Notes from the Long Run

IN THE 70's, people started running.

Sure, people had been jogging around the block or a couple of laps on the neighborhood high school track for years. But is was about a decade ago that just about everybody--doctors and lawyers and old ladies and everybody started to run.

Marathons and ten kilometer races and all kinds of running events cropped up all over America, and people started to discuss their newfound addictions to the road in the lunchroom, in corporate meetings, and in books about everything from the runners' diet to what kind of socks one ought to wear. Those who hadn't discovered the "Runners High" could only ask why?

James E. Shapiro '68 is one of the myriads who started running in those heady days of the new exercise ethic. But as a true-blue '60s radical and one of those impassioned individualists who refuses to comply with the limits society sets on its fads and trends, Shapiro didn't restrict his jaunts to the conventional distances of ten or fifteen miles or even the marathon. Rather, Shapiro joined up with that elite--some say insane--class that has aptly labeled itself "ultrarunners."

And ultra he was. Logging training runs of 150 miles a week, Shapiro often did 40-mile workouts and entered "ultramarathons" of distances up to 100 miles. This guy, the casual observer might note, was crazy.

But a couple of years ago, when such extensive and grueling distances became standard fare for the wiry New York writer, he flew out to San Francisco, turned around, and, book contract in hand, started running home. When he got back to the City, he collected himself, his diary entries, and his reflections on enduring the road, on the American landscape and on life in general.

WHEN YOU HEAR that a guy has just picked up and gone out West to run across America you've got to wonder why. James Shapiro isn't really sure why he has taken to the road, why he is forcing himself to run 40 or 50 miles every day for weeks and weeks and weeks.

He hazards a few guesses: "Maybe I think I'm running into happiness, running to some spot in the future of my life where I will always be happy," he thinks as he crosses the border out of California. But later Shapiro denies this in one of an endless stream of self-revisions and reconsideration's of what his journey means.

In fact, the why is what he thinks about and what he wines about. His continent-crossing is not competitive; he's not the first to lope across the states and has no ambition of going the fastest. And in the end, neither reader nor writer is any closer to the answer to this question.

But that is really what this book--and Shapiro's run--is all about: Doing something for the hell of it--not for a reason. Like the bear who went over the mountain, he attains, the exhilaration--if you can call it that--of doing something.

And like the famous bear, Shapiro sees. The weary, tan and rugged runner observes America and with a real freshness and unconventionality. He writes not of superhighways and MacDonalds, but of little towns and roadside trash and the heat of the pavement in this place or that.

Shapiro, a Zen Buddhist, recalls that "Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi once said that one should not leave any traces of one's passage." Very much the adherent, Shapiro will no litter on the road on which he runs, but he certainly will muse at length about the remants of the drivers who preceded him.

Plastic toys, combs, pornographic magazines, and shredded tires are all common in the roadside ditches. "Sometimes underpants from both sexes appeared." Shapiro writes, adding commonsensically that the offensive items were "rather frail and gamy items after exposure to desert weather."

But more conventional images of the landscape abound, too, in Shapiro's description of roadside America. By the time he finishes his trek, we have seen quite enough "green rolling land and pure white houses," to make us long for the squalid city at the end of the line. We have been innundated with "the whine and hiss of traffic" and have breathed so much of the thin mountain air that gives "the sky an extra vibrant richness" that we are gasping for oxygen. The book, like the journey, has its grueling stretches.

Despite the spells of tedium the author's Zen-influenced insights into the human psyche, his occasional humor and the magnitude of his feat redeem the book.

For the runner of mountain climber--or anyone who does things merely because they are there--Simpiro's account offers uncommon insight into the question of what motivates the endurance athlete. The sympathetic, curious reader may learn just a bit about how such people think. But to other readers, this 80-day trek that may have been completed by airplane in a few hours may seem nothing but craziness.

We never find out just why James Shapiro is out there, a forlorn pedestrian on the road in the middle of Nebraska. But this lonely, displaced New Yorker has something to say about being alone, and the phenomenon of a man challenging himself, running for running's sake.