There is a point along the road, and as most distance runners will tell you - it is approximately 16 and a half miles down the road where all these nice sounding analogies fall apart. "Mile 16". You read about it in accounts of any marathon. - Odd, perhaps if you don't know. No one talks about mile 12 (lower-case 'm' on purpose here). Or mile 15 even. But "Mile 16". It is utterred in a hallowed whisper that will receive knowing nods from the initiated...
At Mile 16 - for me about 2 hours and 9 minutes into my last run, it was clear that I was going to have to re-think... Actually that's a bit of a lie. At that moment all that was clear was that my legs had never hurt that much and that there was nothing I could do about it.
Actually. My legs hurt worse the first time I ever hit Mile 16 in a training run - in the rain in Vancouver with my good buddy Clint back in 2003. He, of course, had been through "Mile 16" (lowered tone of voice) before - but for me it was a whole new headlong experiment in self-discovery through pain - with, of course, no idea that it would get easier after a mile or two... This, of course, wasa only exacerbated by the fact that you really don't want to tell your buddy that you're "totally done in" (or insert your own appropriately colourful colloquialism) and that he should leave you to die slowly, whimpering pitifully in the gutter...
But perhaps I say too much.
There is no "Mile 16", no "wall" in writing. Sure, there are deadlines, there are workloads, there are mountains of essays to grade, there are ideas that, try as you might, just wont flow, but these pale next to that place down the road where there is no pretence, no way to hide a lack of training behind a nicely crafted sentence. On the road there is a moment of truth and pain - it may ease after a mile or two, but at that moment it seems unending. Here is where you start to hallucinate, to lose track of time, to talk to yourself, and to forget to eat... (which when you are at Mile 16, with 10.2 to go is fatal).
It's at Mile 16 that you really understand what Roy, the replicant in Bladerunner was really talking about in his own last scene:
"I have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the
shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams ... glitter in the dark near Tanhauser
Gate. All those ... moments will be lost ... in time, like tears ... in rain.
Time ... to die.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQcUS4chhc4&feature=related
The question remains, of course, why on earth would we do it to ourselves - why set out to run 26.2 miles, or more? What is our disatisfaction with the sedentiary life?
Again, I have no better answer than Roy, again, whose own quest for someting extraordinary answers for our own:
"I want more life, fucker."
