Running for Your Life: Why Run?

One of my favorite anecdotes about origins is by Paul Auster in a crystalline personal memoir called “Why Write?” In it, Auster, as a boy, is at the Polo Grounds at a time when Willie Mays was king. Miraculously, Auster and his adult companions find themselves alone with Mays. They have paper, but no pen or pencil, so Auster misses a golden opportunity to get his hero’s autograph: “Sorry, kid. Ain’t got no pencil, can’t give no autograph.” Auster says he has never again gone out the door without a pencil in his pocket. And he still doesn’t: “If there is a pencil in your pocket, there is a good chance that one day you’ll feel tempted to start using it.”

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I’ve written here about my illness; being 20 years old and feeling helpless in hospital, my left leg more of a stump than a flexible limb. Even as I sit writing this down (I always start with pen to paper; an unconscious homage to writers like Auster), the leg damaged in the 1970s doesn’t feel right, is fatter and the calf far more swollen than my healthy one.

I literally always feel the difference and have no idea what my life would be like (A cane? I wince when I watch “House,” the episodes when Dr. House hobbles around the hospital in pain, not least because the character before the injury was an avid endurance runner, and as both K and M often remark, the actor, Hugh Laurie, and I bear more than a passing resemblance to one another) if I haven't been running every other day for more than thirty years.

But digging deeper, I tell myself my running life wasn’t only determined by my hospital story, where I pledged to myself, like Auster did as a young man to always carry a pencil, that I would always keep a pair of good sneakers in working order. That I would always run for my life.

There are, of course, other choices: Why swim? Why cycle? Why rock-climb? Why Rollerblade? Why yoga? Am I wrong to think that writers sympathize with runners? Alan Sillitoe’s “Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,” immediately comes to mind, but I’m just beginning David Mitchell’s “Black Swan Green,” and I wonder if it is an coincidence that Mitchell’s boy-hero fiercely identifies himself as a Runner on a frozen lake game of British Bulldog: “I just lay there and let them convert me into a Bulldog. In my heart I’d always be a Runner.”

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For Canada’s Centennial in 1967, a lot was made about fitness. No Canadian with a memory of that time forgets the humiliation of a claim a few years later that an average thirty-year-old Canadian wasn’t as fit as a sixty-year-old Swede. (Which, of course, begs the question: What’s so wrong with that? If you get to the age of sixty in a place as dead boring as Stockholm had to be in 1967, how fit you were seems the least of the many considerations.)

Nevertheless, the nation in its wisdom was going to catch up in a generation, thanks to its “Youth.” (A phrase that seems so quaint now was positively de rigueur in those days; you were “Youth” from the time you could walk unaided until you fell into arrears on your first credit card, owing 24 percent-per-annum charges on the balance.) Canada, of course, took this kind of thing seriously; most of the country’s current arenas, pools and recreation centres were built in the run-up to Centennial, with the view to shaping up Youth.

I was eleven in 1967, when at the start of the school year we learned about the Fitness Challenge. The mental picture of the muscular, bare-chested sixty-year-old Swede stepping out of a sauna on a frozen plain (There is something to admire here?) is still six years away, but I bring to mind the meta-image of TV billboards and bus shelters (a meta-stretch; Owen Sound, Ontario, didn’t have buses, much less bus shelters).

The challenge: All schoolchildren would be measured for athleticism and general fitness and would be judged accordingly, with those meeting the highest standard of excellence winning an ace-looking GOLD cloth patch with the modern symbol of Canada’s future (like Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier said, “The 19th century was the century of the United States. I think that we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the 20th century”), the 10 provinces and territories symbolized by unilateral triangles interlocked like paving stones into the shape of a maple leaf, a single example of which the principal at Dufferin Public held up at that long-ago assembly where playground rats like me stared back in wonder. Whoa! Now THAT was something. Man, I was going to get me one of those. The principal displayed other patches: A blue one with a SILVER leaf, and a brown sample with a BRONZE leaf, and then there was RED, for the terminally hapless, that simply documented that you were Youth with a pulse at the time of the Challenge, destined to be ridiculed and bullied for the rest of your life. The principal said that it was no shame to be RED, that the Fitness Challenge was all about taking part, just doing your best, but we playground rats knew differently. There was GOLD and FAILURE. No way did you want to fail.

So let the games begin. The dash and what constituted the long-distance run, three times around the perimeter of the baseball playing area at Harrison Field, are cake, as are the situps, 49 in a minute, and the running broad jump that I simply aced, and if my teacher-judge, who was responsible for marking in the dirt of the standing broad jump, had have squooched up my third and final attempt a little to the deepest spot of footprint, not where the heel just glancingly touched down, I am it: Gold!

But she shakes her head, jots on her clipboard. Silver. One stinking Silver and you are Silver, only as good as your worst performance. I'm Gold in every other category, but Silver in standing board stops me, and I swear an undersized boy like me, MS, who I won’t name here but I remember as if it is yesterday, places second behind me in the long-distance run, what I know in my heart is a Silver distinction, instead is one of the only boys in the school to win Gold. To this day I see MS standing before the whole school with his Gold badge as we cheer his achievement, and his achievement alone.

I kept my Silver badge in my clothes drawer for a year or two, but one day it vanished and I haven't seen it since.

Running for Your Life: Why Run? II