I drove my brother to the airport today. It’s 13 miles from my house, so the roundtrip was about a marathon’s distance. It took me almost 2 hours to make the journey thanks to traffic and lights. Steve has often asked me if I could run somewhere faster than I could drive. While that isn’t true in this case, sometimes sitting in the car, you just wish you could get out and run home.
My brother also recently sent me this New York Times special report on the quest for a sub-2 hour marathon. It’s a fascinating story, one that he and I are convinced will make for a great three-star Disney sports movie in a few years.
No doubt there will be quite a bit of bio-ethics debate over what constitutes revolutionary training and what crosses the line into performance enhancement drugs and activities that make up a “cheater’s” disqualification. These kinds of debates have existed since the dawn of sporting events. While reading Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush or the Bunion Derby, the turn of the 20th Century training regimens turn the stomachs of 21st Century men and women. Water was viewed as a bad thing to have on long runs, women weren’t allowed to participate due to “health concerns” and various other now rightly viewed nonsensical recommendations pervaded the land. This isn’t a piece about the steroid use as a good or bad thing, just an observation that there have been, and always will be, efforts to enhance performance. There’s always another frontier, another limit to be broken.
I was recently chuffed (as the kids in jolly ol’ England might say) to have qualified for Boston with a 3:08:11 time. And these scientists and athletes are pushing toward a sub-2 hour marathon… or roughly less time it takes to drive back and forth to the airport from my house.
I suppose I could’ve run with Steve on my back, his bag on his shoulder or back. A human rickshaw to and from the airport. Uber would have nothing on me.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. And the more I run, the more I need to keep running. It’s addictive, both from an endorphin “runner’s high” perspective and from the desire to do better, to push one’s own personal boundary and limit. I highly doubt I’ll ever be a sub-2 hour marathoner. But I highly doubted I’d ever qualify for Boston until I had aged higher and gotten a higher time limit. We never really know what we’re capable of; all we can do is keep pushing forward and seeing where the road and life takes us.
That’s not a bad way to live.