Enough II - from Bill McKibben
Bill McKibben wrote the amazingly insightful and equally terrifying The End of Nature.
This excerpt came from his next book, entitled Enough; Staying Human in an Engineered Age published by Times Books. Bill is clearly a smart, thoughtful, centered advocate for the human spirit coexisting in the natural world. I suspect a couple hours in his company as he talks to a group would be enlightening and inspirational.
CHAPTER ONE Too Much
For the first few miles of the marathon, I was still fresh enough to look around, to pay attention. I remember mostly the muffled thump of several thousand pairs of expensive sneakers padding the Ottawa pavement-an elemental sound, like surf, or wind. But as the race wore on, the herd stretched into a dozen flocks and then into a long string of solitary runners. Pretty soon each of us was off in a singular race, pitting one body against one will. By the halfway point, when all the adrenaline had worn off, the only sound left was my breath rattling in my chest. I was deep in my own private universe, completely absorbed in my own drama.
Now, this run was entirely inconsequential. For months I’d trained with the arbitrary goal of 3 hours and 20 minutes in my mind. Which is not a fast time; it’s an hour and a quarter off the world record. But it would let a forty-one-year-old into the Boston Marathon. And given how fast I’d gone in training, I knew it lay at the outer edge of the possible. So it was a worthwhile target, a number to live with through one early-morning run after another, a number ‘to multiply and divide against the readouts on the treadmill display when downpours kept me in the gym. It’s rare enough in my life to have a goal so concrete and unambiguous.
By about, say, mile 23, two things were becoming clear. One, my training had worked: I’d reeled off one 7:30 mile after another. Two, my training wouldn’t get me to the finish by itself. My legs were starting to slow and wobble, my knees and calves were hard pressed to lift and push at the same pace as an hour earlier. I could feel my goal slipping away, my pace dropping. With every hundred yards the race became less a physical test and more a mental one, game spirit trying to rally sagging flesh before sagging flesh could sap game spirit and convince it the time had come to walk. Someone stronger passed me, and I slipped onto her heels for a few hundred crucial yards, picking up the pace. The finish line swam into my squinted view and I stagger-sprinted across. With 14 seconds to spare.
A photographer clicked a picture, as he would of everyone who finished. I was a cipher to him-a grimacing Cipher, the 324th person to cross, an unimportant finisher in an unimportant time in an unimportant race. In the picture you can see the crowd at the finish line lookjng right past me toward the middle distance, waiting for their mom or dad, son or daughter to hove into sight.
It mattered not at all what I had done. But it mattered to me. When it was done, I had a clearer sense of myself, of my power and my frailty. For a period of hours, and especially those last gritty miles, I had been absolutely, utterly present, those moments desperately, magnificently clarified. As meaningless as it was to the world, that’s how meaningful it was to me. I met parts of myself I’d never been introduced to before, glimpsed more clearly strengths and flaws I’d half suspected. A marathon peels you down toward your core for a little while, gets past the defenses we «t even against ourselves. That’s the high that draws you back for the next race, a centering elation shared by people who finished an hour ahead and two hours behind me. And it must echo in some small ay what runners must always have felt-the Tarahumara Indians on their impossible week-long runs through the canyons of Mexico, the Masai on their game trails. Few things are more basic than running. pg 1-3
Sport is the canary in a miner’s cage. It’s possible the canary will die; there are those who think, with good reason, that genetic engineering of the human organism may be crude and dangerous, especially at first. But the even greater danger is that the canal)’ will be souped up into an ever perkier, ever tougher, ever “better” specimen. Not a canary anymore, but a parrot, or a golden eagle, or some grand thing we can only guess at. A canal)’ so big and strong that it … won’t be a canary anymore. It will be something else entirely, unable to carry the sweet tune it grew up singing. No one needs to run in the twenty-first century. Running is an outlet for spirit, for finding out who you are, no more mandatory than art or music. It is a voluntary beauty a grace. And it turns out to be a fragile beauty. Its significance depends on the limitations and wonders of our bodies as we have known them. P 7