The Longest Race: A Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance

Praise for The Longest Race

Ought to be required reading even for people who have never run a step.

—Boston Globe

Revealing, savvy, and fast-paced, Ayres’s eloquent book on marathon running is a master class on the priceless life lessons of enduring and conquering obstacles to victory.

—Publishers Weekly

Ed Ayres is a legend who shares his many provocative insights and lessons in an informative yet enjoyable way. A true champion, Ed uses his gift to help us all be the best that we can be.

—Dean Karnazes, athlete and New York Times–bestselling author of Ultramarathon Man

In this compelling read, visionary Ed Ayres takes us on a run that may save our nanosecond lives . . . and our planet.

—Kathrine Switzer, first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon, winner of the 1974 New York City Marathon, and author of Marathon Woman

"The Longest Race is a fascinating, compelling, and far-reaching read."

—Amby Burfoot, Runner’s World editor-at-large and winner of the 1968 Boston Marathon

This book reminds us that our strength and vitality can never be separated from the health of the earth we run on, and whose air we breathe.

—Bill Rodgers, four-time New York Marathon winner and four-time Boston Marathon winner

"The Longest Race is partly a chronicle of [Ayres’s] experience in the fabled JFK 50 Mile ultramarathon, but it’s also about so much more. . . . This book isn’t just about an athletic race. It’s also about the human race."

—Bloomberg

In a culture addicted to quick hits, fast times, and unrelenting over-stimulus, Ed Ayres speaks with the voice of wisdom, simplicity, and acceptance of what is. We highly recommend this book to anyone ready to step off the speeding train and do a freefall into the present.

—Danny and Katherine Dreyer, authors of Chi Running, Chi Walking, and Chi Marathon

A gifted storyteller, [Ayres] seamlessly moves between discussing running to exploring larger life issues such as why we run, our impact on the environment, and the effects of the nation’s declining physical fitness.

—Booklist

[Ayres’s] broad-ranging interests and accumulated wisdom will appeal to a wide readership, not just runners and environmentalists.

—Kirkus

An ultramarathon is made up of a million moments, and you’re different at the end than you were at the start—it’s the perfect metaphor, as Ed Ayres makes clear, for the race we’ve got to run now, with focus and grit, if we’re going to deal with the deepest trouble we’ve ever stumbled into as a planet.

—Bill McKibben, Schumann Distinguished Scholar, Middlebury College

The story of one epic 50-mile race in all its technical and visceral elements, and also a celebration of the sport of running and of our ability to keep running in changing times.

—Shelf Awareness

Required reading for any aspiring ultrarunner. An inspirational story by someone who knows more about life on the run, and what it means to us, than many of us could dream of.

—Robin Harvie, author of The Lure of Long Distances: Why We Run

[A] compelling and poignant read. . . . Ayres shows us how we can all make the world a better place through the way we live, the way we eat, and the way we interact with one another.

—Danielle Nierenberg, codirector, State of the World

Ed Ayres has masterfully intertwined his world view, gleaned from over 50 years as a runner and an astute observer of societal trends, with a stirring account of his quest to break the 60+ record at the JFK 50 Mile. The result is a compelling story about one man and mankind.

—Phil Stewart, former president, Road Runners Club of America

"The Longest Race takes you inside the head of one of the pioneers of the modern running movement."

—Gabe Mirkin, MD, former medical editor, Runner’s World, and host of The Dr. Gabe Mirkin Show

With the head of a scientist, the heart of an endurance athlete, and the soul of an ultra-distance runner, [Ed] teaches us good stewardship not only for our bodies but also for this planet. . . . We can all learn from his words.

—Naomi Benaron, author of Running the Rift

The most clearly articulated account I’ve ever read as to the goings-on inside the mind of a runner.

—Brendan Brazier, bestselling author of Thrive and formulator of Vega

I have been reading Ed Ayres’s insightful thoughts on running and life since I started serious training in the 1970s. We can all benefit greatly from Ed’s wisdom.

—Joe Friel, elite endurance-athlete coach and author of The Triathlete’s Training Bible

To read this book is to run alongside a seasoned athlete, a deep thinker, and a great storyteller. Ayres is the best kind of running companion, generously doling out hilarious stories and hard-won insights on performance conditioning and the human condition. His lifetime of ultra-running and environmental writing drives his exploration of what keeps us running long distances—and what it might take to keep the planet from being run into the ground.

—Curtis Runyan, editor, Nature Conservancy magazine

"The Longest Race tells an extraordinary story of athletic spirit fueled by, yet transcending, competition. Deep in our souls, it’s a thing we can find only through the hard work of caring and striving, not only for ourselves but for our fellow competitors, for life itself, and indeed for the fate of the earth. We return to this spirit or we perish."

—David Meggyesy, former NFL linebacker, author of Out of Their League, and former western director of the NFL Players Association

An extraordinary journey of the human body, mind, and soul running together. This is a breathtaking, feet-on-the-ground story.

—Marianne Williamson, author of A Woman’s Worth and Healing the Soul of America

"One of the nation’s leading environmental thinkers, and a nationally ranked runner over half a century, Ed Ayres embodies the classic ideal mens sana in corpore sano. Ayres shows how the discipline of endurance running can lead us as individuals and as a nation to environmental sustainability. Ayres confirms what a few of us have long suspected: In our greatest individual challenges, trail running proves itself just like life, only more so."

—Tony Rossmann, environmental advocate, UC Berkeley law professor, and past president of the Western States Endurance Run

Ed Ayres has a talent for drawing the reader into his adventure. Enjoy the journey; it is a fun one.

—Michael Wardian, 2011 World Ultrarunner of the Year

As [Ed] carries us with him along this course, he deftly uses the past to inform the present. His overarching question: What does it take for an individual as well as a civilization to go the distance without collapsing?

—Lester R. Brown, president, Earth Policy Institute

Ed deftly weaves together a lifetime’s experiences and observations: a memoir of a pioneering ultramarathoner and professional writer, a primer of advice on going long distances, an anthropological study of humans as runners, and a set of environmental/ecological essays. Each topic alone would have made a good book. Together they yield a great one, richly detailed and finely written.

—Joe Henderson, former editor, Runner’s World

An epic story of how important our fitness as individuals may be to the long-run sustainability of our national and global society.

—Jacqueline Hansen, two-time world-record holder for the women’s marathon, Boston Marathon winner, and first woman to run a sub-2:40 marathon

"Ayres’s tale is nothing less than a philosophical treatise on how to survive and thrive in a world of dwindling resources, alarming climate change, and haunting violence. It’s about a human race, but also the human race."

—Larry Shapiro, PhD, author of Zen and the Art of Running

"This is a story of critical connections—about the dawning realization that we need to rediscover how to think not just on our feet but with our feet."

—Thom Hartmann, host of the Thom Hartmann radio and TV shows

This is not just a book about running—about putting one foot in front of another—it is rich in history, it is thoughtful, intelligent, often very personal, and provides an exploration of our sport. A brilliant and fun read for runners and non-runners alike.

—Nancy Hobbs, executive director, American Trail Running Association

BECAUSE EVERY BOOK IS A TEST OF NEW IDEAS

Also by Ed Ayres

God’s Last Offer: Negotiating for a Sustainable Future

Crossing the Energy Divide: Moving from Fossil Fuel Dependence to a Clean-Energy Future

(with Robert U. Ayres)

The Worldwatch Reader on Global Environmental Issues

(Co-editor, with Lester R. Brown)

And Then the Vulture Eats You: True Tales About Ultramarathons and Those Who Run Them

(Contributor)

Imagine What America Could Be in the 21st Century: Visions of a Better Future from Leading American Thinkers

(Contributor)

The Longest Race

A Lifelong Runner,

an Iconic Ultramarathon,

and the Case for Human Endurance

Ed Ayres

New York

Contents

Map

Preface

1 | Boonsboro, Dawn

The Start—When Life Begins Again

2 | South Mountain

The Rush—and the Dilemma of Pacing

3 | Appalachian Trail

What Are My Running Shoes For? The Journey from Barefoot Hunter to Boots on the Ground to Where I Am Now

4 | Weverton Cliff

The Art of Breathing and the Music of Motion: Do My Feet Have Eyes of Their Own?

5 | Keep Tryst Road

With a Little Help from Our Friends: The Not-So-Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

6 | Towpath

Learning from Quarterbacks: The Slower-Is-Faster Phenomenon

7 | Antietam Aqueduct

Redemption: A Recovering Strength for the Human Runner—and for the Human Race

8 | Killiansburg Cave

Becoming a Persistence Hunter: The Long Day of Tracking, the Grateful Kill, the Celebration

9 | Snyder’s Landing

The Energy-Supply Illusion: Carbo-Loading, Body Heat, and Naked Skin

10 | A Boiled-Potato Miracle

Burning Fat in a Carbohydrate Fire: A Secret of the Inca Messengers

11 | Taylor’s Landing

Negotiating with Fatigue—and Turning Long Hours into Moments

12 | Dam Number 4

Seeing Around Bends: We Came, We Envisioned . . . We Got Disconnected

13 | Country Road

The Blessing and Curse of Competition: Why Vince Lombardi Was Dead Wrong

14 | Williamsport

If You Fall, Then You Crawl. What Is It About Finishing?

15 | Late Afternoon

The Fading Light

Postscript: 2012

Appendix

Notes for an Aspiring Ultrarunner

Author Q&A

Notes

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Preface

The most significant discovery I’ve ever made as a runner is the one that has taken longest to fully register: There is no finish line! Someday I’ll be gone, but for others—and then others after them—the race will go on.*

The experience of watching my first grandchild, Josh, as he has gone through the adventures of standing up for the first time, then taking a first step, and then toddling, has been a kind of epiphany. Josh was born five months before this book was originally published, and at the time was still crawling. But since then—what a transformation! That must have happened to me once, too!

Until now, my story has always been that I began running at age fifteen, when I first encountered the coming-of-age excitements of high school cross-country. It took the arrival of little Josh, last year, to help me wake up and grasp that for anyone who breathes, the real discoveries of what it takes to carry ourselves successfully through life on this planet—both by becoming strong and enduring as individuals and by helping to build long-run sustainability as a civilization—begin from the moment of birth.

One reason I’ve taken so long to fully get this is that, for many of us who run 10ks or half-marathons or even ultras, the primary goal has been to finish. Go the distance, we tell ourselves. Yet, for every finish, there is a new start soon to come. And isn’t that how it is with life itself? As I sit by the window where I write, little Josh—now just over one year old—comes toddling across the living room toward me, smiling. He loses his balance, falls to the floor, looks momentarily baffled, then gets back to his feet and resumes the journey unfazed. I’m reminded of Lao Tzu’s famous saying, A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Outside my window, I can see a mountain where I often run on the Pacific Crest Trail, and below it a verdant valley studded with centuries-old oak trees. Change seems to be very slow in the natural world, except when there’s a forest fire or flood or windstorm, but with the arrival of us humans, things have moved much faster. As a species, we are head-over-heels in love with speed—maybe that’s one of the appeals of sport. There’s excitement in testing our limits and, through the technologies we have devised, extending the powers we were born with. We learn to stand, walk, run—and then fly to the moon! But are we learning to endure? Nearby I see one of those great old oaks, and I wonder, if trees could think, what this noble oak—which probably doesn’t look much different now than when the first Apollo rocket flew into space nearly half a century ago—would be thinking now.

It was just months ago that Josh took his first unassisted step. The toddling quickly followed, and then suddenly, a few days ago, came another one of those moments a grandparent will never forget. Josh’s mom—my daughter Elizabeth—told Josh it was time to go home. She went to pick him up, but in a departure from previous routine, he toddled mischievously out of her reach. She pursued, and he skedaddled away, smiling broadly. Elizabeth teased, Here I come! Josh lurched away from her outstretched hands, laughing aloud—and then, for the first time in his life, ran.

So, there it was: We go from crawling to standing, walking, and running—and in doing so we discover our own powers. We begin exploring our world, not just through our developing strengths but through our ecological relationship with that world. In the beginning, we discover the laws of gravity and momentum and how easy it is to fall—and how satisfying it is, when we do, to get back to our feet and start up again. Later, if not with our moms then perhaps with other kids on the playground, we experience the thrill of the chase—and the reassurance of knowing that the chase is with friends, not enemies or predators. Or if we’re fortunate enough to explore woods or meadows, we may begin to ponder our coexistence with other life: those sheltering oaks that so quietly give us some of the oxygen that sustains us, or those flitting bees that can inflict such pain yet, as pollinators, are so essential to our food supply. Still later, at school or with a local running group, we may be initiated into the mysteries of serious competition, and the compelling mystique of running in a race.

Eventually, if we’re lucky and attentive, we long-distance runners—along with hikers, bicyclists, gardeners, and others who practice the arts of endurance and long-run preparation—may think more consciously than we once did about our biological and spiritual connections to the natural world on which all human life depends. If we run well, we may become more attuned to what it takes not only to endure as self-reliant and strong individuals, but to survive as a robust civilization in a dangerous age.

The Longest Race is the story of one day in a lifetime of discovery, and as I launch this paperback edition, I’m thrilled by the realization that as we runners continue to reflect and share what we’ve learned with those who join or follow us, the adventure—and the discoveries—will never end.

Ed Ayres

Green Valley, CA

May 2013

1

Boonsboro, Dawn

The Start—When Life Begins Again

I don’t remember being born. I doubt that anyone does. But I wonder if the moment you push off from the starting line of a long-distance footrace might be a subliminal replay of that long-forgotten launch of a new life. As the big moment approaches, you’re jammed up behind an unyielding human wall—the too-close backs of other runners’ necks, shoulder blades, elbows, thighs, and calves not quite ready to let you surge forward. You’re about as naked as climate and social convention will allow, and at the same time you may feel your shoulders and hips bumping unavoidably against other shoulders and hips that are not yours but that, in a way, you feel kinship with. Then suddenly you’re breaking free, and the long journey—in the company of others, but very much on your own—has begun.

There’s magic in a moment like this. It’s not only like being reborn each time you race; it’s like having been given the secret to the most astonishing means of propulsion ever to appear on earth. And, arguably, that’s what the human body offers, as many endurance runners are discovering. A horse can’t compare. A bald eagle can’t compare. For that matter, even a 24,500-mile-per-hour Apollo rocket to the moon couldn’t have compared. Now, as I waited at the starting line, it struck me that our long-lost president John F. Kennedy, whose vision had brought that Apollo rocket into being, might be pleased by what we were about to attempt here in this fifty-mile trail race that had borne his name for the nearly four decades since his assassination.

It was late November 2001. The World Trade Center had been destroyed just over two months earlier, and the country had been staggered by the shock. But life goes on. There were a lot of Marines in this race, and no well-trained runner needed to be reminded that when the going gets tough, the tough get going—a credo generally attributed to President Kennedy’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy. Elite Marine distance runners were as tough a breed as you’d find on this planet, and as we waited for the countdown I could see that the guys in red and gold were poised to take off like cannon shots. God help any baby who’s born quite like that.

Along with the seven-man All Marines and Quantico Marines teams, there were contingents from the US Naval Academy and the army’s 82nd Airborne Division, among others. The military presence at this race had been strong since the first running in 1963, maybe because it was JFK’s challenge to the Marines in 1962—see if you can walk fifty miles in a day, like Teddy Roosevelt’s Marines did—that had been the original inspiration. At the time, Kennedy had reason to fear that the physical fitness of the American military was in severe decline. But this year, in the wake of 9/11, the when the going gets tough spirit seemed almost palpable.

A few yards away, I spotted Frank Probst, a guy I’d had a competitive rivalry with for most of the past decade. Frank was fifty-seven and still worked at army headquarters—although what he did there I didn’t know. On that blue-sky September morning nine weeks ago, he had just stepped through an exit on the southwest side of the Pentagon, on his way to another part of the building, when a Boeing 757 roared very low across the adjacent road, coming straight at him. As it clipped off a utility pole, he threw himself to the ground and the plane missed him by about fifteen feet before exploding through the Pentagon’s massive concrete wall. In the following days, as the attack’s prime surviving witness, he’d had to replay his near-death experience in intensive interrogation, but now here he was—ready to run.

My reasons for entering this race were as complex—or simple—as my reasons for wanting to be alive. I’d been a competitive long-distance runner for the past forty-four years, and I was undeniably addicted. I had also just turned sixty, and it can feel disconcerting to a man at that age to find that he no longer has the strength or mojo that he once had, and that has always seemed an essential part of who he is. Part of my motivation was that I wanted to see if I could still run with guys who were in their twenties or thirties—or even forties. I had reasons to think maybe I could.

Possibly the biggest reason I was standing here, though, was about that most irreducible of all human needs—the instinct to survive. An ultramarathon race, or ultra, (any footrace longer than a marathon) is a ritual of survival. In a world beset by ever-more ominous threats—now heightened by those tragic events of two months ago—the need to not just hope and plan intelligently but to actively practice the art of survival had put a tightening grip on me.

Nearly a thousand marathon-hardened runners were entered—the maximum number the government would allow to run on the Appalachian Trail. I was one of the oldest people in the field, but I knew I had two advantages. First, I might well be the most experienced runner in this race, if not in the whole country, and I wanted to find out to what extent experience could trump youth, or at least keep pace with it. Our culture was more and more dominated by youth, and I frankly needed to know if I still counted. In a short-distance run, or sprint, there was little—well, nothing—an old guy could do to compete with a twenty- or twenty-five-year-old. Guys my age, no matter how tough or strong they might be, could never play wide receiver for the Redskins or Steelers, catching passes and sprinting for touchdowns. In a long run, though, it might be a different story. Maybe my experience could give me an edge.

The second advantage I had stemmed from the work I’d done for the past ten years at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC, as an editor, parsing research reports from environmental scientists documenting what appeared to be the declining stability and sustainability of our civilization. Over the years, I’d noticed curious parallels between the ecology of human societies under duress and that of an individual human under great stress. I had begun to wonder, are these parallels more than just coincidence? Earlier in my career, I’d spent seven years editing research reports for several of the pioneers of the environmental movement and had my first inklings that survival wasn’t just an abstract, academic concept of interest to biology students studying Darwin; it was very here and now. Although most of the general public seemed oblivious, the scientists I worked with (and many others I would correspond with in later years) were deeply alarmed. The first scientist I’d done editing for, in the 1970s, was the nuclear physicist Theodore B. (Ted) Taylor, who earlier in his career, at Los Alamos, had designed the largest fission atomic bomb ever exploded on earth—the so-called Super Oralloy bomb, which was detonated over