“Stephen? Stephen?” Carrie’s voice startled him from the memory as he saw the waves of runners before him advancing forward.
“Yeah, sorry. Lost in the moment, I guess.” Stephen quickly replied.
“Hey, I was just saying good luck out there today and it was nice meeting you.”
“Yeah, you too.” Stephen said with a deep breath as a gust of the morning chill caught him again. “You take care of yourself and don’t let your sister skip out on you next time.”
“Oh, yeah. No doubt, she owes me for this. Maybe not right away but I can assure you we will certainly be running together at some point.” Carrie gave an awkward smile to Stephen and the general buzz of the shuffling crowd began to give way to a growing roar of applause as they shuffled closer and closer towards the direction of the starting line. Apparently, the race had already started because in a matter of seconds the crowd separated Stephen from Carrie and he lost view of her. People pressed against one another and within a minute of forward progress being initiated, the entire mass swept in a singular direction. Stephen could no more resist the crowd’s movement than he could hold back the breaking waves pressing against idle sand.
The more they progressed, the more the intentional mob grew with excitement. The bobble heads were now in full bounce mode, springing repeatedly for a chance to see anything ahead of them. The caffeine deprived zombies even opened their eyes and realized they were about to go on a multi-hour long run. From the look on their faces, Stephen surmised this to be a fresh revelation for several of them. He heard a high-pitched garble of words rapidly being tossed in all directions and quickly identified the earlier gossip group. They were still going at it and the growing excitement only accelerated their pace of speech. Stephen was pretty sure their lips would catch on fire or spontaneously explode at some point in the race. He purposely slowed to allow several people to pass him and build distance between him and the talkers.
Somewhere among the growing chaos was a man with a microphone. Stephen couldn’t see him but his presence was undeniable. The overly excited and jaggedly high-pitched voice emerged and jolted out like trebuchets raining boulders upon the disinterested crowd. But the real sin was the exuberant lift in his voice which advertised his personal excitement with having been designated the official voice of today’s marathon. Stephen thought this guy was a little too happy to be on the loudspeaker. He reasoned it was more likely that the man was an imposter while the actual official announcer, a person whose vocal control was professionally honed to deliver calm and soothing encouragement, lay unconscious under a table somewhere with a nasty bump on his head. Stephen gave a private chuckle to the story developing in his mind. It wasn’t Shakespearean but it passed the time as the wave of agitated bodies pressed forward and stopped; an irritating progression which continued for a good five minutes. He looked up and saw he was passing the starting line. It was an anticlimactic beginning which grew into a momentary disappointment as Stephen realized that he had been so far back in line that he hadn’t even heard the horn blast which announced the start of the race. He drifted into the sluggish pace of the forward shuffle, mindlessly giving control to the crowd’s irresistible pull onto the official race course.
Mile 2
The concept of running a marathon really had seemed like a good idea at the time Stephen signed up. Yet, less than two miles into the race he found himself questioning his own judgment. An elbow flung into his shoulder by an extremely tall and flamboyant runner who already seemed to have been transported into another scene by the music piping through his headphones. Stephen winced in pain with no apparent attention given by the other runner. The person behind him was so close Stephen was sure they were fighting to take in the same oxygen. The crowd was dense; no thinner than when he had waited in the corral to begin the race, only now the sea of bodies was about as gentle as whitewater rapids. Shoulders rubbed uncomfortably and any glimpse he caught of an open space which might provide respite shut without a moment’s notice, leaving him helplessly lodged inside the embrace of the runner’s field.
Without warning, the group around him slowed to a near stop. He could see that the turn ahead of them was causing a bottle necking effect. Claustrophobia didn’t set in until he bumped the side of another man and his shoulder slide off an oversized, hairy and sweaty arm that felt like it was covered in soap. Momentary nausea washed over him and Stephen raised his head towards the open sky in the hope of finding a happier place.
He gave in and allowed the aggravation of the crowded course to grind on him. To Stephen, everyone around him was a source of complaint and it caused him to seethe with an unjustified anger. The pointlessness of the entire event began to gnaw at him.
The running of 26.2 miles, he felt was an odd thing to celebrate. It was odd enough to run for the sake of running but it bothered Stephen even more as he considered the obscurity of the distance.
All this because some hero of antiquity ran all over the Greek countryside two and a half thousand years ago.
As a former soldier, Stephen could appreciate celebrating the battle, or the victory, or even the messenger who delivered a critical message. In the clasp of his current discomfort, he allowed his thoughts to became lost trying to understand the concept of celebrating the run itself?
Who came up with this distance? Where the heck did they come up with 26.2? When Pheidippides darted from the Battle of Marathon for Athens did he grab his water bottle and then stop off to program his GPS? What if he actually started from the far side of the battle field? Or heaven forbid he detoured after getting lost.
If Pheidippides had gotten lost, Stephen was pretty sure that part would have been left out of his report to the people of Athens. He recalled that after the Greek warrior got done running, whatever distance it actually happened to be, Pheidippides hastily delivered his message and immediately dropped dead on the stone floor. Now here they were celebrating his valiant effort by trying to do the same thing.
Stephen had to admit there was a really was a pointlessness to it all that made the effort unreasonable. A part of him wished he had his introspective conversation before he agreed to sign up for the race. At the very least, he would have a hundred bucks more in the bank. Paying for the opportunity to run towards your potential death placed aside, Stephen had not met anyone who regretted running a marathon. Along with the never-ending availability of unsolicited advice, he had received numerous words of encouragement as several friends and associates recounted their own marathon experiences. He felt he could appreciate that completion was an accomplishment of both training and the day’s performance. He respected the race enough to not expect this day to be just another day running, but that it would be like many hard things which challenged the body and mind yet proved itself worthwhile in the end.
“The person who starts the race is not the same person who finishes the race,” he had heard from more than one marathon veteran. Still, he had to wonder how many of those runners had a near Pheidippides-like experience of their own. If someone had a miserable run, would people really be bragging about it? Would they even bring up the idea of running a marathon? Or was it like being at the Christmas party with that guy who invested in the stock market and caught a winner that would soon be his ticket to investing guru status. Guys like Arwin; yes, who could possibly forget Arwin and his annual performances at the corporate Christmas parties.
Having been a member of the National Guard for several years, Stephen had a day job. Through a series of unpredictable events, he found himself pursuing a professional career in the real estate appraisal industry. Being a business predominately based upon relationships, Stephen spent a fair bit of time attending social events and building a network of potential clients. This gave him a chance to meet all types of characters and with the business development work he did for his company, he routinely bumped into those contacts around town and at seasonal events. Arwin was one of those hyper-extraverted personalities who could pull a room together at a moment’s notice. It was generally accepted by people in his circles that Arwin was an extremely intelligent man of significant success. People accepted this, not from his vast intellect or accomplishments, but because Arwin routinely told them that he was an extremely intelligent man of significant success. Stephen, taking a more passive approach to interacting with people, held the philosophy that the more someone spoke of their intellect, the lower the odds were that they actually had any. He spotted Arwin’s gift of gab immediately and made it a point to not get locked into discussions with the walking self-advertisement.