Week 7

Friday, November 2

Entering the Crucible

At the championship level, the marathon takes just over two hours to complete. While the pain of a shorter race pierces, the marathon’s pain penetrates. The marathon calls for management of the load. What takes thousands of miles to build will be burned to ashes in just 26.2. All that I was and am no more has been given to the road in the hope of emerging as an Olympian.

This, then, the 2008 U.S. Olympic Team Trials – Men’s Marathon in New York City on November 3, 2007, is the hero’s quest of old, told anew. The marathon is the insidious withering of the will as the body cannibalizes itself over time in an exchange of fitness for distance, until finally it reaches the point where each step is a victory. For athletes of the highest caliber, fitness is like a candle: It has to burn brightly, but not too quickly. The marathon is a long burn, and it’s the rate that becomes key. Whose rhythm best matches race pace? Whose energy is being utilized most efficiently? That’s what we mean by, “Whose day is it?”

“Who can peak on a given day, and train to be very good at a particular time—it’s a difficult thing to do,” says Frank Shorter, America’s master of the Olympic peak. “It’s tough to plan to ‘be on.’”

Big-time marathoners set their loads through months of training; they are locked into a world of rigor and regimen. Then they cock their hammers back as the starter’s pistol releases them to the course. It is a combustible mixture when 130 men must reduce themselves to an anointed three over a span of 26.2 miles. And when the camera zooms in on the faces—because it is all right there, on their faces—the marathon captures the imagination in the spark of engagement.

For all the endorphin-saturated serenity that running is said to produce, at the highest level the marathon is a brutal game. In full extension the questions besetting the athletes come faster and grow greater as the distance piles on. Who takes the blow, then returns to the front to make sure no one can rest once the surge dissipates? Who maintains an even pace in the face of the surge as the great Paul Tergat did when Hendrick Ramaala lit off with a withering 4:21 17th mile in New York City in 2005? Who makes the first move? Who makes the last? Goals become altered as miles turn to minutes.

The marathon is a cruel game, as the miles rob you of your wits just when they are most required, when muscles revolt and the brain seeks oxygen now shunted to pistoning legs. These are the moments that challenge and inspire as the battle rages. You are already going hard, then somebody makes a move. You don’t want to go, but you have to. There is only this, and this is it for victory!

There is purity in this process that transcends a world wed more than ever to fields of secular yields. The marathon is a contest unencumbered by modern contrivance. It won’t be determined by luck, a turn of the ball, or a referee’s arbitrary call. Rather, it will be settled by trial in the crucible of all systems coming under fire. It has been this way since the beginning, since gravity’s design of leg, lung, and limb. And though training methods have been refined and equipment and surfaces have improved, the outcome remains determined by men carrying no more than what they first brought into this world, whips of sinew and cudgels of bone.

Finally, this self-winnowing process will reveal the precious metal within, glittering for all to see atop the podium, forged by the relentless forces of time and distance. Arbitrary though it may be and born of a mythical tale, on Saturday morning, as each qualified man toes the line, their first steps will hang silently in the air as the battle of will begins.