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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
Just after 11:00 a.m., a small group of mostly Africans ran past like the wind, chasing a guy dressed in blue and yellow. The lead guy, a Mexican runner named German Silva who has won the marathon twice, had recently undergone a wart-removal procedure and didn't plan to race, so he agreed to act as the "rabbit." The rabbit runs as fast as he can for the first few miles of the race, and the others chase him, like greyhounds at a dog track. Silva chose to run past his designated jumping-off point, and had everybody scared for a couple of miles, but he eventually gave up and rode the rest of the way on a camera truck.
A couple of minutes later, a second group of Africans and Mexicans ran by. These were the female front-runners. Apparently they didn't get a rabbit because there were no women fast enough to do it. This gives an unfair advantage to the men, the women say, because not only does the rabbit provide psychological motivation but also he creates a windscreen for the lead group (and on this blustery day, the runners needed it).
Then, after a seeming eternity, the other 30,000 runners came pouring off the bridge and onto Fourth Avenue as in a scene from "Braveheart," casting aside their warm-up clothes (some nice stuff, I might add, although none of it fit me) and smiling maniacally. I saw Jon and Ellen pass within a couple of minutes of one another, although that gap would widen. At long last, I dipped into McDonald's for my sausage McMuffin (with egg) and ate it while reading the abortion-clinic and laser-hemorrhoid-surgery ads on the R train as I crawled through Brooklyn in the hopes of catching both of my runners five miles farther down the course, near a falafel place on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn Heights (which, it turned out, despite being in an Arab neighborhood, makes lousy falafel).
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Marathoning, we are told by the NYRRC (and dozens of other fanatical pro-running organizations), is for everyone. But is the human body really intended to run 26.2 miles at a stretch?
"A marathon is definitely not for the average person," says Dr. Stephen Lynn, director of the St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Emergency Department, who has worked in the medical tent at the New York City Marathon finish line for the past 15 years. "I can't imagine how or why people do this."
Many obsessive runners are victims of either exercise addiction or fitness (aka non-purging) bulimia. Exercise addiction is a phenomenon thought to be caused by the release of endorphins (the body's version of opium) during exercise. Richard Benyo, author of "The Exercise Fix" and perhaps the foremost authority on exercise addiction, says you're an addict when "the obsession with your running turns to an arrogance of mind over matter, where you confuse willfulness to overcome your body's physical limitations with being strong-willed." Sounds like most marathoners I've met.
Fitness bulimia, by contrast, is really an eating disorder. As described by Dr. Jerald Block of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, it's the compulsion, in the wake of binge eating, to exercise excessively to burn every calorie ingested. It's analogous to vomiting or laxative abuse, albeit far less visually offensive.
I submit that both sets of people -- the exercise addicts and the fitness bulimics (and of course you can be both) -- are crazy. Yet society indulges them. As a fat guy, if I require medical treatment for obesity-related illness, I'm considered a drain on society's resources -- a lazy slob dragging down the nation's medical economy. But if I injure myself through overuse of my body, I'm heroic. Obesity, the propensity to eat (as nature intended us to do), is seen as a disease. Yet destroying oneself through exercise is considered virtuous, even though the costs of easily preventable orthopedic surgery, physical therapy and chiropractic care (which insurance companies in many states are now required by law to support) are immense (though undocumented by a medical establishment blind to the harms of overexertion). The entire discipline of sports medicine owes its very existence to people's voluntary abuse of their bodies.
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