Running with the Pack Read Free Page B

in the Miami Marathon is take your own sweet time about it. There is, as in most city marathons, a graduated reopening of the roads. You want to stay ahead of these reopenings if you can. After six hours, all the roads are open again. Having to finish the race weaving my way in and out of traffic would not only be somewhat mortifying — it would be positively dangerous.I’ve been in many countries where the drivers are clearly insane. Greece and France spring to mind. But in those countries the vehicular psychosis is more or less predictable. After you’ve been there a while, you can more or less predict which senseless gambit is going to occur in what situation. After a while, it all seems wearyingly quotidian. But in Miami, nothing that has to do with the roads is predictable. There is no public transport in Miami worth speaking of. The city’s elevated monorail has, as the writer Dave Barry once put it, about as much significance in the life of the average Miamian as a shooting star occasionally glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye. Everyone drives. And so the demographic runs from boy racers to boozed-up businessmen to heavily medicated centenarians, even the occasional heavily-medicated-boozed-up-centenarian-boy-racer. No one really has a clue what’s going to happen at any given junction. And since a significant percentage of them are armed — the medicated centenarians, especially, seem to like to drive a little ‘heavy’ — remonstration is a dangerous game to play.
    On YouTube yesterday, while I was ‘researching’ my run, I found a video record of last year’s race entitled, unfortunately not inaccurately: ‘Scumbag Miami drivers honk marathon runners.’ The humiliation of immediate calf breakdown, a protracted and painful run, or mortality by vehicular means: disappointment, pain or death — Zatopek may have had a point. This is certainly going to be ugly. I feel a strange tingling, something I haven’t felt for quite some time. Is it fear? Perhaps that is a little aggrandizing. Let’s just say I’m nervous. And it is not entirely unpleasant.
    Why am I doing this? It’s not an easy question to answer, and to avoid trying to do so, when people ask me this, I am morethan happy to resort to platitudes. I could say, ‘Because I enjoy it.’ In some sense of the word, I enjoyed the training — while it lasted — and I am enjoying the trepidation of these pre-race minutes. I am enjoying the feeling that I may have bitten off more than I can chew; I am enjoying the uncertainty — the not knowing what is going to happen next. In some sense of ‘enjoy’, I might even enjoy what is going to happen next. So there would be a modicum of truth in this ‘enjoyment’ answer. But it’s not a particularly illuminating modicum — it is not the sort of truth that advances understanding, but merely invites the further question: why do I enjoy these things? I could add: I’ll soon be fifty, and if I don’t do it now, I’ll probably never do it. And it would be a shame to have lived a whole life and never run a marathon. I am sure that’s part of the reason; but it is still just a stock answer, and vulnerable to the same sort of objection as the original response. After all, why do I think it would be a shame to have lived a whole life and never run a marathon? The real reasons, I suspect, are more difficult to identify, let alone explain. But it is an interesting sociological fact that (a) many people seem to have opinions on what my reasons are, and (b) the content of these opinions depends on where — specifically which side of the Atlantic — those people live.
    There is, I think, a distinctively American way of thinking about running and, by extension, about what I am doing today. Books written by Americans about running almost always revolve around certain recognizable themes. In