Outracing The Reaper

Yes, a few people die running marathons. But many, many more perish because they don’t.

- Peter Sagal

IT WAS APRIL of this year, and unlike young men in springtime, my thoughts turned to death. It is, after all, the season of Passover and Easter, both holidays that venerate death as a prerequisite for the creation of new (and/or eternal) life. Then there was adidas, bless its heart, which celebrated the completion of the most important event in running by emailing a message saying “Congratulations, you survived the Boston Marathon!” to everyone who had just run it, a message instantly condemned for its poor taste, coming just four years after the horrific bombings which some bystanders had not, in fact, survived. But I could understand the impulse behind the cheerful message: marathons have been associated with the risk of death ever since the event was (unwittingly and unwillingly) invented by the Greek runner Pheidippides, who came in first in a field of one and then promptly expired. Whether he existed (probably) or actually ran from Marathon to Athens to deliver news of military victory before giving up the ghost (probably not), the modern marathon, based on his legend, was born with the notion of sudden death wrapped inside it. Mortality comes standard. Anybody who has ever run a marathon, especially for the first time, has heard it: “Come back alive!” or “Man, if I tried to do that, I would die!” In fact, for most of its history, even training for a marathon was seen as a risk to one’s life. One of the ‘survivors’ of Boston in 2017 was Kathrine Switzer, who exactly 50 years before had run the race on the sly as K.V. Switzer, because organisers would not allow women to run it, for fear that they would die when their uteruses spontaneously left their bodies, or something.