention only when I ran with Charles, who always forced me to go faster, an effort that wore on my mind more than on my body. Moving through space may be joy, but thinking about it in any systematically intentional way is drudgery.

I had apparently decided not to think about how unready I was to run a marathon. My mind shied violently from the subject whenever I tried to force it to focus on what would happen during the race.

Music cranked from big speakers near the start line, and a voice came on periodically, talking over the music: 10 minutes until start time … five minutes … one minute. They were playing the usual jock rock, which typically slides off me with no effect, but on this occasion it got through. Lenny Kravitz’s “Fly Away” was playing when the starting gun went off, and the rising A-B-C-G-D groove caused a feeling to swell within me that I could run much faster than usual for a very long time and would feel mountingly greater and greater until I felt great forever and couldn’t feel anything other than great. I knew this was stupid, but I still felt this way.

Charles took off, and I took off with him. Charles, who at the time did something James Bond villain-like in the energy business and now does something similarly fate-of-the-planet-y but carbon-neutral, is a natural-born pusher of systems to failure. When you play poker with him, he bets like a bebop drummer dropping bombs off the beat, a jaggedly unpredictable presence forcing everybody at the table to constantly evaluate whether they’re just in the game to hang out with their pals or are, in fact, ready to go all the way right now. If a dog chases us when we’re out running together, he charges at the dog, and once when the owner was in sight he faked at the dog and charged the owner instead.

It was hard for me to keep up with him, even over the first few hundred yards of the marathon course. I am relatively quick — I have quick hands, and when I play ball my first step usually shakes me free of my defender for at least a moment — but I’m not at all fast. I pretty much just have the one running speed, so there’s not much difference between what it looks like when I’m poking along and when I’m going as fast as I can. It felt to me, trying to stay almost even with Charles’s shoulder, that I was running flat-out, as I would if I were fleeing an enraged mob. It couldn’t possibly be sustainable, but I let Lenny Kravitz’s A-B-C-G-D crunch clear all that from my head and just ran.

After a while, I couldn’t keep up with Charles anymore, and gradually he disappeared from view. This was no more than a mile or two into the marathon, and I was already winded and disappointed. We came upon a big hill, and I ran up it as fast as I could, then down the other side, also as fast as I could, which was faster. Whatever the many potential failings of running as fast as I could all the time as a strategic approach to my first marathon, especially one I hadn’t trained for, it had the virtue of being easy to remember. I snatched paper cups from the volunteers at some of the water stations, but I couldn’t get the hang of drinking while running and didn’t want to stop, so I spilled most of the contents. I didn’t have any of the nutrient goo that marathoners eat to re-up on calories, and I resented that everyone else seemed to be drawing reptilian strength from theirs.

The course doubled back on itself, and the same hill rose up ahead. This thing again? Fine, whatever; up we go, and down. After 15 miles or so I could feel myself tiring, but it didn’t seem different in kind from other times I’d been tired — worse, but not unimaginably so. I trudged on.

Then, somewhere around Mile 20, with no special warning, my soul died and went to hell and left my body sailing inertially on. The people and houses I passed grew flat and unreal, resembling cardboard cutouts badly pasted to a stark backdrop, an effect reminiscent of cheaply slapped-together cartoons that in my childhood had made me sad in ways I couldn’t express when I watched them on UHF stations on winter weekday afternoons that darkened to evening by 4 o’clock. I became confused about time and distance and could not for the life of me figure out how much farther I had to run and how much longer it would take. I settled on a rough estimate of forever and forever, respectively. I didn’t know about the effects of glycogen depletion, so I vaguely assumed that I just happened to be suffering a sudden delusional break with reality while I happened to be running a marathon, but I was too addled to be more than a little curious about the coincidence.

No matter how awful I felt — and indeed I felt more awful than I ever had in my entire life — I retained just enough sense to realize that continuing to feel this way was preferable to hating myself forever if I quit. I was also dully aware of hating Charles a great deal, and of hating myself for letting him trick me into this death march that I now had to see through to the finish. Furious, perplexed, betrayed, self-pitying, I sulked onward.

Mostly, I was looking forward to not having to run anymore, in a way that I had never looked forward to anything else, ever. But I was still going as fast as I could, albeit in a self-parodic undersea fashion. Having started out at something like a six-minute-mile pace with Charles, I probably clocked more like 10 minutes apiece for the last couple of miles. Eventually the finish line came into view, and I plodded in a haze across it. There were nightmarishly chipper people there who put around my shoulders a foil-like anti-shock wrap of the sort they put on weeping survivors of natural disasters. Faces swam into my balky vision, and tinny, flat buzzing voices kept asking if I was okay, which annoyed me because it confused me even more. Now that I no longer had to keep running, everything was fine, obviously. In fact, seeing the finish line and knowing that I could stop running when I crossed it and then actually ceasing to run when I crossed it ranked among the most intense pleasures I had ever experienced.

There were things to eat and drink in the finish area, all of which caused every individual cell in my body to want to vomit when I considered ingesting them. I’m not a big orange juice man, but all of me wanted orange juice and only orange juice. When I finally found a convenience store and drank some down, my cells were like, “Jesus H. Christ, that’s what we’re talking about,” and my head cleared and I returned to an approximation of my normal self, only constructed out of jerky and sawdust. We were staying in a not entirely convincing north-country-sporty-resorty hotel, which had whirlpools in the bathtubs. I had to use my hands to lift my dead legs over the side to get into the tub. I spent a very long time in it, immersed up to the eyes like a gator, thinking about how to do better next time.

Over the next few years, I learned how to run a marathon. In training, I did speed work at the track every once in a while — not often enough and not fast enough, but more than before — and built up to longer and longer Sunday runs. I got used to carrying and eating packets of goo in the first half of a race to stave off glycogen depletion, a condition of crisis known among endurance athletes as “bonking,” and I learned to shake down and rip open the packets and suck out their gaggingly sweet contents when a water station came into view so that I could wash down the mouth-clogging crap. I also learned how to crimp a paper cup so I could drink while running without spilling, and I learned that in the final miles of a race I had to plot a shallow angle into a water station to pick up a cup and then a shallow angle back out again to compensate for getting so stiff that it became difficult to change direction. I got used to living with how it felt to be deep into a marathon, within view of bonking but not bonking, and I got better at functioning in that state.

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I ran a marathon in Lowell in a sleety October nor’easter, and another in Boston on an April day so freakishly hot — 90 degrees, after a winter and early spring of training in the cold — that over 2,000 runners were treated for heatstroke and more than 4,000 entrants decided not to run at all. Usually I have nothing to do with spectators along the route, since I regard running a marathon as a shamefully self-regarding indulgence best carried out in private and I tend to assume that a significant percentage of the people lining the route are latter-day Merry Pranksters bent on expanding runners’ consciousness by dosing them with psychedelics. But on that dangerously hot day I gladly accepted ice, pretzels and garden-hose spray-downs from strangers. I crushed the melting ice onto my stove-hot scalp and sucked the salt off the pretzels before tossing aside the doughy, denuded remains.

I fell into a rhythm of running the nearby Lowell marathon in the fall to qualify for Boston in the spring, and I got better at setting a fast-enough pace I could sustain while leaving enough in reserve to finish with some dignity. I learned that this was considerably less awful than banking faster miles at the beginning by running at a speed I couldn’t keep up and then staggering home on empty. I never did run the famously slow, hilly and crowded Boston course to my satisfaction, but Lowell is fast and flat and not too crowded, and I got pretty good at orchestrating a run on it to finish just under the slowest possible time that would qualify me to run in Boston.

Once, in Lowell, I overdid the moderation in the early and middle stages and therefore had enough energy left for an actual kick down the homestretch. I passed scores, even hundreds of runners in the final couple of miles, and it felt as if I was just bounding along without a care in the world while they were borne back past me on a conveyor belt to which they were pinned like dying insects. The route finished with a lap around the field at a minor league baseball park, during which I fell into tandem with a Lycra-encased, raven-haired amazon. We tore around the warning track, parting to either side to pass solo runners and groups, then surging back together to return to our stride-for-stride intimacy. After we crossed the finish line at home plate, we grew mutually embarrassed by the sudden unplanned breathlessness of our encounter and contrived to drift off in opposite directions, strangers again.

So I staged an education for myself and got a lot smarter about running marathons. But here’s the lesson inside the lessons: That cataclysmically stupid first marathon in Burlington in 2008 was the fastest one I ever ran. My time that day was 3:24:42, an average of 7:49 per mile, good enough for 256th place out of 2,379 finishers. When I ran the Lowell marathon in the years that followed, I tended to come in a lot closer to my age group’s 3:30 cutoff for qualifying for Boston. A couple of times I missed the cutoff, which also happened each of the three times I ran the Boston Marathon — twice by a minute or two and once by a lot more than that (though, because that was the 90-degree day, just getting through it in my slowest time ever and ending up in the medical tent at the finish line felt like some kind of triumph).

As I got better at pacing myself through a marathon, I found that I was less and less torn up the next day, and that I perversely missed the tender obliteration that obliged me to go backward down staircases and turned a hot bath into a masochistic pleasure cruise. One reason I stopped running marathons was that I could no longer force myself to go so hard that I felt entirely used up the next day. Feeling merely sore wasn’t worth the bother of all the thinking-about-running entailed by training, and all the not-running forced on me by tapering before the race and taking time off after it to recover. If the ultimate point of running is simply the feeling of making headway under my own power along the rise and fall of the land — a heady blend of physical pleasure and space-exploration high that feels like concentrated essence of the joy of being alive — it was better to just listen to a book and go for my usual run almost every day, happily covering ground without thinking or planning or looking at my watch.

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What does it mean that I got slower as I got more educated? In retrospect, my refusal to think about the first marathon before I ran it looks to me like an unconscious scheme to short-circuit a fail-safe mechanism that would have stopped me from going all-out. Had I trained, I would have felt free to think about the race. But once it became clear that I wouldn’t be ready, my mind shied from considering the consequences. If I had known what I would feel like for the last six miles or so, I would have abandoned any idea of keeping pace with Charles and run a slower, more sensible race from the outset. I couldn’t know what bonking would feel like, but I suspect that my body had an inkling. I’d come close enough to see that feeling on the horizon in those Thanksgiving runs out to my mother-in-law’s house, and during the all-day pickup basketball epics in which I’d indulged before I had kids. My guess is that my body could extrapolate from those experiences and had at least a suspicion of what lay on the other side of the depletion frontier, and ordered my mind not to think about it so that it wouldn’t take steps to head off the disaster.

The more I learned about marathoning, the more reliable became the fail-safe mechanism that prevented me from going all-out. I spend time around boxers, and I’ve seen something similar happen as they gain in experience (though the stakes are exponentially higher in boxing). Take Hector “Macho” Camacho. One of the most abundantly gifted fighters of his era, he was elegant and ring-smart and preeningly untouchable at the age of 24, already 28-0 and in possession of a lightweight champion’s belt when Edwin Rosario nailed him with a left hook in the fifth round of a bout in Madison Square Garden in 1986. The punch didn’t even put Camacho down, and he moved and jabbed enough to survive the round and salvage a split-decision victory to remain unbeaten, but in the moments after absorbing that hook Camacho shifted from predatory virtuosity to belt-and-suspenders actuarial caution, and he never switched all the way back. He became a safety-first fighter, and, though he showed flashes of inspired greatness in bouts over the next quarter-century, that tended to occur only when he was sure the other guy couldn’t hurt him. He had a fine, long career, but he never became the all-timer he was shaping up to be before he fought Rosario.

The more I learned about marathoning, the more reliable became the fail-safe mechanism that prevented me from going all-out.

Badly shaken by Rosario’s hook after suffering a cut in the corner of his left eye — he was pawing at the blood with his glove just before Rosario drilled him — Camacho had arrived at a fresh understanding of himself and the world. From then on, whether he was winning or losing, he held back from letting a fight reach the all-out state in which everybody has all their chips in the pot and it’s plain that nobody will ever be the same again. Call it fear, wisdom or something else, but when he was informed after taking the decision over Rosario that his own face resembled that of a Cabbage Patch Kids doll, Camacho said, “Hey, if this is macho, I don’t want no part of it.”

This kind of resistance to going all the way can show up not just in boxers who get hurt but also in boxers who badly hurt or kill an opponent in the ring — and indeed in all sorts of athletes, artists, party animals, teachers, parents, spouses. Not going all the way shields you from what’s down at the bottom of things, which in some cases can be enabling as well as disabling. Getting a good look over the brink and stepping back from it can prevent you from finding out what you’re capable of, but it can also save a career, a liver, a marriage, a life. My friend Charles averaged a 6:52-per-mile pace in Burlington, exactly as planned, and finished in just under three hours, in 2:59:41, exactly as planned. I had secretly, unreasonably hoped to run shoulder-to-shoulder with him the whole way, and I was jealous of his triumph. But he was never the same again. He’d always had trouble with tight, balky tendons and ligaments, and in the course of willing himself to go all-out all the way in Burlington he did something to his hips and Achilles’ tendons from which they never fully recovered. He could no longer run whenever he felt like it or as far as he felt like going, and he went through long periods when he couldn’t run at all. He tells me he tried one more marathon several years later, but his parts rebelled, he had to walk part of the time, and he realized that he couldn’t force his body to do it anymore.

I know that there are all kinds of serious long-haul runners out there — competitive marathoners, ultramarathoners, back-to-back serial marathoners, triathletes — who scoff at the notion that running a marathon, especially at my pokey pace, would be a big, draining traumatic deal at all. But I’m not one of those people. I’m a casual runner who came to it in middle age, and I’m not fast, and it was always a big deal for me to get through a marathon and to qualify for Boston.

Non-elite marathoning is a middle-aged person’s game. The average age of official entrants in the Boston Marathon is over 42, and I’m surprised it isn’t higher. Young men and women do, of course, run marathons, and as a group they’re overrepresented among the faster runners, but when I would look around at the starting line of a marathon I saw a whole lot of people who, like me, were somewhere between post-young and pre-old. That impression was even stronger at the finish line, where even the youngest runners looked older than they did at the start. And the virtues on display in a marathon are the virtues of middle age: endurance, persistence, self-knowledge, an ability to see a task whole and pace yourself through it, an acute awareness of capability and limits.

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When we passed Wellesley College at Mile 13 of the Boston Marathon and Boston College at Mile 21, I’d take in the spectacle of thousands of young people, many of them having worked up a respectable Saturday-night buzz on a Monday morning, watching thousands of people who used to be young derive satisfaction from laboring through a difficult and not particularly exciting ordeal. That, to me, suggested one essence of the event. The spectators who were college seniors, a few short weeks away from leaving campus and figuratively joining the trudging flow, ought to have been paying special attention.

At Mile 23 the Boston Marathon route passes a block from my house. My daughters were still little girls in the years that I ran Boston, and they would come out to Beacon Street to try to spot me in the herd of suffering commuters. This was usually just about the worst moment of the race for me, the peak of hating myself for getting into a situation in which I wanted to quit but had to keep going because I knew myself well enough to know that I would hate myself even more if I quit. There were still three miles to go, which seemed like a lot, and I would be tempted by a vivid awareness that the sweet surcease of my own couch and bathtub were within a short limping walk of the course, were I to suddenly turn off to my right at this point. But that’s when my kids would spot me, and they’d shout and jump up and down and scuttle through the legs of the crowd to keep up with me for a bit, and I would feel obliged to smile and wave to let them know I was all right, and by the time I was done with that charade I would have to admit to myself that I couldn’t quit now and might as well finish butchering this thing. Parenthood in a nutshell, at least the part of it that requires endurance.

The whole business of marathoning reeks of allegory. The idea is to go through the course at a pace slow-and-steady enough to be sustainable but fast enough to qualify to do it all over again, and the rewards of such self-discipline are entirely, even pathologically, personal and internal. Having a couple of marathons a year to prepare for put an extra edge of purpose on every run, even if I never did train hard enough, and the necessity of qualifying for Boston supercharged even the tiniest details of my routine. There’s no functional difference between running 26.2 miles in 3:29:59 or in 3:30:01, but the distinction mattered a great deal to me. I have no use for bluster about sports and character, but I do think it’s true that doing one difficult thing equips you to do another.

When I finished a marathon, I’d lie around for the rest of the day and then go on about my business, sore and satisfied, secure in the knowledge that nothing significant had been achieved and that my efforts had no effect at all on the world. Still, as is true of life itself, you start here and you end up there, and it’s not always easy, and you keep going anyway. You don’t have to be middle-aged to recognize such persistence as sweet victory, but it helps.

And I try not to forget the lesson compressed into the fact that my first and most incompetent marathon was my fastest one. Age brings a measure of expertise and even wisdom, but also a careful self-control that can put out of reach what you were capable of when you were younger, dumber and more willing to make a revelatory mistake.

Carlo Rotella’s most recent book is “The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood.”