50/50 (8 page)
During my corporate years, our management team was put through a personality profile test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The first of the four parameters measured was the subject’s disposition toward introversion or extroversion. When the facilitators went over my results with me, they said I had registered the highest score for introversion they had ever seen.
The Myers-Briggs test helped me understand a few things I had noticed about myself. It explained, for example, why I feel overwhelmed in large crowds, especially if I’m the focus of any attention. It also explained why running for hours by myself is so refreshing to my soul, whereas many people might find it mind numbing.
Having reflective alone time is essential to my well-being, and I am acutely aware of this fact. I certainly enjoy spending time with others and meeting new folks, but seldom am I able to pass more than a few hours in a group before my senses get overloaded and I begin eyeing the exit. That’s why, in the months leading up to the start of the Endurance 50, I worried about how I would deal with being surrounded by other people constantly for seven weeks. I would have no alone time whatsoever. While I would spend more than enough time running to satisfy my body’s yearning devotion to this activity, every stride would be taken in the company of at least a few fellow runners. I was facing the longest streak of non-solo running I had ever experienced. What would it do to me?
The first few days of The North Face Endurance 50 seemed to answer this question in an unexpected way. Far from draining the battery of my spirit, running with the other Endurance 50 participants charged it up. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of people each marathon attracted, and by the special group bond that formed among us day after day.
Marathon number seven, the Lincoln Marathon in Lincoln, Nebraska, gifted me with one of the most pleasant group running experiences of my life. The preceding night was a mixed bag. On the positive side, it being a Friday night, Julie flew in from San Francisco and met us at the hotel. But while her presence lifted my spirits, it had no effect on the nagging head cold I had recently acquired, which kept me stirring half the night.
The marathon starting line was located just outside the Nebraska University Coliseum and within a mile of our hotel, so we walked there—Mom, Dad, Julie, the kids, the crew, and me. It was a mild, fresh autumn morning—perfect running weather. A very diverse group of twenty-one runners joined me. At one extreme was a small handful of first-timers, including two of the seven women among us. At the other end of the spectrum was a guy who had run more than one hundred marathons. And somewhere in the middle was a pair of triathlete buddies who both worked and worked out together and planned to cover only half the distance today as a training run.
The Dean’s List
Prolonged strenuous exercise and overexertion can lower your body’s natural immunity to bugs. Here are some ways to fortify your immune system:
•
Mushrooms.
These edible fungi have been shown to boost your body’s so-called natural killer cells.
•
Echinacea
. Although controversial, some studies have found that it actually does reduce the severity and duration of colds.
•
Garlic
. Not only delicious, garlic contains allicin, which has immune-enhancing properties.
•
Probiotics
. Found in yogurt, probiotics are compounds that can boost the good bacteria in your gut.
Lincoln is a charming, low-density Midwestern city with lots of big, leafy trees and cheerful middle-class neighborhoods. It’s a great setting for a marathon, not least because its gently undulating landscape provides just enough up-and-down variation to keep things interesting but not so much as to make the 26.2-mile distance more difficult than it would otherwise be.
We made our way through the course at a decent clip, which was probably unsettling for the first-timers. By the halfway point, at least one runner, an athletic-looking woman in her early twenties, was struggling. Nevertheless, she refused to allow herself to become separated from the main group. She had come here to complete her first marathon and was determined to do just that. When her turn came to talk about herself, she said her name was Sarah Sherman; she was a graduate student in the athletics department at the University of Nebraska. Her father happened to be Mike Sherman, the former head coach of the Green Bay Packers football team. Clearly some of his gridiron toughness had rubbed off.
Where Runners Gather
Group runs and events are not the only environments where runners can fellowship and share camaraderie. You can also do it online. There are several running Web sites with lively forums where runners can swap stories, advice, and ideas. Here are a few:
Then I noticed that the two triathletes who had planned to stop at the halfway point, hadn’t. Perhaps they wanted to help Sarah make it to the finish line, or perhaps they were inspired by her grit and determination, and were feeding off it, as I was.
Marathons normally don’t work this way. In big events such as the real Lincoln Marathon, each participant runs his or her own race. Sure, plenty of people run in pairs or small groups, with stronger runners holding themselves back to stay with slower friends, and slower runners pushing harder so as not to weigh down their friends too much. But this situation was different. Almost our entire field of participants was clinging together, and the differences in ability levels were extreme. Some of the runners could have been literally miles up the road if they had chosen to run as hard as they could. On the other side, Sarah and some of the others probably would have been going much slower if not for the pull created by the stronger members of the group.
As much as I love to run alone, I’ve never lost sight of the fact that running with others motivates me to push harder than I might solo. When competing in ultramarathons, for example, the desire to catch another runner often pulls me forward, and the desire not to be overtaken frequently propels me forward with a similar energy. It’s a fundamental law of racing: Our best times are better when we run together.
Nor is this phenomenon limited to competitive environments. Recently I participated in a multiday outback run in Australia that pushed me as close to the brink of surrender as any mind-over-body challenge I have ever experienced. One powerful motivator kept me from surrendering, and that was my bond with my support crew, whose members were working as hard to get me to the finish line as I was working to get myself there. The thought of letting my crew down by quitting was unbearable, so I did not quit.
The same thing happened throughout the Endurance 50. Whenever the relentless grind of running a marathon every morning, talking to reporters, posing for photos and signing things until mid afternoon, and answering e-mails and updating my blog while riding hundreds of miles on the tour bus into the night began to wear my spirit down, tempting me to raise a white flag, I thought about the immense passion and energy my crew was pouring into my dream, which had in many ways become their dream too. And this thought annihilated my white-flag fantasies every time. There was just no way I could disappoint Koop, Garrett, Hopps, and the others, not to mention my fellow runners and the thousands of people across the globe who were following our progress.
As we passed the twenty-mile mark, I began to doubt whether Sarah could continue, even with the support of the group. She was clearly in a world of hurt, running with her eyes half-closed and no longer able to say more than two or three words at a time.
But when she voiced her own doubts about finishing, the group broke into a spontaneous chant of encouragement.
“Go, Sarah! You can do it!” we shouted.
It worked. She kept running. Three miles later, however, Sarah’s suffering had reached a new depth. The exertion was so great that tears began trickling down her face. The nature of our verbal support now changed from encouragement to pleading.
“Don’t give up, Sarah!” said one runner. “You’re almost there.”
I love to interact with people when they’re most exposed—when every layer of pretension and vanity has been stripped away and left strewn along the pathway. The marathon mercilessly rips off the outer layers of our defenses and leaves the raw human, vulnerable and naked. It is here you get an honest glimpse into the soul of an individual. Every insecurity and character flaw is open and on display for all the world to see. No communication is ever more real, no expression ever more honest. There is nothing left to hide behind. The marathon is the great equalizer. Every movement, every word spoken and unspoken, is radiant truth. The veil has been obliterated. These are the profound moments of human interaction that I live for.
Sarah was beautiful as she ran along, not because of her striking looks, but because of her inner strength. Her resolve and tenacity were speaking volumes about her character. But could these virtuous qualities carry her any farther?
Miraculously, she held on. The nine of us remaining together in the homestretch formed a side-by-side lineup, clasped hands, and raised our arms overhead as we crossed the finish line. Sarah doubled over and began sobbing with a mixture of joy and other emotions that are too complicated to name, but are known to everyone who has pushed his or her body beyond known limits to achieve a goal.
“This is the best day of my whole life,” Sarah said after she had recovered. “Is that pathetic?”
No, Sarah, it’s not pathetic. It was a great day for all of us—precisely because it had become such a memorable day for you and the others who had blasted through previous limitations to cross that finish line. We all felt the power in it.
Better Together
In a recent study, Arizona State University scientists found that the maximal weight-lifting ability of men and women improved significantly when they competed against others or lifted in the presence of others versus alone. Similar results have been observed in earlier studies involving runners. Interestingly, in a recent study involving elementary school children, only boys ran faster in a competitive race than they did in a solo time trial.
The marathon finished in the same place it had started, right outside the football stadium. The Nebraska Cornhuskers football team was scheduled to play a game there against Troy University that very night. Sarah’s boyfriend, Zac Taylor, was Nebraska’s star quarterback, who would lead his team to a 56–0 demolition of the opponent. They would both have something to celebrate.
When we crossed the finish line it was only 11:20
AM
, still more than seven hours before kickoff, but already there were groups of students tailgating in the stadium parking lot. I couldn’t even imagine the condition these kids would be in come game time. Running a marathon seemed tame compared with what they were putting their bodies through.
Because the crew had feared getting trapped in the parking lot by early arriving spectators, the Finish Festival had been set up a few blocks away. We walked over there together and went through the usual routine of interviews and handshakes. It was a bit of a comedown from the high of the magical group bonding experience we had enjoyed during the run. Despite the initiative the younger Endurance 50 crew members had taken after the Mississippi Coast Marathon on Day 3, the organization of this post-marathon festival hadn’t improved much. None of us had yet thought of simple measures that could be taken to make things flow more smoothly, such as arranging the sponsors’ tables in a manner that was intuitive, guiding people in a natural sequence from one to the next. Instead, tables and booths were strewn about haphazardly, confusing everyone.
World-class introvert that I am, I began to feel increasingly overwhelmed as the mingling wore on. For me, the post-marathon marathon was more straining overall than running 26.2 miles. Could I really survive another six weeks in this environment without snapping and running off into the woods to be alone? As magical as today had been, suddenly I wasn’t too sure.
The Running Clinic
Day 8
September 24, 2006
Boulder Backroads Marathon
Boulder, Colorado
Elevation: 5,200'
Weather: 61 degrees; sunny, very dry
Time: 3:46:56
Net calories burned: 25,496
Number of runners: 2,200
R
unning is a participatory sport
, not a fan sport. For this reason, typical runners have only limited interest in sitting back and admiring elite and other well-known runners. Rather, typical runners want to learn from these folks and apply the knowledge to their own performance.
Every time I travel to running events and meet other runners, I get a lot of questions about training, nutrition, shoes, and other topics of interest to those seeking to go faster or farther. The Endurance 50 was no exception. I answered a lifetime’s worth of questions from runners between St. Charles, Missouri, and New York City, many of them quite common (“How do you stay motivated?”), others more unusual (“What can I do to keep my inner thighs from chafing on long runs?”).
The eight live events that I ran brought the most questions, because they involved thousands of runners instead of the handful or few dozen who kept me company during the re-created events. Indeed, for me, the live events brought a whole new meaning to the term
running clinic
. Sometimes I felt as though these events were 26.2-mile workshops on the run, and along with giving away truckloads of suggestions, I learned a lot from the other runners.
QUICK TAKE:
Many runners experience uncomfortable chafing of their inner thighs on long runs. To prevent this problem, apply some lubricant into this area before you start. Bodyglide and Aquaphor are two favorites.