A Series Of Recursive, Idiosynchratic Near-Misses: Running 15 Miles In Minimal Footwear & “Infinite Jest”

The annual Charleston Distance Run (held every year in Charleston, West Virginia) is touted as America’s only 15 mile road race.  It was never shortened to a half marathon because the man who started it, an eye doctor by the name of Don Cohen, simply liked the route.  Anyhow, as someone who is a native of the state with 20+ years of residence, you’d think I could be more specific than that about said route, given that it’s a city that a decent number of people in my town commute to once a week or more.   You’d think I’d have done more than read the annotated google map once to get an idea of pacing.  You’d think I’d at least be on time for the 7:30 start, which is marked by the lighting of a cannon, and not running around with my hand over my heart during the pledge and National Anthem, reverent in outline but also bobbing and scanning in semi-panicked vigilance.  You would think wrong, because I found the race table, just behind the back of the starting pack, got my packet, and had 2 of 4 pins into my race number as the Starting Fuse was lit.  At this point, subjectively at least, my hands lost half their feeling and the pins became either tiny or unexpectedly huge…  A wave of collective slack that signals a pause becoming awkward went through the starting pack.  The Announcer: ‘sometimes we don’t know how long it’ll take exactly’.  I realize that I’m going to have to run with my commemorative technical shirt + drawstring bag they’ve just handed me at the number table because the trailer will be gone at the end and I guess I could pass but these are very cool shirts and I paid the entry fee and ow I swear to god, How is it I am allowed to drive but I can’t operate a safet–

BOOM!  and then it got easy.  Unfold pin, pinch Under Armor to Tyvek and run it through, squeeze it shut like a baby carabiner. My ipod is already on a playlist that once of my friends made me and I know it’s 90 minutes.  I know the passage of “Infinite Jest” I want to re-hear is about an hour.  I am fairly confident I can cover a mile in ten minutes in my five-toed shoes, over level, even, (if often inclined) pavement based on a couple of years of running in these things.  At 15 miles, this makes 150 minutes, or 2:30 in terms you immediately think in.  2:30 of entertainment, 2:30 of running.  2:30 of incredible entertainment that’s actually a good use of my time, make that.  I have a camelback, which almost no one else does, so I don’t have to worry about my mouth drying out, which is often A Concern That Keeps Me From Being On Time.  Now, however, I am in a place where nothing can go wrong. 

My Mom has parked and is just past the start as I ramp up, I hand the shirt and bag off to her.  I feel like I could do things like this without her, but they would take on an extra layer of brutality and exhaustingness.  It strikes me for a second how sad it is that many kids never appreciate their parents in their lifetimes’, or sometimes period.
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It’s a strange feeling, at 28, to feel more awake, engaged and in kiddish awe of my body than ever.  It feels like I should be taking it for granted more, or somehow over it as I would be any other surrounding so immediate as to often be continuous with one’s mind and sense of self.  However, I also feel more vulnerable than ever.  On the day of this particular race, I’d been running on an injured left lower calf; something in the network of tendons and ligaments that stabilize the foot; all important for minimal running as they’re flexing like a suspension bridge, dissipating and redirecting  and storing the forces that the padding of a regular running shoe generally absorb.

In light of this near-literal Achilles Heel (like 3 inches up a little to the right and an inch in, to be exact), I started relatively slow (for someone still flushed with a little bit of cannon panic), but was still passing people.  The initial level stretch was used to test my feet and get things working together, subtly adjusting angles of landing, collapse and recoil to engage the whole evolution-hewn Rube Goldberg lattice.  Many people don’t think about the toe next to their pinkie toe for years at a time, but that was one of the critical cruxes of this race, aiming crumple zones at imaginary impact dots on the pavement and letting them spring back into shape, propelling the next step.  Subtly testing postures against shock attenuations, stride ratios for efficiency, strike angles to be ever so slightly more flush with the pavement so as to minimize blister-sowing friction.  This process was both painful and expected.  This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t rationalizing at mile 1.5 “OK, I can endure 9 more if it doesn’t get worse… Please don’t get worse.” 

Eventually, we headed up a hill I couldn’t see the top of.  Counterintuitively, I was able to pick up the pace at this point  because the angle of the hill made falling into my strides easier, even though I was still having to offset gravity.  Things begin to blur from exertion some here, but I was able to lock into a stride that allowed me to plow forward pretty much painlessly.  The gear ratios between things felt correct.  I saw things at their actual size and exact material weight, outlined in the humidity and soft light.  People cheered from us from front porches, wall tops and businesses and I smiled and waved back as we exited the freeway and started to wind through the South Hills neighborhoods.  Prince’s “When You Were Mine” comes on and the sheer technical clarity of the recording re-gears my mind as I turn a corner into an incredible view of one of those correct sized (and thus awe-inspiring) valleys, populated by de-tilt-shifted houses made from wood that went down with saurid force back when it was trees.

Coming down the hill precipitated a whole different set of considerations.  Running is a notorious high-impact exercise and the combination of momentum and a steady, unforgiving series of drops gradually pulverizes many runners’ knees.  I wasn’t immune to this (you could argue the minimal shoes made me more susceptible), so I just sort of accepted that pain didn’t necessarily equal damage and braced for it, favoring my right leg due to the injury on the left side and taking as much of the drop with my core/posture alignment as possible.  It felt like re-entry in the broad sense, but coming to points in my knees, ass and neck instead of whitening the whole leading edge with heat.  However, the actual exertion was minimal; so essentially the inverse of the earlier hill. 

When I was 8, I read an article about how Stunt People fall without getting hurt and the phrase I remember was, “When most people fall, the first thing they do is stick out an arm and break it.” This is not to say that Stunt People take falls with some kind of trauma-shielding feline grace; falling wall will still make you feel like someone who’s taken a fall.  However, you can roll with a fall and disperse it, lean into it’s kinetic energy, let it guide you without throwing you, then you can fall well.

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We crossed the bridge back to downtown and I retooled for my knees, letting my toes and arches engage the load more fully with the benefit of level ground.  As the playlist ended, we reached the state capitol building, instantly recognizable for it’s golden dome.  The last song was “The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance” which is not, on the surface, a good sentiment to take in to the truly battering last hour of the race.  However, I already had a plan.  After 90 minutes comprised largely of dance music and indie music that you can dance to, I was going to listen to a certain passage from “Infinite Jest”, it’s one of the book’s handful of monlogues, delivered in flashback by one of the protagonist’s paternal grandfathers.  It’s here if you want it.

It starts, appropo a mishandled garage door, with a rant about how Marlon Brando ruined a whole generation’s relations with objects and ends with a tearful recounting of the narrator’s career-ending tennis injury.  In between, it covers everything from the precept that true efficiency is effortless… pleasurably deterministic almost, to the narrator’s career-ending injury and simultaneous insult by his own father.

Somewhere in here, it briefly lightninged and rained and I rolled the forearm sleeve of my black underarmor over my ipod armband to make sure stray water didn’t beat the odds and short the thing out.  It stayed like that even after the rain because the day was warmer now anyways.  There is a broader theme of recursion and various near misses and brushes with near-greatness in the passage and in “Infinite Jest” at large.  Each step is a near miss with pain but I feel ligaments engaging and tendons storing and returning energy within what feels like only their peak range, stopping me short every time.  I have never felt them performing this fluidly during training, but then I only train up to 11 miles.  I feel a continuity between mind and body and all the ideas that emanate from them that I don’t know most people ever do.

I’m in the last mile now and, as the stadium where we finish comes into view, I become strangely aware of the exact pain crater outline of the foot bottoms I keep landing on.  It isn’t pain yet.  They are still in solidarity, all the high-functioning trinketry in there, but the end of that solidarity will go from being that of an optimistic viking rowboat to that of a strike in what I can now tell will be minutes.

Our last 250 meters is run at Laidley Field, where I saw a Monster Truck Show at the age of 4 or 5 that I remember as a whiteout of euphoria, the smell of fuel and combustion, and the seashelling modulation of engine nose through overlarge mowing earmuffs.  20 years later, It’s got one of those tracks made of pulped tires and it feels luxurious compared to the pavement I’ve spent the day on.  The assembled strikers in the crater become a team that feels like a tiny pillow, cushioning each of those last, long steps.  I hear my name on the loudspeaker and it crosses my mind that I don’t really deserve it.  2:30:16.5 is my final time, 10 minutes a mile,;as predicted. I was 329th out of 560 people, but the top 3 finishers basically cut my time in half…   There is unrest among the workers below.  I begin to feel my feet again. 

It’s helpful to remember that, as subjectively heady and Important as my experience of running can feel, I’m slightly behind the middle of the pack at an event like this.  But at the same time, I’m not really competing with anything other than what are (essentially) mental limits as expressed in tiny physical adjustments.  I’ve assimilated plenty of subtleties of motion and layers of finesse into unconsciousness in 2 years of minimal running and, last Saturday, I welded in a few more.  It’s also worth noting that, at an arbitrarily long race, taking too hard-nosed a competitive stance is sort of ridiculous anyhow.  The damning line in the “Infinite Jest” passage is “But he’ll never be great.” which is a killing denunciation in context, but a freeing statement to me, because it allows me to be enthralled by all the little asides that have no competitive bearing but that bear greatly on the engagement of the experience.  It doesn’t mean I’m unserious or slowing down, but that the pressure is to let the elements operate as smoothly as possible, to minimally tax their mechanisms, not to particularly push or dig or grunt or hup, but to correctly convert falls into propulsion.  I will never be great at it, but I can be arguably good at it for a very long time.