Runners on Parade

(February 1999 RW)

Mornings don't start much better than this. I didn't run a step for two Sundays in a row. But what I saw will inspire my running for some time to come, and will fuel my writing for at least this article and the next.

Both Sundays started with marathons -- first at Portland, Oregon, and then at Victoria, British Columbia. Both times my work was finished. I'd given talks and taken runs on the marathon courses (but at only a fraction of their total length) the day before.

Sunday was my day off from running. All I had to do was watch other people go about their business.

The day in Portland started with an early wakeup call, not from an operator downstairs at the Hilton but from the next room as a runner flushed a toilet and then turned on a shower. The hour was 5:45, and who else but a runner would be up this early on a Sunday?

Runners throughout this hotel and others were waking for the dawn start of the marathon. I looked out the window an hour before the seven o'clock racetime and saw runners warming up. Will they ever learn that this distance already has more than enough steps without wasting any beforehand?

At the start I watched 4000-plus marathoners pass, and their parade filled me with unexpected emotion. While standing talking with a stranger, I had to break off the conversation for fear of a choke coming to my voice.

Walking back to the hotel, I passed a church displaying words that fit perfectly what I'd just seen. This wasn't a sign posted just for the day's running of a marathon and its many satellite events. It was an inscription carved into concrete on the side of the building.

It read: "Run with patience the race set before you..."

Running long races is an exercise in patience, or delayed gratification if you prefer. Runners train patiently... wade patiently through bad spells... wait patiently for the big day... pace patiently the early miles to reach a distant reward.

Later that morning my wife Barbara asked, "Did you see anyone you knew at the starting line?"

"Only one I knew by name," I said. After thinking about this response, I amended it: "But you might say I knew all 4000 by what it took them to get here, what it will take through their marathon, and what they will take away from this day as lessons and memories."

This thought was what almost choked me up. More of the same followed by just a week.

On Saturday at the Royal Victoria Marathon I was asked a hundred or so times, "Are you running tomorrow?" No, but with an explanation that came out in a banquet talk.

"Someone has to stand and cheer for you," I said. "There's a lot to be said for watching you run."

Without the tunnel vision required of a runner, I see the full field. I've watched thousands of these parades, and yet the sight never fails to stir emotions.

My early wakeup call on Sunday morning came from runners in nearby rooms at the Grand Pacific Hotel. An hour before the race I looked down at the street beside the Inner Harbour to see runners wasting steps with a warmup an hour before the start.

Standing a block into the marathon, I scanned the eager, happy, concerned faces passing by and could put a name with only two of them. But I knew all 2400 by this longterm project they now were starting to finish. They moved me again.

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