50/50 (7 page)
One of the runners succumbed to hypothermia. Two others sought refuge inside an outhouse to escape the elements. Yet as a whole, the group showed incredible grit and mind-over-body determination. Three first-time marathoners crossed the finish line. How they were able to accomplish this remarkable triumph in conditions that tested even the most experienced runners is a question I can’t begin to answer. I was just glad to have witnessed it. Inspiration is a two-way street. On this day, I was the primary beneficiary.
I was also blessed by the magic of Koop. The rain today had further exacerbated my blister, and there was no avoiding the need for treatment now. When I showed him, he used a butterfly needle (a very small-gauged hollow needle typically used in venipuncture) and drained the wound brilliantly. Then, using a thin strip of sterile gauze and some duct tape—yes, that silver adhesive tape widely used by car mechanics and industrial shop workers—he expertly patched my foot with near clinical precision.
And just like that, I never felt a thing from this day forward.
Here Comes the Future
Day 6
September 22, 2006
Des Moines Marathon
Des Moines, Iowa
Elevation: 1,205'
Weather: 68 degrees; partly cloudy
Time: 4:06:33
Net calories burned: 19,122
Number of runners: 35
T
he last tune-up race I ran
before starting The North Face Endurance 50 was the Leadville Trail 100—a classic one-hundred-mile footrace that follows rugged trails up and down the Rocky Mountains in the vicinity of Leadville, Colorado. It almost killed me. My legs had been thrashed from too much racing before I even started the Leadville 100, so I found myself struggling early. As I wheezed my way along the seemingly endless climb to the summit of Hope Pass, elevation 12,500 feet, I locked strides with a fit young woman who introduced herself as Jamie Donaldson. I knew of Jamie and joked that I was surprised to see her “back here with the slowpokes.”
We ran the next sixty miles together, taking turns encouraging each other and, eventually, taking turns puking. There’s a lot of time to talk when you run sixty miles on someone’s shoulder. I told Jamie all about the Endurance 50, which was then just a few weeks from beginning. She told me she taught the sixth grade at a school near Littleton, Colorado.
“Hey, you know what?” she said. “I think it might be really cool if I created a lesson plan around the Endurance 50 for my students. We could learn a little geography, some math—maybe even throw in a bit of science.”
Weird science
, I thought.
Jamie was not the first runner-teacher to whom this idea had occurred. Several teachers had already contacted me about creating a lesson plan around the Endurance 50. But the potential scope of this aspect of our endeavor never crossed my mind until I met Jamie. I guess I hadn’t realized just how many American schoolteachers also happen to be runners. As it turned out, hundreds of classrooms around the country—most (but not all) of them headed by teachers who run—followed the Endurance 50. The calendar of marathons that had been published in
Runner’s World
was pinned up in classrooms across America. In every state we visited, there were passionate educators who saw the learning value in having their students follow the event, and who, along with their pupils, poured tremendous energy, enthusiasm, and creativity into making the most of it.
Some teachers whose schools happened to be located within driving distance of an event made their own arrangements to get their students to the site and give them an opportunity to run a short stretch with me—which added a real-life component to the lesson plan. A runner-teacher in Nevada loaded three classes onto a small fleet of school buses and rode two hours to run the last mile of the Valley of Fire Marathon with me.
Eric Baker, a seventh-grade special education teacher from Indiana, found a clever way to teach his students how to subtract with decimals (a skill they struggled with). Each day he had them subtract 26.2 miles from my fifty-state mileage total. (On Mondays, they subtracted 78.6 miles for Friday’s, Saturday’s, and Sunday’s marathons.) By the time we reached Indiana (marathon number thirty-nine), nearly all of his pupils had mastered it.
Chris Shell, a middle school teacher in Wausau, Wisconsin, also created a math lesson around the Endurance 50 by tracking my cumulative distance, average pace, and other numbers with his classes.
As we passed through Billings in the last few miles of the Montana Marathon, we ran by Central Heights Elementary School. One of the teachers, Kris Cummings, was running the marathon with us that day. His entire fifth-grade class was waiting for us. They were wearing T-shirts with the phrase
ENDURANCE IS . . .
printed on the back. We all ran together to the finish line.
Along the way, Kris had explained to me that the school’s fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classes were following the Endurance 50 as part of a lesson plan he had designed, and that each of the students was required to write his or her interpretation of what endurance is on the back of his or her T-shirt.
At the Finish Festival, I had an opportunity to check out what some of them had come up with. I saw:
ENDURANCE IS . . . NEVER GIVING UP!
ENDURANCE IS . . . ALWAYS TRYING YOUR HARDEST.
And one little boy had written:
ENDURANCE IS . . . SITTING THROUGH CLASS.
At least no one could fault his honesty.
These are but a few examples of the tremendous classroom creativity I witnessed and heard about during the Endurance 50.
Although it wasn’t planned so, the majority of my interactions with students and teachers involved in the Endurance 50 occurred through the Internet and e-mail. It started slowly, but grew and grew until it was very nearly out of control. During the 450-mile drive from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Wichita, Kansas, site of my fifth marathon, I had sat down at the computer to catch up on e-mails and nearly fell off my seat when I found that more than one hundred messages had accumulated in my inbox within the past twenty-four hours, many of them from teachers and students.
It took me nearly six hours to respond to all these messages. A couple of times motion sickness upset my stomach so severely that I had to close my eyes and stop breathing to keep dinner down, but I worked through it and got the job done. I could not bear the thought of letting down the teachers and students across the country who wanted to participate remotely in my adventure. I was nearly cross-eyed by the time I finished, after midnight, but if this was what it took to inspire even one child—one more steward of our nation’s future—to become more active and adventurous, the effort was worthwhile.
A similar scenario had played out the previous night. As soon as the tour bus got rolling toward Des Moines, Iowa, I settled back in front of my computer to check my inbox with curious anticipation. Sure enough, the volume of e-mail messages from teachers, students, and others that I found awaiting my attention was even greater than it had been the day before. The Endurance 50 blog hosted on
RunnersWorld.com
had become the most visited section of their entire Web site. In the messages awaiting my response was one from my own Web master, who manages my personal site. He asked me what the heck was going on—the jump in traffic had blown out our server!
Running and Sleep
Due to commitments that extended beyond running, and the travel factor, I slept little during the Endurance 50—no more than five hours a night, typically. This was not ideal. Research has shown that adequate sleep is needed to repair and refuel muscles between runs. The effects of sleep deprivation are cumulative, so that even a modest amount of sleep deprivation each night can add up to big problems over time. As few as thirty hours of cumulative sleep deprivation have been shown to reduce the cardiovascular performance of runners by more than 10 percent. If you need eight hours of sleep a night and get only seven, your running may be compromised within a month. If you want to run well, do as I say, not as I did during the Endurance 50, and get the sleep you need!
By the time I had answered each of the messages, we had nearly completed our 390-mile drive.
At mile ten of the Des Moines Marathon, the course makes a loop around the famous blue Drake University track. When I arrived there with the large, spirited group of nearly three dozen runners who had signed up to run with me today, we were greeted by the Drake University mascot (a bulldog named Spike) and more than fifty young kids wearing matching yellow T-shirts.
Here comes the future!
I thought, as the kids wildly broke ranks and stampeded around the track with us, cheering and throwing high fives the whole way. The smallest of the children was a towheaded boy, no more than six years old, who seemed intent on demonstrating his fabulous running form and speed to me. I was rightfully impressed and congratulated him on his magnificent stride.
“Mr. Karnazes,” he said, panting, “I run like I mean it!”
We had just completed our lap when a woman standing at the exit from the track handed me one of those bright yellow T-shirts, in my size, that had been signed by all of the children who’d run a quarter mile with me. The words
KIDSTRONG IOWA, INC.
were silk-screened on the front. I learned later that the woman who handed me the shirt was Cindy Elsbernd, founder and president of Kidstrong Iowa.
Cindy is a veteran of multiple marathons who started this organization in response to her concerns about the childhood obesity epidemic. With two young kids of her own, these concerns began right at home. The program’s concept is simple but brilliant. Participating elementary schools invite their students to take part in supervised walking and running sessions during their recess time. For every five miles a child accumulates, he or she is given a little plastic foot that can be attached to shoelaces. Kids being what they are, they get very excited about these plastic feet.
Tips for Parents of Youth Runners
• Lead by example. If you run, your kids probably will. If you tell them to run, they probably won’t.
• Keep it fun by varying runs with different environments (trails, grass, tracks) and workout types (hills, sprints, easy runs, and so on).
• Celebrate every run as an accomplishment, even if it’s just with a sweaty hug. (That probably means more from a parent than all the finisher’s medals in the world.)
• Kids love technology. Consider incorporating it into your child’s running. My kids enjoy using a GPS device that allows us to map runs in real time as we go.
• Kids are naturally competitive. Give them opportunities to compete in fun runs and such. But be sure to teach them that, win or lose, every race is a success when they give their best effort.
Children who amass a whole marathon’s worth of walking or running are rewarded with one of those cool yellow T-shirts and are recognized during morning announcements at school. They also get opportunities to take part in special experiences such as running a victory lap at the Drake Relays—a major collegiate and professional track meet—and running the last mile of the Des Moines Marathon.
Cindy Elsbernd should be cloned. Several dozen of her would make a measurable impact on the health and well-being of America in the future. Who knows? Maybe Cindy
can
be cloned, in a nonliteral way, and perhaps her program can spread to other states like a chain letter.
In any case, she deserves high praise for recognizing running as a great way to fight childhood obesity and for acting on this knowledge. But I also applaud her for acting wisely. You can’t get kids hooked on running just by forcing them to run. You have to allow youngsters to hook themselves on running by providing opportunities and experiences that make it rewarding and enjoyable. A simple moment such as running a lap while hundreds of spectators cheer and clap during an intermission in a big-time track meet has the power to plant a seed in a child that eventually can grow into a lifelong passion for running. Sometimes, as I have often seen, a single enjoyable running experience is enough to ignite the flame.
Parents ask me all the time whether my kids are runners, and whether I want them to be runners. Neither Alexandria nor Nicholas has inherited my love of running quite yet. I have never suggested that either of them take up running, and I never will. I just do my thing and give them opportunities to share in my running, for example, by crossing the occasional finish line with me. Only time will tell what sort of influence these experiences will have on them.
I will be thrilled, of course, if my children become runners, but I’m not so naive as to believe they won’t turn out just fine if they don’t. In fact, the main parenting value I see in my running is that it demonstrates the happiness a person derives from doing what he loves, whatever that may be. Above all, I want my children to follow their hearts and pursue their own individual passions, whether they include running or not.
I recall a funny thing that happened recently, however, when I was walking home from school with Alexandria. She announced to me that she wanted to take up hip-hop dancing this year and join the cross-country team.
Cross-country team!
I thought.
Where the heck did that come from?
Well, as surprised as I was, I guess I know where it came from.
United We Run
Day 7
September 23, 2006
Lincoln Marathon
Lincoln, Nebraska
Elevation: 955'
Weather: 64 degrees; partly cloudy
Time: 4:15:34
Net calories burned: 22,309
Number of runners: 21
L
ike a lot of runners,
I am an introvert by nature. Running naturally appeals to introverts because it’s a solitary activity, unless you go out of your way to make it otherwise, and it has a way of dampening external stimuli, bringing your feelings and thoughts to the fore.