RIP Alain Mimoun who has died aged 91.

French-Algerian 5 times Olympic silver medallist at 5 & 10k, Olympic champion in the marathon, 2.34 marathon runner at age 51, and long-time second fiddle to Zatopek.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2013/jun/28/alain-mimoun?INTCMP=SRCH

Review of Leni Riefenstahl, 'OLympia: Festival of Nations' (1936)

Anyone who reads this blog should be familiar with the question: do we run for inner peace or do we run for glory? I’ve been thinking more about it having watched Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which is often mentioned as a glorification of athletic success. Is this view right?

I’m going to steer away from the obsession with Nazism and WWII which fills much of the British public conversation. Yes, the film shows Hitler, Mussolini, and Goebbels; and yes there is some straight-arm saluting, but beyond that there is little that you wouldn’t find at any other Olympic games. Little hint of the horrors which were to be discovered later.

The film shows a variety of track and field events which are recognizably similar to those in today’s athletics, but performed or described differently. Runners have no starting blocks but dig holes in the cinder track with trowels; high jumpers scissor-kick their way over a bar at 6 foot 5 inches before landing neatly on their feet. Athletes compete in the ‘javelin-throwing’, the ‘hop, step, and jump’ (triple jump), and seek to get a ‘world’s record’.

Although obviously very fit and posting good times, the athletes are not the lycra-clad aliens they are today. Some in field events wear woolly jumpers and slacks. And the phlegmatic English commentator discusses them without the layered encrustations of sporting metaphor – a runner is simply described as ‘putting on a terrific burst of speed’, and of a corpulent shot-putter, it is said that the shot ‘looks like a pea in his hand’.

Riefenstahl’s use of the camera is famous (as anyone who has seen ‘Triumph of the Will’ can remember). We see the athletes perform in slow motion, or speeded up. Dramatic cello- or trumpet-heavy music builds the atmosphere, and crowd shots are carefully inserted. The action in each event is not only as interesting to watch as in today’s coverage, it’s more so: rather than retaining the same camera angle for each pole-vaulter (say), each successive jump is shown from a different angle. This means that your ability to compare the height of the jump is impaired (but who cares, as the announcer reads it out); instead you can appreciate in 3D the sinews and the coordination of the human body, a marble statue hotly breathing.

That’s where people object, of course: when a particular type of young – and often white – body is presented as being better than others. In terms of all Riefenstahl intended her film to be used for, they are right. But I propose throwing a spanner into the thought process that says that because these bodies are *good* at what they do, they are *better* or more worthy than others in general terms. Athletes’ beautiful bodies do not tell us about nationality or race or ideology. Instead they tell us about lives spent ‘obeying in one direction’ (Nietzsche) and thus sapping the ability to obey anything or anyone else. After all, this is what our word for what they do means, with its roots in notions of emptying, sending- or giving-away. That word is sport.

Review of Robin Harvie, 'Why We Run: a Story of Obsession' (2011)

This is by far the most engaging book about running I’ve come across: it is both weird and wonderful, and I encourage you to read it. To get a sense of its intellectual ambition, we need wait no longer than the epigraph, a quotation from Apsley Cherry-Garrard (a survivor of Captain Scott’s antarctic mission) which takes us away from the brainless positivity that usually surrounds running: ‘If you are a brave man you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have the need to prove their bravery’.

The book recounts the author’s monomaniacal relationship with running, which began after a hazy all-night party with him seeing the London marathon on TV, and vowing that next year he would be on the starting line. He eventually becomes dissatisfied with what a devalued currency the marathon has become, and turns to ultra-marathons, ultimately taking on the Spartathlon, a 152km race from Athens to Sparta.  

But Harvie’s kaleidoscopic vision takes in much, much more – from discovery of his family roots to death and illness of those close to him, and beyond. Most of the major figures in the history of running are discussed, from Zatopek to Bannister (‘his legs moved as easily as milk pouring from a jug’) and from the Greek Olympic games to Bill Bowerman’s founding of Nike in the 1960s. A lot, perhaps too much, therefore goes on in this busy book. But this does mean that each reader is treated to tidbits of information she didn’t previously know. Some of mine were that the Greek ‘gymenazesthai’ (whence gymnasium) means to exercise naked, that running was the only sport in the first 13 Olympic games, and that a monastery of Japanese monks dedicate their existence to enlightenment through running. 

The author openly states that he is not built like a runner, and one of the strongest aspects of the book is the glee with which metaphor is mixed with gruesome description in describing what happens to the body during and after running: ‘My feet wept for days. Blisters, forming and popping under the nails, turned the skin a mottled black as the damage done to the tissues slowly revealed itself like some peculiar deep-sea creature’.

This description is of Harvie’s feet following the Spartathlon – for the benefit of non runners, the experience is not normal –, and reveals one of the unresolved debates going on beneath the book’s surface, which can be put as follows. Is this a book about training for and running a single, monstrous event (as its narrative and structure suggest)? Or is it about running in general (suggested by its title, Why We Run), about the way the impulse to run comes back again and again, no matter whether we are training for a race or not, thus creating patterns in our lives full of sound of fury but signifying nothing?

This question receives an ambiguous answer with the crossed-out title of the final chapter on whether he will re-run the Spartathlon: ‘Never Again’.  And although I’ll leave you to discover how the race pans out for the author, I can give a sense of the conflicted state in which it leaves him. On the one hand, he comes close to describing running as a parasite inhabting him: ‘There was a better person, an idealised version of the man I wanted to be, who had never returned’. The language here is that of a Vietnam veteran. On the other hand, when describing a sensation of cosmic harmony, he gives it both barrels: ‘my will had been exposed to a divine knowledge’. 

The book that ends by being pulled in these two directions is both interesting and ferociously honest; one of those I’m looking forward – without ambiguity or crossing out – to reading again.   

Review of Jean Echenoz, Running: a Novel (2008, trans. 2009)

There are three and a half reasons why we should be interested in the subject of this book, the Czech runner known as ‘the locomotive’, Emil Zatopek.

First, he was a 4-time Olympic champion and multiple world-record holder. Second, he played a bit part in post-war Czech politics, symbolizing the working-man’s graft before speaking out against the Soviet invasion in 1968 and being sent to work in a uranium mine. The half-reason is that he seems to have been a nice chap, giving his 10,000m Olympic medal away to a runner he felt better deserved it.

This book by Jean Echenoz – a Prix Goncourt winner and household name in France – intertwines these narratives, but never in more than a box-ticking way. It even admits as much in various nervous asides, introducing the runner’s decline thusly : ‘I don’t know about you but for me, all these exploits, victories, trophies are beginning to wear a bit thin. Which is no bad thing, because as it happens Emile is shortly going to start losing races’ (I’m translating here and below).

Still, all is not lost. Because there is one more reason – *the* reason – to write about Zatopek, and that is his running style. In making a list of most arresting and peculiar topics that have been written about, you could include the memory and time (Proust) or the nature of divine love (Dante). You could also include Emil Zatopek’s running style. Before Echenoz, it had been described as ‘a man trying to wrestle an octopus whilst travelling on a conveyor belt’.

The simplest is to read part of the book’s description of this style: ‘It looks like he is living on borrowed time, burrowing away, like gravedigger in a trance. Far from emulating the greats and their elegance, Emile moves forward heavily, torturedly, jerkly, in fits and starts. The violence of his efforts is clear, it can be read on his strained, frozen, grimacing face, always twisted as it is by horrific spasms. His features are altered, as if torn asunder by awful suffering, his tongue lolls out now and then, and one suspects he may have a scorpion in each shoe. When running he seems absent from himself, he seems to be in some terrifying other realm, he is so concentrated that he disappears, and yet he is more present than anyone. Hunkered down between his shoulders, on his neck which always cranes to the same side, his head bobs endlessly, shudders and tosses from left to right’.

Wacky Races

(Haven’t posted in a while due moving back from Paris and generally, life).

There are two ways of looking at the foot racing calendar. The first is as a succession of essentially similar races, from 10ks to marathons, none involving much more than putting one foot in front of the other, as quickly as you can. But the second way is to look out for the pleasing number of events where the inner weirdness of running sprouts into external form. What follows is a list of some Wacky Races that I’ve come across, plus one that I’ve run in myself.

* An annual race in Prescott, Arizona pits humans against horses over 50 miles. Apparently humans have begun to win over the last ten years, proof that running is not just about the natural build of the human body.

* Run for your lives also pits human competitors against… zombies. Unlike the horses, their aim is not to win the race, but merely to eat the human participants. Unsurprising really, given zombies’ famous fixation on their main activity (you’ll recall their marching cry: what do we want? Bra-a-a-aains. When do we want it? Bra-a-a-ains). 

* The Barkley marathon takes the prize for sheer difficulty and also gets a special award for cultishness: read this article.

* Finally, there’s Tough Guy (scroll down for video), which I ran on its habitual date of 30 (yes, thirty) February a few years ago. The first half is just a cross-country course, with some silly course planning – it zigzags up and down the same hill ten times – as a warning of what is to come. The second half is then an assault course with some real teeth to it. There’s all the normal parts – rope courses, six-foot walls to climb, barbed wire to wriggle under. But there’s so much more. The burning haybales that we had to run over, or the forest of dangling live electric wires. Then trenches full of watery mud, or having to swim under an enclosed section of English river (this was February, whether the 30^th or not). I’m pleased to say I came something like 30^th out of 3,000. This meant that the ex-sergeant majors who were employed to bawl at stragglers silently watched me slither up out of the river with a strange satisfied glint in their eyes. I wonder how we all got to be like this. 

Chris McDougall, ‘Born to Run’ (2009)

You would have to be stonyhearted not to want to go along with McDougall’s declarations of love for running as a primal art, and for its practitioners the Tarahumara, a Mexican tribe. You would have to be seriously unexcitable not to be stimulated by his writing and the forceful ultramarathon-runners its depicts. And yet – as I see it – if you really bought the book’s argument, you would have to quit running immediately.
*
Said argument is that running allowed modern humans to develop from a homo erectus that was smaller, weaker, less intelligent than its neanderthal cousins. It enabled these proto-humans to run animals to exhaustion and death, to feast on their flesh and grow in prosperity. In turn the body learnt to reward endurance running, explaining why we still experience Runner’s High.
*
McDougall tells us that this type of hunting was possible because whilst animals can often run faster than humans (rabbits at up to 45 miles per hour!), the fact that they can only cool down by panting means that after a short distance they must stop to recover. Humans, on the other hand, have millions of pores allowing prolonged, on-the-run cooling. This and other thoughts on anatomy means the book changes how you look at people in the street. I sweat therefore I am human.
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A side-branch of such thoughts are that the human foot is already designed for running, and that heavily-cushioned running shoes actually cause injury by flattening the natural suspension-bridge engineering of the foot arch, and altering our gait (creating heel-strike). The tantalizing prospect of barefoot running means that McDougall’s book is often discussed amongst runners, and its success is doubtless being closely followed by shoe manufacturers who over the last decade have been producing lightweight racing shoes.
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So these are the arguments that jostle for space in the book alongside reflections on technique and nutrition (a marathon runner should eat like a poor person – meaning not McDo’s but lots of carbs and little protein), a great vignette about a Harvard professor of anthropology hosting a stone-age evening on the college lawn, where undergraduates butcher a goat with sharpened flints before barbequeing it, and plenty of good writing on trail running, for instance the Badwater ultramarathon in Death Valley, where temperatures can reach 93 degrees C., and where ‘six out of twenty runners reported hallucinations that year, including one who saw rotting corpses along the road and “mutant mice monsters” crawling over the asphalt. One pacer got a little freaked out after she saw her runner stare into space for a while and then tell the empty air, “I know you’re not real”.
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‘Born to Run’’s narrative is woven around a central character study of Micah True, aka Caballo Blanco, aka Michael Randall Hickman, who died in March 2012 after the book had made him famous. The author’s admiration for Caballo is clear, and there’s no reason to argue with it. His advice for ultra running is to only increase speed in terms of moving from ‘easy’ to ‘light’ to ‘smooth’. I can see the attractions of this, but at the same time it’s tempting to be cynical about the author’s other descriptions of ultramarathoners smiling their way, trance-like, round the course. I’m more attracted by the description of Czech runner Emil Zapotek, 4-time Olympic champion: ‘he looks like a man wrestling with an octopus on a conveyer belt’.
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Like Caballo before him, McDougall falls in love with his idea of the Tarahumara tribe and their embodiment of a Western evolutionary theory of ‘running man’. The problem for me is that this theory just makes too much sense: I worry about the assumption that there must be a natural or evolutionary advantage to running, and we just have to find it. That running isn’t just a side-effect of our screwed-up modern lives. In some ways this theory is a parallel to how fundraising and the marathon go completely hand in hand: whilst fundraising of course does heaps of good, it’s also slightly a shame to naturalize the weirdness of running by only understanding it in terms of running *for*.
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So ‘running man’ theory boils down to *running because*, and marathon fundraising boils down to *running for*. For me, both of these ignore the vast majority of humankind that doesn’t run, whose presence as you tramp past them just underlines how derisory, embarrassing, ultimately meat-headed it is to run. And yet that’s its majesty: that people run, not ‘because’ or ‘for’, but for the sheer bloody hell of it.

Faces at the Finish (of the NYC marathon)

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/07/sports/20101107-nyc-marathon-faces.html