Born To Run

By Andrew Braithwaite • October 17, 2008 • 2 Comments

PARIS—In 490 BC, a Greek military leader entrusted the messenger Pheidippides with an important communiqué: the Greek army had triumphed over the Persians in the Battle of Marathon. Pheidippides travelled 38 kilometres on foot from a battlefield near the coastal village of Marathon to Athens, maintaining a brisk running pace. Upon delivering the good news, the messenger promptly dropped dead.

And now, two-and-a-half millennia later, people do this sort of thing for fun?

Sorry, sorry guys. I know that’s not how I’m supposed to start one of these sessions. Here goes: Hello, everybody. My name’s Andrew, and I’m a distance runner. I haven’t run a full marathon in 17 months, but I’m scheduled for a relapse ten days from now, in Dublin. So consider this the first in a trilogy of columns on my destructive, enthralling 42.2 kilometre mistress.

When I claim to run marathons, I do make a point of noting that, hey, it’s not like I have 30 of the grueling bastards under my belt. I’ve not yet reached that point in my addiction, not by a long shot. The 2008 Dublin Marathon will only be my second time covering the distance, after all. I ran my first last spring in Ottawa (and have the t-shirt to prove it).

I’m not sure what propelled me to undertake that endeavour, to be honest. I’d never run a half marathon before, nor even a 10K race. The woman at the Running Room store on Yonge Street who sold me my first pair of Asics, upon hearing of my experience and my plan, said something along the lines of, “Are you sure you don’t want to start with something shorter? You know, work your way up to the full?” Obviously this woman was woefully uninformed on the subject of how-I-like-to-roll.

I am, after all, the guy who decided earlier this year, after having never published a piece of creative writing longer than about 750 words, to write a novel. I guess you could say I’m a go big or go home type of guy.

I really feel a connection with the Czech runner Emil Zatopek in this respect. Zetopek, who, like me, won three gold medals at the 1952 summer Olympics in Helsinki, including the marathon, a race which he’d never run before (I’ll show you my medals sometime), put it thusly: “If you want to run, run a mile. If you want to experience life, run a marathon.”

So that’s what I did last spring, on a rainy Sunday in Ottawa — though not rainy enough to keep Jean Chrétien off his front lawn, where I caught him drinking coffee and cheering us runners on. And that’s what I’ll be doing again on the streets of Dublin, a week from Monday (a bank holiday in Ireland, though given the present state of the banking industry in Europe, can these guys really afford to take a day off?).

The marathon, of course, isn’t just about that one day and those 42.2 kilometres. The race itself is almost the victory lap that one takes to mark the culmination of four or five months of pretty dedicated training. I started training seriously for this marathon in June, after I picked Dublin off a list of European fall marathons, both for its later event date and its reputation for friendly-yet-passionate crowd support. I stuck to a rigid five-days-a-week workout schedule designed by John Stanton of Canada’s Running Room franchise, where the distance of the crucial long Sunday run gradually increases – fortuitously, the “down” weeks midway through the training program, where your long runs actually get shorter to give your legs a chance to recover a bit for the last hard push, coincided with my wedding day and honeymoon in August.

Still, I missed a couple long runs over that period, and have struggled to successfully rid myself of a pesky cold the past two weeks, skipping one workout when I should be skipping two, so that I miss some training but not enough that I don’t exhaust myself back into a sneezing, hacking mess. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve all but abandoned my goal of winning this year’s event. Sorry to all the punters who wagered the big bucks on me.

I am still expecting, or maybe hoping at this point, to beat my Ottawa time of 4:04:37, simply by virtue of the fact that I know what I’m doing this time around, and was able to manage my workload in such a wiser manner as to avoid the injury that hampered my training last spring.

But as race day approaches, I find myself becoming more and more relaxed. I’m actually looking forward to the race, knowing that the hard work is behind me. I suppose that’s what draws me to marathons: that essential nature of the legwork required to even finish the race. For a guy with, if I’m being honest, more ambition than initiative, it’s the perfect endeavour, because once I send in my application form, I have to do the legwork and do it on schedule, to boot. Otherwise, I’m going to be a very, very unhappy man over the last ten kilometres. No matter how well you train, the last two or three kilometres are going to be pretty grim. As Japanese novelist and all-around awesome guy Haruki Murakami writes in his fantastic 2008 memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (the book was reviewed by Jared Bland back in July):

At around twenty-three miles I start to hate everything. Enough already! My energy has scraped bottom, and I don’t want to run anymore. I feel like I’m driving a car on empty. I need a drink, but if I stopped here to drink some water I don’t think I could get running again. I’m dying of thirst but lack the strength to even drink water anymore. As these thoughts flit through my mind I gradually start to get angry. Angry at the sheep happily munching grass in an empty lot next to the road, angry at the photographer snapping photos from inside the van. The sound of the shutter grates on my nerves. Who needs this many sheep, anyway?

But I now know from experience that a good, rowdy crowd and Murakami’s powerful sense of righteous anger that overtakes my thought process at around the 38 kilometre mark is enough to push me across the finish line – well, that and the thought of hobbling down the street, having Mlle Trotter hoist me onto a barstool and imbibing the most delicious Guinness I’ve ever tasted in my life.

Hey, come on, you didn’t think I chose Dublin by accident, did you?

Coming soon in The Sportstrotter:

NEXT WEEK: Breaking down my four-hour iPod playlist.

THE WEEK AFTER, IF I SURVIVE: The post-mortem. Er, figuratively speaking.

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Asian Observer

Run hard, dude. Run hard.
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Born To Run

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The Walrus Foundation National Event Guide