It's the morning of the marathon, and it's raining the kind of soft gray rain that elite runners love and sends the rest of us back to bed.
The sun isn't up yet, but I've had my first cup of coffee. Karen is lacing her shoes and preparing to go out for her run--not the marathon, though she's run them before--and I imagine that in a few minutes I'll slip on some rain gear (I play golf so I have lots of effective rain gear), harness up the dogs, and we'll go out for our walk. Typically we go out for three or four miles, through Knoop Park or Allsopp Park.
Karen will go her usual eight miles, at a leisurely pace. She'll be gone a couple of hours. And later today, after the rain stops--and they say it will stop before noon--we'll put everybody in the car and drive out west, where we'll walk another four miles or so through the woods. This is how we accumulate our mileage. It's not how fast you run, but how far.
I don't run anymore, though sometimes the girls and I will sprint the last 100 yards or so to our gate, and sometimes we chase each other, cutting and braking, around our sloping yard. In a way, I feel like I don't need to run a marathon to prove anything to myself--it's not unusual for us to cover 10 miles on foot when we travel, and there's the miles baked into my daily routine. Once in London we walked nearly 30 miles in a day; when it snows or freezes our first option is to leave the cars in the carport and hike the 3.7-mile route to the office downtown.
I'm pretty sure I could finish a marathon. It might take me a while.
On the other hand, maybe I overestimate myself. My knees are creaky and there's an odd sensation in my lower back, a dull blooming on the left side. My shoulders are stiff because on Saturday I took a shovel and broke up the ground that was under the deck we pulled apart six months or so ago (we built a new, more compact one) so that Karen could plant some rye grass.
I've become convinced of my vincibility in recent years, well aware of the things I can no longer do. It's been 30 years since I dunked a basketball. I don't hit many par fives in two anymore--it might be time to move up a set of tees. I don't max out on bench presses--I don't want to tear anything. These days I am more careful. I don't want to miss any time.
Yes, I know; alluding to things I no longer do is a way of signaling that I once did them. But what else is a column like this but a humblebrag? A way of marking one's pitiable and transitory place in the empty universe? I write columns for the same reason some people run marathons -- to scream "I was here" into the void.
Anyway, while I'm normally skeptical of corporate-sponsored adventures, I like our marathon. A lot of friends are running it, some for the first time. I can follow their progress on an app if I'm inclined; I could walk down to Kavanaugh Boulevard and cheer as they run past. We've done that before and it's a cool way of feeling connected to a certain kind of civic spirit. The marathon is one of the things that--whether we run it or not--binds us as a city. I can feel proud of the runners, especially those who undertook it as a challenge they weren't sure they could meet. They've earned congratulations; all of us need to find our own way to run, to force ourselves out beyond our imagined limits, to some unfamiliar territory where we can take nothing, not even our own competence, for granted.
The minor inconveniences the marathon imposes binds us to it: Were it not raining I wouldn't be sitting here typing, I'd already be out with the girls, hustling so I could get back and out to the golf course before the runners closed down Kavanaugh Boulevard. Living where we do, one Sunday a year you have to think about when you can go to the grocery store--one Sunday a year you have to remember to turn right rather than left when you get the the bottom of our hill. Once a year you might have to wait to cross the street.
I was never really a runner. Running was for me a means to an end, a way of training instead of a way of life. I never got to the place some runners talk about, to that feeling of being outside one's self, the endorphin-induced euphoria they call the "runner's high."
Endorphin is a natural painkiller released to mask the discomfort of aching legs and burning lungs. It takes a while, some say about two hours, before the HIGH kicks in.
And if you push yourself too hard, you mightn't notice the rush of chemicals because they won't be enough to offset your pain. If you don't push hard enough, you never light up the prefrontal and limbic regions of your brain. Like everything else, it's a matter of balance. While the health benefits are fairly obvious, running isn't a particularly efficient way of getting high.
(Which is good because if it were, the state legislature would try to ban it. Or at least levy a sin tax.)
I'm wired to find running on a treadmill or through overly familiar streets extraordinarily boring. It's really amazing how inured you can become to local beauty--sometimes when we're out on our walks we'll notice how the light strikes the bluffs beneath Fort Roots across the Arkansas River and we'll be reminded how pretty our city--our state--is, but usually not. Usually we just take it all for granted, we get caught up in conversation, in the current of events.
That's not all bad. Sometimes it's not how fast or how far, but the quality of the trip.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 03/07/2017