Races — Many Journeys to Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon

ANCHORAGE — In the 1948 film, the Naked City, the narrator tells us, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City; this has been one of them.” I’ve often thought about that quote in the context of marathons and marathon runners. To me, with every marathon that I support, I feel that I get a step closer to being able to express how the marathon is not just a collection of stories, but the culmination of a series of long journeys that is much too complex to put our minds around. I got a step closer this weekend at the Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon in Anchorage.

The Anchorage event has been one of my favorite marathons for some time. What it has to offer is unlike almost any mid-size marathon in the United States. It is well organized. It offers all of the amenities that you’d expect, like great aid stations that even serve oranges and pretzels. And, perhaps most importantly, it is delivered against a stunning backdrop on the edges of the Alaska wilderness.

Perhaps that’s why so many people’s marathon journeys bring them to this remote part of the world. In this place, they can achieve their marathon goals, but they can lose themselves in the woods for time while doing it.

Many of the people that come to Anchorage for the Mayor’s Marathon are brought by the Leukemia and Lymphoma’s Society’s “Team In Training” program, which like many charities provides a coaching program for marathon runners and walkers to prepare for their first marathon. And while many people in the broader media — and perhaps even the broader running culture — like to flog charity running groups for bringing people to marathons that aren’t traditional runner types, they have missed a substantial point in making their criticisms. The point is that the journey these people are on is so much larger and more poignant than just running a marathon. The marathon is just the last step, or perhaps the first, in an emotional journey that most of us don’t have the capacity to understand.

Runners and walkers alike often express their goals for their marathons in a simple term the first time out, “I just want to finish,” they say. But when pressed there is often more to it than that. There is something that started them on their journey, which is now compelling them to finish. Finishing their marathon is about finishing something greater than those 26.2 miles.

A runner this weekend, who I won’t name due to the sensitivity of her story, had lost her son to cancer just a few months ago. “I promised him that we’d run a marathon together,” she told me, “but he died before we could make that happen.” Instead, she ran this marathon with a small vile of his ashes and spread the ashes in a river along the scenic wooded portion of the course. She tearfully hugged me as she ran on at mile 16, knowing that she had crossed a painful bridge on her road to recovery. For her, this race was about doing something for her son that she could no longer do with him and this compelled her to finish her journey, with him, if only in spirit.

It is hard to imagine the pain that she must have been feeling at that moment, or to understand how she had the strength to continue on after losing a child. She was not only there, but running through that Alaskan forest on her way to a new level of strength that she may find as she gains some faint hint of closure to her trauma.

A walker named Leslie from Ohio explained to me that she had been diagnosed with cancer and that doctors were in a waiting period before giving her treatment. “I call it my Advent Period,” she told me at mile 25. Advent is the waiting period of time before Christmas at the end of which Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus, considered to them to be a miracle. “I will either not develop symptoms and live or I will die and go to Heaven. Either way I will have my miracle.” Her 26.2 mile journey is layered with much more than just athletic achievement.

And just last night I received word that one of my walker athlete’s sister had finally lost her battle to cancer. “My ray of sunshine, my sister Nancy, died this morning after an incredible spirited fight for her life,” she wrote in an e-mail. Tam will most certainly start a new journey that will culminate in another marathon sometime soon.

When I look across these moving rivers of people that we call marathons, I see much more than just a million stories. I see lives that have taken them on journeys that have brought them to that place and that time and I know that there is so much more to their stories. “Just finishing” their marathons is just the tip of the iceberg.

The marathon is a million threads of the human experience, that are brought together in a patch-work for just one moment in time. Marathons are a quilt that are only woven for one day and each patch on that quilt is the human experience in all its brightest and darkest moments.

My hope is that all of you will see just a glimmer of the depth that is our sport, hidden just beneath the surface. It takes real humility and humanness to open yourself up to the journeys going on under the surface of those marathons, but I hope some day that you will feel it as I have. I know that I am a better person from having heard these stories and known these people in the midst of the brief moment that our lives intersected.

Coach Joe English, Portland Oregon, USA
Managing Editor, Running Advice and News
www.running-advice.com

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