Excerpt
The Running Ground
Chapter 1Thirteen SecondsNever, never, never again take on mice when you can take on tigers. The mice have the right to chew you to death. The tigers will fight and you’ll win.—Email from my father to me, December 1997
On a Sunday in early November 2007, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning and tiptoed out of my bedroom, trying not to wake my wife, Danielle. I navigated to the kitchen, using my phone as a flashlight. There I found the breakfast that I’d laid out the night before: bananas and a salt bagel with peanut butter next to a glass of water. I put on my thin, light racing uniform and then draped myself in baggy sweatpants and a sweatshirt from the Salvation Army. I turned the brass knob of our apartment door and headed out into the cool Brooklyn morning, delighted that the house was still quiet. Danielle was sound asleep and nurturing a tiny, curved body—then roughly the size of a blueberry—whose heart had just started to beat.
I was 32 years old, starting my annual pilgrimage from Brooklyn to Staten Island, where the New York City Marathon begins. From there, it winds through the five boroughs to the finish line in Central Park. On my way to the 4/5 train, I saw other marathoners leaving buildings nearby, like crabs emerging from their burrows in the sand before storming together toward the sea.
Not everyone can run a marathon, but it’s remarkable how many can. There are the graceful leaders moving like antelopes on the veldt, and the elite wheelchair racers whose arms are thick as oaks. But then there are the rest of us, of every shape, size, and age. We go to the starting line together before we gradually slip apart. Marathons may be the only sporting event where anybody can directly test themselves against the very best in the world on the same day, in the same place.
I moved slowly down the stairs to the subway, conserving energy by bringing both feet together before moving to the next step. On the 4 train, and then the Staten Island Ferry, I closed my eyes so I could visualize the race. At Fort Wadsworth, where the runners gathered, I lay on my back, stared at the sky, and tried to imagine each mile ahead—but my mind shifted to my father, who had run this race once, in 1982, and ridden the same ferry and sat somewhere in this same park. His life back then was a tempest of contradictions. He was working in the Reagan Administration as he came to terms with the realization that he was gay. He had begun to achieve the professional recognition he had long sought, even as he made a bonfire out of the structures—marriage, family, and social groups—that had supported his career. He had blown up his marriage with my mother and left the leafy Boston suburbs to cruise the alleyways of Dupont Circle.
His life was manic and confused, and he was entering a period of record-setting promiscuity and little sleep. But he was still a runner, and this habit seemed to create just enough gravitational force for him to hold his life together. He ran every morning, alternating runs of 12 miles and 6 miles. When I visited him at his new home on Q Street, he would head out on a run before I woke up and return, covered in sweat, just as I was making my way down his dusty, half-renovated stairway with its broken banister. On the day of the 1982 New York marathon, he had sat in this park and hit play on Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso on his Walkman. It was, he would later write, appropriate that he was listening to an opera about “a stirring figure driven mad by the world’s demands.”
I rubbed Vaseline between my toes to prevent blisters and then made my way to the start at the base of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. I was part of a starting group called “local elite,” which sounds more impressive if you focus on the noun and not the adjective. I pulled off my sweatshirt and sweatpants and tossed them to the side. I felt nearly naked in the cold and stood tightly packed with the other runners. We fist-bumped our friends, peed into Gatorade bottles, and waited. I rotated my foot inward and stretched my ankle joint, then eased my ear toward my shoulder to loosen my neck. There aren’t that many ways to warm up when pressed shoulder to shoulder with strangers.
Every runner had their reasons to be on the starting line. Each of us had paid $100 or more to shiver in the cold at the start before suffering for hours and getting an apple and a blanket at the end. My reasons were clear. Two years earlier, at the age of 30, I had run this race in 2:43:51, by far my fastest marathon yet. Two weeks later, my doctor found a lump in my throat. I was swept into a series of tests and sent down endless, cold hospital hallways before I learned that I was suffering from thyroid cancer.
The next year was hell. I had my neck sliced open twice; I underwent radiation therapy and lived briefly in isolation. My cancer was eminently treatable, but I was convinced, often, that I was going to die. Danielle and I wanted to have children, but we had to put our plans on hold. How could I bring a new life into this world when the current life was so uncertain? Struggling to understand this cancer, I tried to think of it as a foreign invader, but that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t a virus or an infection. It had grown from me, in me. It was me.
The announcer called out, “On your marks.” I tensed out of habit and leaned forward, putting my weight on the front of my toes. I crossed myself as a reminder that what I was about to do was both spiritual and quite hard. Then the gun fired. “New York, New York” blared from the starting-line speakers, and I was off. Up the bridge we went, looking left to see the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan, so far north of us now and yet so far south of the finish line in Central Park. The bridge swayed ever so slightly as the mass of runners began to storm across.
I followed precisely the plan I had for the race, running calmly down into Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. These were quiet miles, with people strolling out to the side of the course with their signs and Sunday-morning coffee. I ran with my friend Corey, drafting, or taking turns blocking the wind, as we moved down the thoroughfare of Fourth Avenue and past its mix of bodegas and nineteenth-century churches. I was once told that a runner begins a race with a hundred pennies of energy in his or her pocket. The goal is to spend those pennies as evenly as you can until, in a sprint at the end, you drop the last one. In these first few miles, though, it’s easy to waste pennies: high-fiving a random spectator on the side or accelerating slightly to get around someone in your way. I started to keep track of the runners going at my pace and gave them names in my head. There was “yellow singlet,” “purple shorts,” “hairy back.” I analyzed their posture and the sound of their breath.
With each step, I tried to visualize a different part of my body, moving with strength and relaxation. I thought about my toes pressing through my soft socks, onto the foam of my racing shoes, onto the hard asphalt and then pushing me off. I concentrated briefly on the sensation in my calf and my Achilles tendon: the force going down and then propelling me forward. I marveled, as I often do, about how strange it is that one spends roughly half of each race suspended in air. I imagined a straight line up my back from my sit bones to the base of my skull, a balloon attached to my head, keeping me upright and balanced. And I worried about all the silly things that runners worry about: Were my contact lenses going to slip out of place? Had I put on enough sunblock to prevent a burn but not so much that it would make it harder to sweat? If I had a slight sensation that I was going too fast or too hard, I looked at my watch. If my pace was too fast, I would breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, relaxing my body and trying to bring in a sense of calm.
Sometimes, my mind drifted. Deep in a race, lost in desperate agony, you want to disassociate and send your mind off into the clouds. Part of learning to race, though, is learning how to lock back in. Focus on the shoes of the man ahead of you; focus on your breath; focus on your feet. Meditate on the task at hand. Disassociation usually makes you slow.
After 44 minutes, we neared my favorite spot of the whole race: mile seven, where Danielle would emerge from Union Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Several blocks before that, I moved out of my pack to the right side of the road so that she’d be able to spot me. She stepped out of the crowd, and I stepped toward it and kissed her on the cheek. I thought about the child who might appear in seven or eight months. I thought back to two years earlier, when she had waited at the very same spot as I ran toward her with an unknown poison growing in my neck.
