Who Are Those Guys?

“I couldn't do that. Could you do that? Why can they do it? Who ARE those guys?”
Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy

The astonishing Race Across America bicycle event has ended for another year, with an impressively large  field of finishers:  28 solo men and 2 solo women (plus over 200 cyclists in relay teams). I find myself once again wondering: who are these people? What drives these extraordinary athletes who can go basically without sleep for 10 days and nights while remaining upright on a bicycle, all the time pedaling and moving forward. One fellow cycled for half the race while suffering from Schermer’s Neck, a condition that makes it impossible to hold your head upright. He had his bike helmet duct-taped to an aluminum frame mounted on his back to support his head so he could see where he was going.

This coming week 95 seasoned ultra athletes (the average age is 45 years old) will run the Badwater Ultra Marathon, a 135-mile footrace across Death Valley and up the side of Mount Whitney. The temperature at the start is forecast to be 117 degrees Fahrenheit. If you are a sun-worshipper, Badwater just might cure you forever.

Who are they, these humans that can accomplish such miracles? Are they even human? Do they put their running shorts on one leg at a time just like I do?

To an extent it is all relative; in the eyes of couch potato sprawled in front of his 47-inch flat screen with a bowl of chips balanced on his 48-inch stomach, the idea of running anywhere even for ten minutes is inconceivable. To many 10k runners, a marathon sounds superhuman. And to most marathoners, an Ironman would seem like the very limit of endurance. Yet over the past 30 years we have arrived at the point in our culture where thousands of ordinary people accomplish these distances every weekend.

This is not so for an ultra endurance event. Aside from national institutions like South Africa’s 89 kilometre Comrades Marathon, which attracts over twelve thousand runners every year, very few people attempt to run or bike more than conventional race distances.

What does it take to be an ultra athlete? To ride your bike for days on end, to run across deserts and up and down mountain trails, to travel under your own power through withering heat, rainstorms and vicious headwinds; to endure? I have read many thousands of words on the subject and I have yet to discover the answer.

One opinion I have heard likens ultra running to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder; the seemingly endless repetitive plodding over hundreds of kilometres at a pedestrian pace can only be accomplished by someone who has lost his grip on reality somewhere along the road.

Marshall Ulrich, the legendary ultra runner has just published a book about his 53-day run across the United States. It seems like he was in pain from about mile 10 onward, and yet he ran every day until he finished. Maybe endurance is about enduring pain for longer than the average person.

On the other side of the coin, Gordy Ainsleigh, the very first finisher of the Western States 100 Endurance Race has spoken admiringly of a fellow ultra runner thus: “…his own rhythm is strong enough and his own joy is great enough the he’s able to win [the Western States] more than anyone else”. Is it an indefinable, unfillable capacity for joy that drives an ultra athlete?

In To the Edge, his memoir of completing the brutal Badwater Ultra, Kirk Johnson paints an excellent picture of what running nonstop for two days through Death Valley in July was like, but he doesn’t tell me how he did it; what pushed him to finish when many others did not. He had warm and supportive family members in his crew and I have no doubt this helped him a lot.

Years ago in an essay on marathons, I wrote that we athletes were running out of mere being into our essence; that we ran in order to demand something supernal of our souls and bodies. Fine. But these poetic sentiments are not a lot of help when your hip flexors have seized up, your feet are on fire, your gastro-intestinal system is in revolt, your morale is in the cellar and you still have an inconceivable distance to travel before the finish.

What do I need to get to the finish? I’ve come to realize that my fascination with this type of athletic lies not only in finishing an extreme event, but also in discovering what it takes to do so. Obviously the answer here is not something that can be taught, but something that must be learned.

To be continued…

I Was a Teenage Bodybuilder

Your body is the baggage you must carry through life. The more excess the baggage, the shorter the trip.
Arnold H. Glasow

It's simple, if it jiggles, it's fat.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

My son came home with a cool device a few weeks ago, a “Body Composition Monitor”, which means a scale with a bunch of bells and whistles. But what fun the bells and whistles are! I got on the thing for the first time today and learned what I am composed of.

The Body Composition Monitor (BCM) tells me such useful information as the percentage of water that is inside me, how much my muscles weigh and what my metabolic age is (apparently it should be lower than my real age; this should be an easy one for me since the scale only goes to 50).

The charts and tables in the BCM User Manual tell me that all my numbers are inside the acceptable range. I’m not sure what the BCM does if they aren’t; perhaps flash an LCD readout that says “Clean Up Your Act!”, beep three times and print an audition application for The Biggest Loser?

I am apparently 57.3% water. This explains the sloshing feeling I have occasionally, and why I have to pee so often.

As an athlete I am used to being aware of calories; for me calories are the fuel I require to burn in exercise rather than the Blue Meanies they represent to dieters. If I am reading the BCM number correctly, I need 1733 calories per day in order to survive. Although the readout does not specifically indicate this, I believe that a large number of these calories are allowed to come from ice cream. At any rate, whether or not they are allowed to, in my case they do. However, I interpret my relatively low body fat percentage number as positive reinforcement for my dietary choices.

The good news is that my muscles, fat and bone seem to add up to roughly my total weight, meaning that I am composed of not much more than these components (which of these three categories is the brain in, and how much does mine weigh? The BCM does not tell me this). I wonder what would happen if politician got on a BCM; they are often full of other substances.

And what are goosebumps made of? The BCM manual says you are not to wear anything while weighing yourself and it was chilly in the bathroom.

The most surprising readout was what the BCM calls my metabolic age, which came out as 14. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand I suppose it is good to have body of a teenager rather than of someone four or five decades older, but I’m not sure I want to go back to teenhood, physically or otherwise. It took me a lot of work, suffering and angst to get to where I am today and the thought of metabolically starting all over again makes me want to start scarfing down the cookie dough and at least get myself up to voting age.

At any rate, what I am to do with all this information remains to be seen. When one has the body of a 14-year-old, where else is there to go? If I continue to get fitter will I also continue to regress and end up like Benjamin Button?

At my time of life I suppose the best thing to hope for is that my metabolic information (or the rest of me for that matter) doesn’t slide too much in the coming years. And now I have the Body Composition Monitor to help me with that; or at least to track the inexorable decline as I sink inexorably into my declining years.

The Naming of Goals

Ottawa Marathon – May 29, 2011

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
The Naming of Cats
T. S. Eliot

Mr. Eliot tells us that every cat possesses three names: first, there is the name he answers to at home; the second is the unique name by which he is known to other cats; and lastly, there is the name he himself knows, the one he shares with no one else. I think that my athletic goals for the Ottawa Marathon were like this.

My public marathon goal could have been to finish the race in a certain time. The goal I shared with other runners would have had to do with treating injuries or maintaining a certain racing or nutrition strategy.

I had two private goals for the Ottawa Marathon on Sunday, and these were really the only ones that mattered. First, I wanted to run the race at a consistent pace, in control as much as possible, and finish, but without worrying about a finishing time. Second, I wanted to confirm that my body - from the feet upward - was still capable of a sustained running effort after the injuries that have hobbled me in past years. These two things – race consistently and keep it together - were my rhythm and my focus for the entire 42.2 kilometres of the race.

The Ottawa Race Weekend is a huge affair, featuring a marathon, a half marathon, a 10k run and several family fun runs. Altogether more than 15,000 people take part over two days. Many of my extended family members have run in these races over the past twenty years or so, and this year a dozen of us got together each to participate in at least one of the events (I say “at least one”, because one energetic young fellow ran the 10k on Saturday evening and then the half marathon the next morning). My son Duncan and my youngest brother Dave were running their first full marathon. My daughter Laura was running the half.

Race morning was mild and overcast with a prediction of light showers. As the starting horn sounded at 7:00am and 4,200 marathoners began moving forward, I had successfully managed to put aside personal speculation about how fast I was going to run, replaced by concern about whether the pinched nerve in my right foot would behave itself or take me out of the race as it had in South Africa two years ago.

After decades of being tweaked and redesigned the Ottawa marathon route is a brilliant one, flat and easy on the senses with lots of green space. The Ottawanian crowds were wonderful the whole way; they were so insistently cheerful that I couldn’t help feeling lifted and helped along by their noisy enthusiasm. It was difficult not to contrast this festive atmosphere with the sullen thrombosis of idling cars and seething motorists one sees at race events in Toronto, so many of whom seem to regard a marathon as nothing but an interruption in their busy important lives.

After running the first 10k in 57 minutes I decided that I was moving a bit too quickly so I slowed down just a fraction, passing the halfway mark at just over two hours. After that I stopped looking at my watch; it was all about moving forward at a steady pace. As we ran through the congenial and boisterous neighbourhood of New Edinburgh at 28k, a light rain began to fall; this provided some cooling relief from the pervasive humidity. Beyond that, I didn’t notice the rain at all.

I was tiring at 32k as we headed up the Rideau Canal, and my legs were starting to stiffen up. I knew there was going to be discomfort. No one who has participated in a serious athletic event - who has hiked all day in the rain, who has climbed a rock wall, who has finished an Ironman - no one is surprised at discomfort. It is part of the challenge, and we accept it. We are not masochists or freaks; we don’t like the pain, we just acknowledge it as part of what we have to pass through in order to reach our goal.

I was determined to stick to my plan of not walking except to take on fluids or gels at the aid stations. This is the first time in 20 marathons I have ever successfully done this; I have always talked myself into walking “just to the next lamppost” in the past. This time I didn’t; I remained in “profound meditation” of my ineffable private goals, and I ran.

In past marathons I have managed to stretch out my final two kilometres so that they have seemed to last for hours. This is easy to do if you are hurting and if you give into the temptation to walk. This year I actually felt like I was picking up speed as I got closer to the end. I felt as if I were being drawn to the finish line.

Running back down the canal toward the race’s ending, our stream of tired marathoners was joined by the (much perkier) half marathon people, who had started two hours after us, and the stream became a river. The noise from the crowds and the dense throng of athletes provided exactly the right mood of sound and colour. I flew under the finish line with hundreds of other runners and felt better post-race than I ever have.

Unknown to me, Duncan was just about two minutes ahead of me and Dave was just about two minutes behind me. And somewhere close by was Laura who was simultaneously finishing the half, as were most of my other relatives. Judging from our times, we must all have been within a few hundred metres of one another. There would have been no way to coordinate a chorus line finish, but it’s cool to think of us all so near. I congratulate them all and I am proud to be among their number.

My personal goals were met. It was not my fastest marathon nor was it my slowest, but it was my most consistent and ultimately the most fulfilling since my very first one in 1987. The best news of the day was that my body – right down to the feet – managed to respond happily (or at least uncomplainingly) to what my mind asked of it. For the first time in a long time I felt as if the two were one again. I have laid down a good foundation for my training this summer and I feel optimistic for the future. On to Ironman.