Head to tail

Now would be a great time to write a slightly moralistic list of resolutions about how we can all make the running world a little bit better in 2005 by giving a bit more of ourselves. It might also be a good time to wax lyrical about the events of 2004. However, I’ve tried both in this space before, and I don’t think you liked it any more than I did.

In September, once again too injured to run, I drove a van for a Reach the Beach Relay team. Reach the Beach is a reverent imitation of Oregon’s Hood to Coast Relay, run from Bretton Woods in the White Mountains through 210 miles of New Hampshire to Hampton Beach, a river of vans making its own twisted path to the sea.

I had run with this team for two years, but this year I skipped the actual running and just enjoyed the sleep deprivation, sketchy nutrition, and rain. Teams start in waves, beginning with the slowest-seeded around eight A.M. and continuing until the specialists like Bucknell start at four or five in the afternoon. We usually start between 11 AM and noon, and finish solidly in the middle of the field (124 out of 240 this year.)

For the first two years, the magic of the race was how a mixture of sub-three marathoners and post-Penguin masters could cram into two vans and coexist cheerfully with mutual goals for twenty-four hours. This year, without my own share of miles to go before I slept, I sat on top of our van at the exchanges, watching the parade go by. I started thinking about the whole race: the exchange zones, the waves of runners, the volunteers who stayed in one place while we all streamed down the back roads of the Granite State.

With more teams always behind us and another runner always coming into view ahead, I started wondering: what’s it like to actually be the first runner in this race? Is there a police car up there, or an ambulance in the back? It’s not always the slowest runners in back or the fastest in the front; in fact, it probably never is.

2004 was a year of looking back. We said goodbye to Johnny Kelly, Arthur Lydiard, and Gunder Hagg, and noted that fifty years have passed since Roger Bannister ran 3:59.4. Consider us, for a moment, as runners in a multi-stage relay, with those momentous figures now behind us. Who’s still in front? Where, for that matter, is the front?

Even now, some great athletes are well in to their training for the international cross-country season and the major spring marathons. Someone has laid out their four-year plan to win a medal in Beijing. Someone else has made a New Year’s resolution to run their first marathon in the fall. We haven’t met them yet; they’re on the road in front of us, warming up for their turn in this race which has no leaders and no caboose.

So this year, I won’t advise about the future or gush about the past. I’ll just sit here on my van and watch you all go by.