Бывший сотрудник магазина беговой экипировки вспоминает нелегкий путь от продаж до участия в марафоне

Back in 2010, on the cusp of 30—what Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, would call “my younger and more vulnerable years”—I needed a job and thought my blend of recreational running experience paired with what can only be called my “sunny disposition” might land me a gig in running retail. In my interview, I used “overpronation.” I may have mentioned “medial post.” For some damn reason, I wore a suit. I got the job. Subsequently, I came to deeply loathe runners and the distance running industrial complex. The drudgery of it all set in after several months. I hated the stickers that adorned the backs of minivans and Subaru Outbacks: the 5K was absurd and 26.2 pretentious; the only one I accepted and found hilarious was the 0.0. The best of us sales associates were kind and empathetic. The rest of us, less mature—which was to say nearly every one of us—hated the overzealous customer; we hated their ambition, the way they flaunted the great and not so great distances they ran. We hated mileage porn: those who bragged of 60, 70, 80-mile weeks—and those who drooled over those who ran 60, 70, 80-mile weeks. We hated people who wanted color options. We hated the barefoot runners (minimal running being the fad du jour, “zero drop” entering the running vernacular). We didn’t mind fitting people referred by podiatrists, often elderly, but we hated the subsequent vacuuming up of dead, flaky foot skin. We especially hated people who insisted we tie their shoes for them, though that was kinda sorta part of the deal. Our view from the fit stool afforded us opinions from on high. Most of all, we were tired, and our peeves were legion. Many of us retail workers took pride in our answer when customers asked us how many miles we logged per week, and we said, “We don’t run.” Like a librarian who doesn’t read. You saw the look on their faces: How can we trust a person selling running shoes who doesn’t run? The foundational malaise around the running industrial complex could be that, at its core, the sport was so wonderfully simple to adopt: Merely lace up with something between your bare feet and the ground; don a pair of shorts and an acceptable shirt and head out the door, chafing be damned. Bring on the chafe! That was it, back in the days of jogging’s origin story, popularized by Bill Bowerman, a co-founder of Nike, author of Jogging, and the famous fedora-wearing head coach of the University of Oregon’s track and field team. Running was out of the mainstream. It was for the weirdos who might not have made the football team, the basketball team, any team. Track, and more specifically distance running, was for misfits, but some of those misfits turned out to be fleet of foot. In the mid-1970s, “regular” people began running 5Ks, 10Ks, and the marathon: the ultimate status symbol. It wasn’t enough to do it; it soon became how fast, how many, and the real cake topper: how many Bostons. By the time I entered running retail, the sport was incredibly popular, and with it, the cost of the once simple and affordable sport spiked. The Eugene Marathon (in my current home city) is $160 ($180 if you procrastinate), all to “run in the footsteps of legends,” as it finishes on the track at Hayward Field (admittedly pretty rad), the site where America’s most charismatic distance runner, Steve Prefontaine, made his mark. That fee doesn’t include travel or lodging, or food—and if you start factoring in the cost of decent shoes (multiple pairs) and the price gouging of opportunistic host cities, this once rogueish sport for the weirdos suddenly became a thing only afforded to those of means, and substantial ones at that. As running became more commercialized and the options multiplied, so did what we saw as runners’ increasingly ridiculous demands. And to fight the running industrial complex and what the sport has become, my friend Wayne and I, who hated runners and running even more than I, decided to prove that anyone can do it without all the fuss: we said, fuck it, let’s do it ourselves. I met Wayne at the running shoe store where he, too, fit customers with a DMV-level enthusiasm. This was before I knew the extent of his addictions, before he would betray our friendship at the depths of his most toxic “ism;” back then, I saw someone whom I so desperately admired, almost instantly. He stood as tall as me, had the most ridiculous haircut, a Wyatt Earp mustache, and a borderline weaselly voice. He was heavily muscled in the upper body; his lower body—the bane of his existence for lack of mass—was strong but out of proportion. He was impulsive. He bought a motorcycle. He jumped off high cliffs into pristine waters, sometimes headfirst. He was never without a romantic partner who doted on him and hung on his every word, enabled all his toxicities, and fed his every appetite. Wayne once ran competitively, was, in fact, good, very fast, and fearless—and when he raced, he told me, he saw no point in pacing. It should be full speed or nothing. In races, he would take it to the front and lead until he could no longer lead. He seemed intent on exhausting himself until there was little else remaining. If life were long, he seemed out to shorten it. He brimmed with confidence in ways I could never understand; having little to none myself, seeing someone in possession of so much of it confused me, almost like watching a person dunk a basketball: an impossibility. We connected not through running, though that was where we worked for a time, but in the weight room, his ultimate subversion of running culture, his way of building armor. If running were an exercise in shedding mass, Wayne would find ways to add as much as possible. He thought he could run just as fast by lifting weights and not pound out endless miles that invited any number of overuse injuries we routinely addressed in the store with Superfeet inserts, overstructured shoes with medial posts, Strassburg socks, foam rollers, and gallons of Bodyglide. Runners annoyed him, partially because he was so steeped in them as a competitor, and burning out on the sport invited a different kind of burn in the gym. I was never built like a runner, rather more of a powerlifter, and he saw in me something of an equal, at least in the weight room, and so we bonded over iron and our growing disdain for running and runners. His ultimate middle finger to the sport would be to eschew running altogether and still outkick you, that maybe he could run farther and faster by just rolling out of bed. If deadlifting and squatting hundreds of pounds were our grand subversion to the people we sold shoes to, we wanted to elevate it to another level. By 2012, we had dealt with thousands of customers, and our dread of seeing a car pull into the lot and a customer limping toward the door had only increased. We had grown quite skilled at pushing this feeling deep down, but it would, like clockwork, resurface once the customer drove away with a new pair of Brooks Adrenalines. After ringing out a customer, buying another pair of the Adrenalines, no doubt a trying experience for Wayne, I could see he wanted to share something, an idea borne of his pathological need to act now and think later. It was an intriguing idea, and why not? We would run an unsanctioned marathon without training … well, without running training, no bib required. What Wayne and I had planned—as well as Wayne’s younger brother, Tom, and his friend, Jerry, all lifters, all far burlier than your typical runner—was to run an aimless marathon through the Pine Bush Reserve in Albany, New York. This was a network of tightly braided trails populated by deer ticks and other fantastic beasts. We would start at 4 in the morning before July’s humidity struck, and several hours before the sun rose. There would be no fanfare, no aid stations, nothing but a Timex GPS watch the size of a coaster on my wrist to log our distance, the clothes on our bodies, and the shoes on our feet. If we were to prove a point, it seemed only capable of proving it to ourselves. Even this early in the morning, it was already warm. We strapped on headlamps because we wouldn’t see our nearest star for at least two hours. I started the watch and let Wayne take the lead to set our pace, which we figured would be 12 minutes per mile to start, a real plod, almost harder to go this slow than faster. Wayne lamented that we should be going faster, not for speed records, but he feared the time under tension of step after step, hour after hour, would be too much for our legs to endure. He would be correct, but we couldn’t know that yet. We spoke little in those early hours, still groggy despite our blood pumping. We kept a close eye on the ground for roots and rocks, but the occasional commentary had more to do with the free-spirited nature: that what we were doing was in stark contrast to the running establishment of the time. It felt so free. We were relatively young. I was the oldest at 33. Wayne was 27, and Tom and Jerry 17, about to enter their senior year of high school. My body was starting to feel the impact faster than the others. I could feel my Achilles tendons tightening up; from then on, every stride would feel like they were pierced with an ice pick. About halfway through, we started eating chalky “Stinger Bars,” solid protein bars that were superior to any energy gel, at least I thought so. Plus, the chewing kept our minds from focusing on the growing aches we felt as we crested the hill of 13.1 miles. Pain and all, we kept going and were questioning why we were doing this. We ran the risk of making the point only to ourselves, shouting into the canyon and hearing only our own voices coming back. By then, it was 7 a.m. and getting hot rather quickly, and we started to string out a bit. Wayne and I, for the most part, stuck together, spitting out words here and there about how silly it was for people to commit themselves so fully to a thing that is, on its surface, so meaningless. We didn’t even run! We lift heavy weights! Look at us go! We laughed until we realized how much pain we were in. I was at least carrying a water bottle. The high schoolers, being high schoolers, thought little of hydration. But we also hadn’t seen them for a bit, so, in all honesty, we couldn’t be sure to what extent they were still alive or not. Coming around the corner, we saw Tom, on his hands and knees, picking up sand with his hands and letting it pass through his fingers. He had a maniacal grin on his face like he was in a trance, and perhaps he was. He had found divinity in dirt. My watch said we had run 19 miles. He needed water, and I was the only one with water, and I kinda sorta didn’t want to share it because I wanted to teach him a lesson, even if that lesson meant he’d be hooked up to an IV bag at Albany Med in 30 minutes. I’m not proud that I hesitated, but in the end, I shared, as I felt a fatherly responsibility for the kid, and the water seemed to lift his body and spirits enough so that we could keep going. The teenagers rebounded with maddening speed and found a second, third, maybe even fourth wind. By now, I was the one who could barely keep pace. Besides my Achilles tendons giving me hell, my hip flexors were so tight I couldn’t stay upright. I was peeking at my watch every 10 steps, willing the miles to add up. By now, we had passed 21 miles and had been running for nearly five hours. At our current pace, it would take two more hours to complete this godforsaken idea. Even Wayne had the look of someone who was about through. We shuffled, agonizingly slow, for another mile before calling it quits. Twenty-two miles. We hobbled to our cars and checked our bodies for deer ticks, of which there were a few. Getting Lyme’s disease seemed like a real cruel bit of karma for this endeavor. We pulled out coolers and drank a few beers, beer being a familiar substance to each and every one of us, of legal age or not. We knew we would never speak ill of runners again! Years later, I’d come to quite enjoy running, especially in the spirit of the open trail and for no other reason than hearing my feet hit the dirt and to feel the tender surrender of the leaf litter underfoot. When I went for runs, I would never tell Wayne, because he thought running was so stupid—and I always worried about what he thought of me. His opinion had an outsized influence on my thinking, even my behavior, even when he wasn’t around. It was like I had this bird on my shoulder. He was judgmental, and I didn’t want to incite it, insecure as I was. Come 2016, when I moved across the country, I naturally lost touch with Wayne. He felt personally abandoned, such is my understanding. He visited a couple of times, once with a short-lived fiancée. He asked me to be his best man. I said yes. Then, weeks later, the engagement was called off. Wayne’s drinking had been too much for his partner to deal with. Wayne’s stake in a new personal training business fell apart. In a moment of crisis, he said he was driving cross-country to crash with my wife and me in Eugene, indefinitely. He said he needed to get away from everyone, that we were his only true friends. He was short on money. Could we send him some? We wired him $100 for gas. We asked for an ETA, and he balked, but said he was in Pennsylvania, speeding west, and would need more money. We sent him $100 more. On the next check-in, he said he was in Iowa, and we asked him if it would be a good idea for me to fly to Omaha, Nebraska, so he had company for the remainder of the trip. He said he’d be OK, not to worry, but he needed some more money, so we sent him another $100. By now, we were getting suspicious. When will you be here? We have to make arrangements. Take time from work. We told my wife’s mother, who had planned on visiting, to cancel her plans. Turns out Wayne had never left New York. He was broke from drinking. He had bailed on so many of his clients; his business partners ousted him. We were his last allies, and he fleeced us for a few hundred dollars to sustain whatever binge he was on. To this day, we still haven’t gotten an apology, likely because he’s embarrassed, or maybe not. Maybe he’s getting help. Maybe he isn’t. I’ve grown to think that his time on this planet has long been borrowed, and he would push the patience of that lender until he was in the ultimate default, leaving others to clean up the mess and make sense of the ruin he caused. The more I thought about it, the more I realized everything about him was unsanctioned: his commitment to living fast and free, to being fiercely devoted to an ideal, and to finding the current and swimming like mad against it. I long gave up hope on Wayne, but I can’t help but feel happy for having known him and how, for a time, we stuck it to the road-racing establishment and the marathon industrial complex. When I look back on that quartet in the Pine Bush Reserve, I think: They were tapping into a kind of energy and ethos I desperately want to harness now. What they did is what I’ve been after for years. On those trails on that sweltering summer morning, we didn’t need fancy shirts and finisher medals; we didn’t need congested expos and exorbitant race fees. The road is open to all. The trails are free. The only gates are in our minds. You need no one’s permission to start a race. Cresting ever deeper into middle age, running has become … important to me in a way I would have never predicted. And since I hated it so much in my 30s, I have some tread on my tires in my 40s. It’s become deeply personal, a way of exploring my inner map. The tendency as we age is to lean into convenience, and I grew tired of convenience; I wanted to do hard things and feel a sense of pride in myself, not unlike the glimmer of accomplishment from our unsanctioned “marathon” all those years ago. Reminiscing after all these years, I still love the subversion of it all. I have pinned a bib number to my shirt and spent far too much money on races with the sole purpose of bleeding their participants of disposable income. I understand the cost of closing down roads and hiring police, not to mention all the rations for aid stations and all the other stuff that goes into putting on a bucket-list marathon. But it has all felt a bit much, a bit greedy, and I remember our marathon for what it symbolized more than making it the full 26.2. And for the company. In the greatest race of my life, I found an enduring memory of a once-great friend. Maybe he’s still out there, unchained and unbound, at peace, unbridled as ever. This is a work of nonfiction. Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved. Brendan O’Meara is a journalist and author The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine. He is the host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where he speaks to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. His work has appeared in Trail Runner Magazine, Geezer Magazine, Lit Hub, Writer’s Digest, Short-Reads, Longreads, and Creative Nonfiction Magazine.