Why We Run

By Colman McCarthy

Twenty five years and uncountable miles have passed since I ran the 1977 New York marathon. At mid-life, and the mid-autumn of late October, I was doing my first marathon. One goal was to win a panting chance at regaining muscles, bones and capillaries that had been idled by too many years of long meals and sagging sofas. With coronary disease in my family, a well-exercised heart might be the kind of preventive medicine that no drug or doctor could provide. The other goal was to come in with a time under three hours and thirty minutes, to qualify for the Boston Marathon the next April. With Fred Lebow and the Rudin brothers at the Central Park finish line cheering all of us in, I made it with two seconds to spare.

I wish I could say that I will be part of the pack in this Sunday’s marathon. But the health benefits for many of us who took up running a quarter century ago have been mixed. We have become cardiopulmonary wonders but orthopedic wrecks. I don’t know of one runner who hasn’t a medical tale to tell about bones, from toes to hips, blown out from the years of pounding. Where once we put in training runs of 10 or 15 miles twice a week, now we are giddy to go three miles without an ache.

ance running was still only a boomlet, not yet the boom it would become in the 1980s when starting lines the world over would see the press of 30,000 and sometimes, 50,000 bodies. It was still years away when an annual Antarctic marathon would be staged near the South Pole, or a 50 mile ultramarathon through Death Valley in the summer. New York in 1977 had less than 4,000 runners, a number that now seems quaintly intimate.

If running had a positive future, it also had a negative past. In the early 1900s. marathoners were seen as skinny zanies who scared horses, dared death and set editorial writers to thundering. Weeks before the 1909 Boston Marathon, a New York Times editorial minced not a syllable: “The chances are that every [marathoner] weakens his heart and shortens his life….To take part in a marathon is to risk serious and permanent injury to health, with immediate death a danger not very remote…..The truth is that exercise should always be purely subordinate to the business and pleasure of life.” Running 26.2 miles “is a dangerous as well as an absurd mistake.”

After that 1977 race—we were a blend of low-numbered fleetfoots, flatbellies, dawn-joggers, ex-layabouts and back-of-the-pack turtles—I went on to run 17 more marathons, including three New Yorks and three Bostons. For many of us, the health benefits have been mixed. We are cardiovascular wonders but orthopedic wrecks. In our first fervor, like monastery novices hungry for asceticism, we overdid it. Put in less than 50 miles a week and you were dismissed as a laggard. Bill Rodgers, who won four straight New Yorks from 1976 to 1979, was a 100-miles-a-week man.

While taking to the roads, I also took to the typewriter to tell the stories of runners. William Shawn at The New Yorker asked me to write about Rodgers. “The Runner,” the pesky magazine competitor of “Runner’s World” gave me space. I interviewed Olympic gold medalists Frank Shorter and Joan Benoit, seeing in them the loveliness, not only the loneliness, of the long distance runner.

Less noticed, by me and others, was that beneath the self-discipline was self-absorption. I saw it in George Sheehan, the cardiologist whose lyrical prose was to running what Roger Angell’s was to baseball or Bernard Darwin’s to golf. Over an occasional lunch, and loping a few miles with him one year in Boston and another year in Washington’s Marine Corps marathon, Sheehan was a both a charmer and an amateur mystic. He wrote once, “When I run the roads I am a saint….Poverty, chastity and obedience come naturally….My chastity is my completion of the true Eros, which is play.” Off the roads, at home with his wife, seven sons and five daughters, it was something else. Several times, he abandoned his family--not to go running but for running around, with groupie girlfriends. Sheehan’s wife, it turned out, was the true saint. She took her husband back every time, and was a comforter at his death in 1993.

James Fixx was another writer-runner whose personal life was unsettled by public adulation. In the 1977 New York marathon I ran about 20 minutes with him as we came south into Central Park. That Sunday, by coincidence, I had favorably reviewed his just publisehd book, “Running.”