Marathons Are Dumb

I ran my first and only marathon in 1998. The Silver State marathon, in Carson, Nevada. I was living in the East Bay at the time, and saw a flyer for the marathon on a bulletin board at the Coast Guard base. That was how we found out about things in 1998—flyers tacked to bulletin boards.

I drove up there with my wife in November, over the mountains and into Reno. We were staying at the Peppermill casino. I had been training a bit—had one long run of 22 miles and several of 17 miles. I felt good about my chances. After all, on that long run of 22 miles, I got catcalled by a car full of girls. The one wrinkle is that I would be running this race at about 5,000 feet elevation, not at sea level, where I had been training.

Got up at the asscrack of dawn to go to the race. You know gross the beginning of a race is—everyone taking last-minute pees and poops, running off into the woods. This was a small race—only about 350 runners. We were basically doing one loop around a giant lake. The starting gun fired, and we were off.

I started off at around a low 7-minute pace. I found out quickly that I was not going to be able to maintain that speed, because I was running in sand. For a good five miles at the beginning of that race, it was like running at the beach. That took a lot out of me. But I was 24 years old and strong as an ox. Everyone knows that 24-year-olds are invincible.

I came up on my first water station at mile 5. It had water, Gatorade, and sliced bananas. I skipped it—it was early in the race, I wasn’t thirsty, and it would only slow me down. I skipped the one at mile 10, too, and the one at mile 15. I was chugging. Before I knew it, I had run the first 19 miles in 2 hours, 35 minutes, and I was on track for a stellar time.

And then I hit the wall.

It was a weird sensation. I still had the will to run, but my body was not cooperating. My legs kept going slower and slower. It felt like they were made of concrete. My slightly-over-8-minute pace was now a 20-minute pace. I would have gone faster if I had walked. Basically, my body had consumed all the available fuel in the form of glucose, and now was directly burning fat. Of course, I wouldn’t have been in this position had I stopped at the water stations and gotten something to eat and drink. But I was a fucking 24-year-old conehead.

I limped along in such fashion for a mile or two when a runner came up behind me. “How are you doing?” he asked, smiling. “I hit the wall,” I said. So he reached into his belt and handed me one of those gel pack things. “This should get you through,” he said, before speeding off into the distance.

I opened up the pack and squeezed it into my mouth. It was the consistency of wood glue, but at least it was chocolate-flavored. I gulped it down, and about 10 minutes later, I got my mojo back. I wasn’t back up to full speed, but at least I could finish the race, instead of dying in the desert, my body picked apart by vultures.

I crossed the finish line at 3:54. Under four hours, at least. I was in so much pain that I collapsed on top of my wife, fell to the ground, and started crying. But I did it. I was a marathon finisher. Sub-4 hours, even. If it weren’t for the sand and being an idiot at the water stations, I probably could have finished at 3:25, almost good enough for Boston. That’s very respectable, but I decided right then and there that my marathon career was over. A half-marathon is a much more humane race. I ran one of those in 1:36, in 1994.

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I am not much of a runner. If you’ve ever signed up for 23&Me, and you look through all of their genetic shit, you are classified as either a sprinter or an endurance athlete. 23&Me says I am a sprinter. Distance running never came naturally to me, but I took it up at age 18 to stay in shape and keep the fat off.

Running isn’t fun—at first. But eventually it does become fun. You keep at it for 3-4 weeks, and you notice that you are getting faster. So you push yourself more, and get faster still.

If you are a non-runner, there are two things about running you need to understand:

1.     Running greatly enhances your sex drive. In my running days, I could have been a porn star. Everyone I know who runs regularly has a fantastic sex drive. Since I quit (at age 30), I have been like a neutered cat.

2.     Running is great for mental health. When I started, I had a lot of anger. I would be running, and I would think about things that made me angry, and I would run faster. It was a good way to manage those emotions—otherwise the anger would have come out in unacceptable ways.

The downside of running is that it’s stupid. I was not much of a fan of Eastbound and Down, but the one Kenny Powers quote that has stuck with me years later, when he meets a triathlete, and says: “I don’t want to be best in the world at exercising.” That pretty much captures it. Running doesn’t require any particular skill. It just requires you to withstand a lot of pain. So the best runners are the people that can endure the most pain.

If you think of the psychology behind that, it is pretty demented. It’s no accident that the most avid distance runners in the world are in the military. They’re not particularly skilled at any sport, but they are the absolute fucking best at withstanding pain. I once met an active-duty Navy SEAL who was running an Ironman a week for an entire year. Who the fuck does that? Someone with a lot of mental toughness, or—someone who is a glutton for punishment. These days, if I am experiencing pain, I stop doing the thing that is causing me pain. I am Facebook friends with a lot of my Coast Guard Academy classmates, and many of them are still running marathons to this day. They post photos of themselves with the participation medal. It’s bad juju to shit on someone else’s hobby, so I’m polite and like the post, but I’m thinking to myself, join the softball team or something. I played racquetball in college, and it’s one of the reasons I took it up again at age 34. It’s a game of skill, that requires practice, that involves strategy and thinking. It is endlessly complex. And while it requires athleticism, the best athlete doesn’t always win. Professional athletes have a reputation as being a bunch of dumb bunnies, but that frequently isn’t the case. Standing at the plate and trying to figure out what pitch the pitcher is going to throw next is like a very complicated game of rock-paper-scissors. There is a lot of game theory involved.

One very interesting development in the last 20 years is that more and more women have taken up running. It is now estimated that 70 percent of race finishers are women, especially at the shorter distances. I ran a 10K in Central Park in 2009, some years after my running career came to an end. Virtually all women. You might expect me to have an explanation for this, but I don’t. My wife is still a runner. She runs every day, at age 48. She has run four or five marathons, though she hasn’t run one in a while. She has the 26.2 sticker in the back of her car. Ever worse juju than shitting on someone else’s hobby is shitting on your wife’s hobby, so I keep my opinions to myself. But I don’t get it.

There are a million things I would rather do than run. Like play softball. Useless for cardio, but it takes skill, and it’s fun to conk home runs. Racquetball. I wrestled in high school, so I could do judo or jiu-jitsu. Tennis. But the last thing I want to do is to go running for four hours. You know what happens to me if I have four hours inside my own head? Not good things. That’s what happens when you run—you think about shit. And in my adult life, I’ve found that running actually causes anxiety, rather than dissipating it. That was one of the great things about racquetball—you’re so focused on the game that you exit the court after an hour, drenched in sweat, having completely forgotten about your problems.

Of course, running is a great way to lose weight. You don’t need to run to do that. Like, I have a colonoscopy coming up in a couple of weeks.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music recommendation: Go fuck yourself.

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