Back to the past future
Sequential changes that first seasoned and then saturated running have made it harder to keep the individual flame of mystery burning.
After what passed for an encouraging set of six times 200 meters plus some strides the other day, I’m again on the verge of getting ready to consider training seriously for a specific type of footrace. Rather than allow these “Why the hell not?” phases to annoy me by triggering an internal tug-of-war, I’ve started critically evaluating them as the cognitive-emotional farts they are as I patiently wait for the stink to pass. And this isn’t solely about running; I’m often cultivating a distracting level of self-contempt for not striving to achieve a number things I supposedly want to achieve when so many of the variables — ample time, good health — seem to favor my diving into such quests. Yet despite being torn in two directions, I almost always roll with the 51 percent of me that says my future conscience will be fine with today’s choice to be a fitness jogger, or a writer who produces just enough stock material to be comfortable, or a dog-sidekick with a marginal, well-modulated social life, or however I view myself.
On a given morning, I’ll have drawn up a training plan for the next six weeks and decided, with the mercurial yet total sincerity of the oft-relapsing alcoholic, that it’s now or never as these legs won’t last forever; by 7 p.m. that evening, I’ll be giving myself lukewarm congratulations for my just-completed hour of light cardio and a couple hundred pushups. If I or any of my ideas around my lassitude were unique and I were more amply endowed with comic genius, my endless inner monologue about my spastic intentions could be translated into a side-splitting episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
My various goals all seem exciting enough in the imaginary attainment until I realize that these days, I really won’t do anything substantial or focused unless a literal urgency in my life somehow compels this, even at the expense of my self-esteem. An example would be confinement in a jail cell or somewhere else with no access to the Internet or other media, only a treadmill, a pen and a writing pad, throughout the duration of which stay I would be a startlingly productive — if not necessarily skilled — screenwriter or novelist. I’d emerge pale and underfed, and joyous for having finished something worthwhile that I’d concocted and and at least sipped from.
But more often than imagining myself completing workouts or stories I’ll probably never start, I’m engaged in the quasi-complementary task of trying to prepare others for some of the same things. As my running friends represent a range of personalities, I go about this in different ways; it can involve anything from giving a friend honest advice about how a certain drug might be interfering with recovery to generating a formal, dynamic training plan. Also, if I do train adequately for the kind of race I’m kind of getting ready for, I will undergo this specific experience for first time in decades. Because some of the folks I’m helping are about the age I was when I first took up the task myself, I’m trying to remember what it’s like to be in high school and fully committed to whatever the identity of “serious competitor” means. That requires me to adopt the psychology of a running-fixated teenager — but not quite the teenager I was myself, because that would mean omitting a slew of influential variables that didn’t exist in the 1980s.
Before the 1985 Manchester Invitational, Derryfield Park. Rick Bragg (standing, facing the camera) and I (far right) were co-captains two years later, when Concord “won” the Meet of Champions.
The technological leaps over the past three-plus decades are easy enough to process and integrate into this periscope-style view, but in my opinion, the most powerful consequences of technology on competitive runners’ everyday lives isn’t how they use the wealth of data at their disposal, but how they see it, and how their minds handle the reality that their running — a habit most of us in essence stay glued to because of what it can only mean solely to each one of us — has been depersonalized, sometimes without our conscious consent.
The effects of this may sometimes be more amusing than harmful, but they are insidious. The very way a typical young runner thinks even on ordinary training runs has been shaped by a number of forces, but these have been absorbed into running over time since I graduated high school in 1988. (By the way, Concord High School has been on my mind for a variety of reasons lately. Watching Challenger: The Final Flight and seeing some once-familiar faces, frozen in their teens, in a Netflix production would have been strange enough, even had it not concerned an event that I have spent a lot of time thinking about over the years. Also, one of the runners whose training I closely follow runs a lot of the same rural-ish routes I did as a kid.)
How does a runner who got his first pair of trainers (an early Saucony Shadow, I believe) in the same month Joan Benoit Samuelson won the first Women’s Olympic Marathon take stock of how running has changed from the standpoint of a young, motivated competitor? I decided that I could answer this by asking myself two more questions, in thought-experiment form: How would the mind of a typical teenage runner process 1985 running-culture conditions and technological limitations, broadly speaking? And conversely, how might the mind of a 15-year-old saddled with Return of the Jedi-era norms react to the training and racing scenery in 2020?
The “young man with 2020 brain running in 1985” scenario is pretty easy, conceptually, for someone who was a daily runner both then and now. (A lot of what I say here applies to girls too, obviously, but I would never pretend to know what it’s like to be female in this world in any capacity, even as — and perhaps especially as — a distance runner.) If you started running anytime in the current century and especially in the past five years or so, you have to imagine not just putting down your devices and logging off your social accounts, but the entire world doing the same thing, and the U.S. Military scrambling the satellite signals responsible for today’s GPS toys so that no one can cheat.
Say you run into the teammate of a personal nemesis from a rival school at the mall. This kid claims that the teammate ran “sixteen minutes” for 5K at a road race in Connecticut a week earlier on a family vacation. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t, and the course was probably anywhere from 2.9 to 3.1 miles anyway. No one had to purposely lie in those days to spread gloriously misleading information.
Either way, such anecdotal chatter is about all you have to go on until the first and only invitational that offers a preview of the championship season, held in late September. The few dual-meet results you see scattered in local newspapers are of little use throughout the season because of the comical variability in “5K” courses. (Road races in the 1980s were usually more accurate, or at least those in charge made it clear when the distance had been measured with a fire truck, a spavined pony, or other handy but imprecise implement of the day.) You don’t even know what half the kids whose names you’ve fixed as runners to beat based on seed times even look like in advance.
Race results are hand-typed on-site even in state championships, with copies made on a portable Xerox and distributed to each team. If you don’t memorize what you want to know from these on the bus ride home, you hope the results in the paper the next day, if they appear at all, are relatively free of obvious typos and other errata.
The important thing about this is that no one in running was troubled by the mere trickle of the information spigot in the pre-Internet, pre-social-media days. Sure, it would have been nice to have instant results, chip timing, something other than Gore-Tex to wear when it was zero degrees, etc. But the lack of access to other people’s detailed, real-time information and a zillion daily photos of happy ass-waggling joggers from everywhere didn’t seem like an unmet need, until you understand why I wrote that last clause as I did. It’s not that doing deep-dives into other people’s non-essentials is a waste of time, though it certainly is. It’s more, to me, that even top-rate. gregarious, photogenic competitive runners are chiefly motivated by molding the activity into something exquisitely personal. This shouldn’t be hard to fathom; over 99 percent of people who ever race have zero chance of winning anything of note, yet they’re out there year after year and enjoying the ride. The main difference between pack runners and elites, at root level, is that elites had the machinery, guidance and drive to get them notice and to invite scrutiny of not just their stats but their everyday lives. A pro runner who avoids social media outright in today’s environment of capricious contracts is likely taking a bat, or at least a wire whisk, to his or her earning potential. But you can see that a lot of them don’t have fun playing along.
After I started watching this video presentation by Brie Oakley recently, I was immediately reminded of a series of Milesplit interviews toward the end of her high-school career, which saw her shoot from anonymity to being one of the best prep runners in national history in a very short time. I remember perceiving that the girl answering questions in these interviews, who was by then recording performances commensurate with my own as a high-schooler (she ran 15:55 on an indoor track, I ran 15:57 in a 5K road race), was not having the kind of fun one might expect a star teenage athlete on the upswing to have. She wasn’t just uncomfortable with the camera, as most people are; she seemed uncomfortable with the whole borg — the onslaught of numbers, the rankings, the photostreams. Who could blame her? It would be facile to suggest that the attention accompanying her, or anyone’s, startling rise to elite status is a major factor in issues like the ones Oakley reports confronting. She certainly didn’t ask for or expect any of the well-meaning mikes that were suddenly stuck in her face, or for the threads started about her by Internet scions. (Yeah, I know. I hope you can see the difference.)
You can imagine it being easier to be a teenage runner these days than in the past — immediate consultations with coaches when the need arises, all the data you could need or want, hell, even safer places to run in most areas. (There were no rail trails to speak of in the 1980s, but there were a lot of shitty-ass rails with dilapidated cars rusting away on them, most likely hosting malevolent, syphilitic clowns. You could safely-ish run alongside the ones that were mostly free of prickly bramble-bushes. And, though I joke, Concord’s railroad tracks have begun hosting lots of homeless encampments since my days up and down these double-strips. Homeless people used to be rare pretty much everywhere, I’m told.)
To drive home this point — not the stuff about flesh-eating Stephen King villains — run the second part of the thought experiment, and move your 1985-teenage-self, if this is even an option, into 2020 and take it for a run. “Go” to any group fun run at a local shoe store; like Wal-Marts, these runs look the same inside and out no matter where in the country you are, except in Boulder, where most of us look absurd to various degrees and for too many sophomoric reasons to list. You could get used to the gadgetry fairly quickly; it was only a matter of time before GPS became integrated into private enterprises, and to see people equipped with ways to time themselves anywhere, over any terrain, for any duration would seem a delightful development, but not beyond the scale of what 35 years was expected to bring in the mid-1980s. The compression socks would be a little jarring, and if you asked ten people what the advantage of them was, including people wearing them, you wouldn’t get a coherent answer. You might be surprised by the amount of what appears to be Spandex in general, but maybe not — The MTV version of David Lee Roth would have fit in without a burp at a lot of 5K events today. Well, at least his attire.
The thing I think most people would find overwhelming, and dubious, and curious, is the level of low-grade competing going on. This borg of borgs called the World Wide Web clearly is, among other things, a boasting mechanism in which people naturally reveal only the most favorable aesthetic, vocational, athletic and psychosocial aspects of themselves (when they can help it). How could such a tool not be used for exactly this?
But to the extent I can remove myself from 2020 and look at it objectively, the pressure on most runners seems not so much to perform up to any given level as to at least participate in the electronic scrum. People who show up at fun runs, and do all of the training things they would have done in the eighties or nineties and race well off this foundation, are looked at as curiosities when they don’t have social accounts. People might trust that you ran a given reasonable-enough time if you don’t have Strava or Garmin evidence, but they might wonder what keeps you, in general, from maintaining a stock of this evidence.
I’m not doing a good job of wrapping this up with a rhetorical bow, but I’m trying to say that I’m gaining a better appreciation for what it’s like to be a decent runner on a contending cross-country team in a world of immediacy and sub rosa obligations. I can see how fun it might have been to trade lighthearted trash-talk with my foes around the state online, but I also liked the mystery of lining up and just seeing what the story was after the gun went off and before everyone gathered for photos and interviews half an hour later. That magic between the lines, like Pink Floyd, doesn’t require a specific generation in order to be reliably enjoyed; no one serious is thinking about anything but the race for those 15 or 20 semi-private minutes, right?
I’m not so sure. Some of that magic, not just of the race but in the identity of being a cross-country runner whose favorite hills and trails, with their own views and swamps and erratics and canyons and chirps from all sides, may have been eroded for good for kids and adults alike, at least along those who are good enough to attract notice. This reality might not be a bleak one, but a lot of what I’ve been up to lately is a forceful reminder of that it’s here, and that it feels like a relief that some of the best runs of my teenage years will only exist as memories, and only mine. Sometimes that seems like a decent enough reason by itself to run around in the woods, or anywhere, collecting personal stories and impressions for use outside the main data stream.