“To die in the celebration of ancient ways.” Don DeLillo, End Zone
At fifteen, I was transformed by the union of flesh and volition. A girl my own age, a vision in her agony: legs churning, sinewy pistons turning over on their axles, surging past her rivals in the final meters of a race. Her body gave way in spectacular collapse, a Gordian heap of vomit-slicked limbs surrendering to gravity just beyond the finish line. I watched as her coach lifted her from the ground in celebration. That night I wept, hollow of all the pain I did not endure in my own race, guilty of a body so fully intact, unsullied by the extremes of effort. I had not yet learned how to heed that interminable longing for dissolution. It was a sinister thing to uncover at that age, the currency of self-destruction.
Few pursuits so nakedly expose our desire for obliteration like the relentless extremity of long-distance running. This savage truth is embedded in the mythology of the marathon itself, that the inevitable result of such physical devotion is death. Pheidippides, the Athenian herald, sprinted from Marathon to Athens to proclaim triumph over Persia, ultimately succumbing in an act of magnificent, fatal excess. His name, derived from that of his father Pheidippos, is rooted in the Greek pheidos: “to spare.” There is an irony in Pheidippides’s final act of service, in that he leaves nothing to spare. He expends himself entirely.
This mythic run birthed a ritual of voluntary suffering, where modern runners court their own impermanence, their own magnificent fragility. The Olympic revival of this distance was a perverse resurrection, a necromantic rite exhumed and clothed in the respectable garb of sport. Other athletic disciplines are finite in challenge, man against man, strategies and formations. Running is a sport whose sole opponents are the self and time, whose laws are dictated purely by the limits of the body; in defiance of those limits, in a war against those limits, there exists the arcane promise of a singular satiable end. This is the paradox. In the rebellion against inertia lies the only identifiable peace.
The 20th century witnessed an obscene escalation of the form, each new iteration a more violent assault on the boundaries of human endurance, a more elaborate ritual of self-immolation. No longer sated by 26.2 miles, the advent of the ultramarathon in the 1970s demanded undefined destruction over 50, 100, even 150 miles of unforgiving terrain. Environmental extremes became the new modes of sacrifice. Beginning in 1986, the Marathon des Sables invites runners to traverse the merciless Sahara. Bodies wither beneath the unyielding sun. At 120°F, rivulets of sweat form and evaporate immediately. At the opposite end of the thermal spectrum, the Antarctic Ice Marathon elicits submission to sub-zero temperatures, runners’ icy breath a collective blasphemy against a lifeless white expanse.
Still, the marathon in its pure form contains a somatic reckoning, a percussive assault on the architecture of the body. Its plaintive cries – lungs no longer content in their cage of bone, muscles flayed by lactic acid, ammonia blooming in the nostrils – born of a pain that predates language.
The skeptical observer might dismiss this framing as too extreme for an activity born of primal necessity. After all, the first biped ran not for glory, but for survival. There are those who run for health, for endorphins, for the perennially elusive Runner’s High. But within any subset, perversity will form at the fringes. In these distances, they find a wellness-sanctioned sublimation for the inclination toward oblivion. They are mystics of pain, seeking moments of sovereignty. Decimation is the last remaining sacrament, the one thing untouched by a culture of self-congratulation, a secular penitence performed on altars of asphalt.
In his own apostolic pursuit of self-annihilation, Mishima understood this intimately:
Ceaseless motion, ceaseless violent deaths, ceaseless escape from cold objectivity – by now, I could no longer live without such mysteries. And – needless to say – within each mystery there lay a small imitation of death.
It is in this carnal deity, one which demands sacrifice but offers no salvation, that a runner’s compulsion begins to echo a cycle of death and rebirth. The violent pursuit beyond limitation and the return to that extremity when the expenditure has ended. Obsession, for the runner, follows the same cycle as that of standard addictions: tolerance, continuance, withdrawal. Tolerance builds, demanding ever greater exertion. Continuance becomes a biological imperative, the body’s cells rewritten to crave the punishing rhythm of marathon training. And when forced to rest, these acolytes suffer.
Researchers examining compulsive behavior in the Estonian running community documented the revolts against imposed idleness. These runners, bereft of their chosen torment, exhibited the same physiological symptoms associated with discontinuation or a decrease in habitual drug users. At the risk of overuse, they persist, and in their persistence, triumph and injury become indistinguishable. This is the language of pain, and it is spoken almost entirely in subjectives.
Each defiant stride is an algophilic act of erasure, and now the body truly begins its descent. But it is in this rhythmic dissolution that the runner unlocks a new, Thanotic satisfaction in the war against one’s previous limitations. Beyond a certain threshold, pain eliminates time. It is the opposite of death, the insistence of a pure present, siphoning all sense of personal past and future, grounding in the violent now. Memory and prophecy are equally irretrievable. It is here and only here that one can clearly glimpse the horizon of continuity, a terrific rupture in the illusion of permanence.
But pain, like ecstasy, is righteous in its evanescence. Eventually the runner is wrenched back into the world of the profane, left with nothing but bones singing hymns of exhaustion. And deeper still is the appetite, that rabid gnawing that transcendence lies ever further, ever more devastatingly, ahead. This is the lurid premise underpinning the lives of those who cannot help but run: there is never a true finish line, no final victory. There is only endless becoming: the next race, the next torment—the shifting, eternal now, always more severe, ever seasoned in its cruelty.
— Lari Ander is a native Midwesterner living, and running, in New York. She can be found tweeting at @martiniposting.