Finally a celebration of optimism... not cynicism
Why just running is a victory in era of cheats
WHY do we run, those of us who run? Why do more and more of us run? Even as we lose faith in the sport of athletics, we run. Even as we say we cannot believe what we see on the track any more, we run. Even as we turn away from Justin Gatlin and wonder why Almaz Ayana is winning the Olympic women’s 10,000m by more than 15 seconds, we run.
Our love for running is growing in inverse proportion to the cynicism we feel about what we still call athletics. More than 50,000 people, including me, will run in the New York City Marathon today. More than 200,000 applied to take part. Maybe the spiralling numbers tell us that, on some level, we’re trying to reclaim something. Maybe athletics is being redefined.
In Britain, the numbers racked up by the Great North Run tell a similar story of spectacular success. More than 57,000 competitors ran in it earlier this year. About 280,000 people compete across the UK in Great Run events annually. Next year will also see the introduction of the Birmingham International Marathon and a marathon i n Stirling, Scotland.
‘One thing is called the International Sport of Athletics,’ says Brendan Foster, the founder of the Great North Run and one of the most inspirational men in British sport. ‘And at the high end, it is about winning medals and breaking records. Then, there is something else and that is called running. It is available to everybody. The two are completely different things.
‘Modern sport looks more like the New York City Marathon than an athletics meeting in, say, Berlin. Old-fashioned sport was people watching in raincoats, standing round a track, watching runners trying to break the four-minute mile.
‘The modern way is Mo Farah in the Great North Run doing the same thing as you are doing a little way further back down the same road. You look in his eyes at the start and he is feeling some of the same things you are feeling as you line up behind him.
‘Running is a necessity. It’s something primitive inside us. It is what we were born to do. We had to run to eat and to stay away from danger. We had to run to live. It is a human instinct to move. When you get to the sharp end, you’re running to the rhythm of your body and your heart rate. It’s in our DNA.’ So today’s New York Marathon will not really be about the elite runners. It will be about the rump. It will be about the people who take part. It will be a celebration of the best things about sport. ‘We work really hard to make sure that it is a totally inclusive event,’ New York City Marathon race director Peter Ciaccia told me on Friday as the elite runners gathered for a press conference near the finishing line in Central Park. ‘We want to provide the same experience for the very first finisher to the very last. I stand at the finish line until the very last runner comes in.’ Like the Great North Run and other mass participation races, New York will be about competing and camaraderie and community and generosity and perseverance. It will be a celebration of optimism, not a celebration of cynicism.
‘Running has become a social movement,’ said Ciaccia. And he is right. Think of the popularity and the ethos of the Parkrun initiative in the UK and elsewhere. In the age of social media and the tyranny of our mobile phones when it is harder and harder to find peace and community, running provides an escape.
So, today, I’ll run in the New York Marathon and I know it will be one of the best things I’ve ever done. I will not notice the gradual climb to the midway point of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge that takes the runners from the start on Staten Island over to Brooklyn because there will be too much adrenaline flowing.
It will still feel like fun in Brooklyn, the locals holding out wine gums, the street rock bands blaring out their tunes and making you feel pumped up, like you’re Rocky Balboa running up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
I’m getting a bit long in the tooth for this now but I have done some training. The first seven or eight miles will be great. Running feels beautiful then. Just how Brendan Foster says it does. Your body finds a rhythm. You’re running without thinking. It feels like every part of you is in tune. The occasion carries you along. The mile markers come and go without you begging them to appear. You start to think that maybe this time you’re not going to feel the pain. The crowds swell near Lafayette Avenue and you feel like you’re running through a tunnel of happy humanity. Soon, the streets throng with worshippers coming out of Sunday service at the Emmanuel Baptist Church. A mile further and you are running through the Hasidic Jewish enclave of Williamsburg. It has been between 15 and 16 miles where I’ve struggled on the previous two occasions I’ve run in New York. That is when you cross the 59th Street Bridge. ‘Slow down, you move too fast,’ Simon and Garfunkel sang in their 59th Street Bridge Song but that will not be a problem for me, I promise you. It’s a steep climb to the midway point of the span, which is also known as the Queensboro Bridge, and there are no spectators there.
All you can hear is the panting of fellow runners and the thud of feet on concrete. There are still 10 miles to go. It starts to hurt. They tell you that you get a boost when you come off the bridge and find yourself in Manhattan.
They tell you the crowds gathered there give you new strength. That’s never happened to me. All I witness is tens of thousands of heads bobbing up First Avenue towards the Bronx for as far as the eye can see. It’s like the Baseball Furies coming for you in The Warriors. Except you’re not trying to get back to Coney Island. You’re just trying to get to the finish line in Central Park.
‘What’s to see?’ Jerry says at a First Avenue marathon party in an early Nineties Seinfeld episode. ‘A woman from Norway, a guy from Kenya and 20,000 losers.’
But here’s the beauty of it, just like Peter Ciaccia and Brendan Foster say: for everyone who makes it to the end, whether they finish first or 20,000th or 50,000th, it still tastes like victory.