It’s been raining all day in a flat, unremitting, windless, helpless, dejected-Sky-God way. About ten thousand women spent the morning running through the rain outside my house. Truckstop and I went down to watch them.
Marathons always make me cry. Partly this is because of the people holding signs and cheering, which seems so loving and futile, and partly because I want to be running, too, and partly because everyone looks so incredibly tired. I also blame the guy standing on the bank of ice plants plucking his banjo like the last band member on the Titanic, and the runner who turned to him and said, Thank you. Thank you.
San Francisco has a major marathon problem. The race planners try to avoid hills, so they route the runners along the water, first the Embarcadero (the Bay side) and then up one unavoidable killer hill through the city and then down through Golden Gate Park and out to Ocean Beach. The problem is the flat highway along the beach just isn’t that long, so they make you run it twice, out and back. Today I watched the runners funnel into two lanes when they reached the end of the park. One lane, for the half marathoners, ended in a big pink Finish sign. The other lane, for the full marathoners, veered onto the beach highway. If you’re a full marathon chugger-alonger, first you get the fun of watching other people bounce across the finish line, and then you get the greater fun of running for three miles down one lane of the highway while faster runners come toward you in the opposite lane. You’re on mile 16. They are on mile 23, and they are not the kind of runners who have to stop mid-course to reapply Vaseline to various fleshy points of contact.
The mixture of dogged and dog-tired expressions on the runners’ faces made me weirdly, wildly sad. A few people had given up and started walking, and I wanted to grab them and say, Run! You came here to run! And at the same time I wanted to say, I forgive you! I forgive you for not knowing what you were getting into!
Their failure felt enormous, since the whole point of the run, unless you are a professional, is symbolic, and if you set out to run 26 miles just to show yourself you can do it, and then you can’t do it, how bitter! But I sort of envied them, too, and missed the naive purposefulness of my own running days. There is something so straightforward about running a race. The finish line just sits there and waits for you to arrive.
Yoga, by contrast, discourages Start to Finish thinking. The other day I took a class with a new teacher named Charu. She’s Brazilian, and she’s terrific. She talks like this: Straight your leg! Rise your spine! Ground the buttocks to the Mother Earth! I like to do yoga but I don’t like to talk about yoga or hear other people talk about yoga, except Charu. When she tells you to move beyond the polarity of Good and Bad, Success and Fail, you see the two poles in your mind like two towers of ice, and you do want to move to the tropical forest of the middle, where Charu lives.
But I am so the polarity. I do yoga but my heart bleeds for the runners. A marathon is a small, crappy mirror for life: your body starts out as the engine of everything and then it starts to hurt and let you down; the endeavor feels scary and exciting and difficult and abstract at the beginning, and by the middle all your attention has turned to the minute topography of the road. And at the end?
I ran two marathons, in 1998 and 1999. The first, in San Francisco, was a disaster. I burned through my youth and ran ten miles way too fast. The next 16 miles I spent trying not to die. I didn’t cross the finish line so much as beach myself on it, and then I couldn’t find my mom and lay down in the grass at Kezar Stadium and cried. The second marathon was in New York. I kept it cool at the beginning and sailed across the finish line, thirty-five minutes faster than my San Francisco time. I ran the last six miles as fast as the first six. My friends found me instantly in the “B” finishers section and wrapped me in tinfoil and took me out to dinner.
But here’s the weird thing: after that San Francisco race, I was determined to do it again. The New York marathon was one of the best days of my life, and then I never ran another one. Maybe, if that was going to be the symbol, I wanted to wear it like a piece of amber around my neck. Or maybe that day felt like a dropped jewel on the sidewalk that I picked up and put on, something lovely, a moment of good fortune, but not really mine. But it was mine, I did all the training, I left my Goodwill sweats at the start and peed on the Verrazano-Narrows bridge like everyone else. I don’t know. I don’t know what the fable of the race is. Instead of the tortoise or the hare, what I keep picturing is the answer to the riddle of the sphinx:
What goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?
Three part man in his three part life: the crawling baby, the striding youth, the bent figure hobbling with a cane.
