The End of the Road

Three weeks ago I reached the end of the road -- after thirty-five thousand miles.

I fear that chronic pain -- which suddenly lit up my entire kneecap like an exploding firecracker at the outset of a five-mile run along New York City's Hudson River Parkway and never moderated -- has terminated my running career forever.

Never was there a more improbable athlete.

Imagine if you will twenty-eight years of persistent futility and repressed frustration for a cerebral youngster, gawky adolescent, and insecure twenty-something who, lacking the requisite hand-eye coordination, tried and failed at every conceivable individual or team sport -- kickball, volleyball, softball, baseball, basketball, football, tennis, and golf (and would have suffered the same fate at soccer if it had not been regarded at that time as the inferior pastime of decadent Europeans) -- who preferred hoisting such weighty tomes as Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and William Swinton's Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac to misdirecting a round or oval spheroid of any description, and who gazed wistfully at the bevy of buxom beauties attracted like honeybees to the swift, the graceful, the muscular, and the heroic.

Resigned to my pedantic, introverted personality, I assumed I had renounced strenuous exertion forever upon completing two years of Phys. Ed. at E. C. Glass High School. But, unbeknownst to me at the time of matriculation, the freshman curriculum at Washington and Lee University in 1965 included not only early-morning three-mile "Turkey Trots" through field and forest but also subduing four stubborn 440's on a track in a stressful eight minutes lest one be found lacking sufficient stamina to be awarded a diploma, in spite of four years of academic excellence.

I swore upon graduation that I would never again physically extend myself beyond a fast-paced perambulation of my family furniture stores.

In 1976, after a six-year apprenticeship as boss's son, order-taker (as opposed to salesperson), floorwalker (and furniture mover), and assistant manager, I leapfrogged straight to the top -- and took on the supervision of eight Schewel stores in the Shenandoah Valley. Whereas I had previously been on my feet most of the time, I now found myself behind the wheel of an automobile sometimes five hours a day.

Coincident with this sea change, the running frenzy swamped Lynchburg, with a host of my contemporaries (many of whom were ex-jocks longing to recapture their former glory) jumping on board the wave, joining hordes of crazed runners tracking the murderous hills of the Virginia Ten-Miler, twice passing my Langhorne Road neighborhood on their jaunt from E.C. Glass High School to Riverside Park and back, their perspiring bodies and excruciating grimaces an ominous sign to all who might venture there.

Wary of a sedentary lifestyle, spurred on by an invisible but insistent peer pressure, invigorated by an epiphany -- that here at last was a sport which entailed no more agility than simply placing one foot in front of another, which required no skillful manipulation of extraneous equipment, like balls, bats, clubs, or racquets, and which one could enjoy in the solitary, non-competitive realm of his own consciousness -- I laced up a pair of old tennis shoes and drove to the nearest track.

Twenty-eight at the time, of slight build, never a smoker, and unencumbered by the lingering irritations of youthful sports injuries, I rounded into shape much faster than I ever anticipated -- buying the first of probably one hundred pair of running shoes, graduating from the track to the adjacent sidewalks and roadways, stretching my distance effortlessly to one, two, three, and then an amazing four miles, upon which I declared myself indisputably a stud.

And why not? For the first time in my life, when it came to athletics, I was no longer the last man standing when teams were chosen, a bench-warmer, an outcast, a -- the word was just coming into vogue -- nerd. (Maybe it was time for revenge.)

In fact, while the physical rewards of recreational running are self-evident -- weight control, expanded lung capacity, heart conditioning -- the psychological benefits may be more gratifying: a cognitive sense of well-being, a feeling of accomplishment, mental stress relief, increased self-confidence and self-esteem. There is no doubt that running -- the first sport I ever played with competence -- earned me the respect of friends and acquaintances and shepherded me through any number of melancholy life-cycle events -- divorce, death of a parent, business setbacks.

In the beginning I shoehorned my runs into a busy schedule, usually in the evening, sometimes at lunch -- which produced some strange situations, like the time I was driving home from Culpeper, Virginia, stopped at a high school in Madison, changed clothes in the car, ran five miles on the track, and completed my trip in sweat-soaked attire.

I soon realized that on any given afternoon or evening some activity was likely to interfere with my daily run. Obsessed as I was, I swiftly overcame my aversion to rising early, and adopted morning runs as mandatory for the committed runner.

Of course it's cooler in the morning -- a relief during midsummer scorchers -- and there are fewer cars to dodge. But, above all, a morning runner never has to miss a day, as long as he's out the door sixty minutes sooner than he would have to be otherwise. Just six weeks ago I rose at 2:30 AM to get my run in before catching a 5:30 AM flight -- a sign of dementia, to be sure, yet a not much more ungodly hour than the 3:30 AM I would be waking up at anyway.

It didn't take me long to become as compulsive about running as I was about other pursuits -- like schoolwork (when I was younger), my career at Schewels, and reading books. As noted above, I began running every day, keeping a diary of miles consumed, searching for that perfect shoe (I settled on variations of the Nike Air Structure with a Spenco Orthotic, but now swear by the Brooks Addiction, courtesy of Jeff F. at Riverside Runners), dropping my weight from its post-college 155 lbs. to a svelte (or scrawny) 138, and testing my mettle and a long-dormant competitive spirit in flights of speed and endurance.

Like the contagious appetite for Beanie Babies, suddenly every locality and non-profit was eager to capitalize on the burgeoning popularity of a heretofore obscure avocation, luring swarms of runners to the starting blocks of a proliferation of races. I remember ten-k's in Appomattox, Altavista, Bedford, Timberlake, and Boonsboro -- as I streaked to ever-faster personal bests -- and, of course, the Hill City's signature event, the Virginia Ten-Miler, organized by a group of local addicts including guru and running-store entrepreneur Rudy S. In its heyday, under the sponsorship of First Colony Life and its CEO, one-time collegiate track star but by then gleefully rotund George Stewart, the race offered a $10,000 purse and drew upwards of 5000 entrants.

With my newly-discovered athletic prowess, I set a goal of a blazing sixty-minute Ten-Miler -- pushing myself relentlessly up and down the Langhorne Road hills all through the sweltering summer months and subjecting myself to punishing speed-work on the Linkhorne School track, only to fall a tantalizing two minutes short, clocking a never-to-be-duplicated 61:59 in the early '80's.

No running logbook would be complete without at least one twenty-six miler, and so I began training for the Virginia Beach Shamrock Marathon in 1982, hoping to break three hours which would qualify me for the ultimate amateur race, the Boston Marathon. Alas, six months of rigorous training -- consisting of 55 miles a week (one 20, two 10's, and three 5's), mostly along the Ten-Miler course with an occasional, gloriously diversionary long run out Trents Ferry Road to Holcomb Rock Road and back -- came to naught and bitter disappointment when I suffered a minor but hobbling stress fracture in my leg thirty days before the race.

A glutton for punishment, I ramped up for another try the following year on a miserably cold rainy St. Patrick's Day (or thereabouts) in March. After a tolerable six-mile warm-up, the course branched off into the George Washington National Forest along a dirt path which by the time back-in-the-pack runners like me got there had deteriorated into a thick splattering sludge, turning nimble joggers into lead-footed sloggers. Ten miles further on I emerged from the dense foliage and rounded Fort Story, only to be smacked side-on by a chilling blast rolling in from the Atlantic, which, adding insult to injury and blurred vision and ocular anguish to an already surreal experience, dislodged one of my contac lenses. (I ran in glasses forever after.)

Following expert advice, I had never run past twenty miles in training and true to form hit the wall six miles from home. Like a wind-up doll on a dying battery, I mechanically plodded on, staggering across the finish line in delirious exhaustion, my lungs gasping for oxygen, my calves and thighs clenched in a vise of pain as the grim digital reaper ticked off 3:13, a respectable 7:42 pace but depressingly short of my goal.

Like an Irish binge, the Shamrock left me with a debilitating hangover -- mysterious nagging ailments, a peculiar listlessness, a skittish disenchantment with runnin, even though I still managed to pull myself out of bed every morning and hit the pavement. Having staked my claim to legitimacy whenever devotees gathered to swap tall tales, I decided that I had had enough of marathon, and that if I was to preserve my body for the long run into my sixties and seventies, I needed to ease back on the mileage and investigate some less bone-jarring modes of exercise. A new buzzword, cross-training, chased me to the YMCA, where I tempered two or three days of running with swimming (a mile, slowly), stationary cycling, and light suspended-weight lifting, which satisfied my monomania, toned (rather than strengthened) my upper body, and kept me injury-free, until now.

In 1983 I passed another milestone in my running career when I captured a first-place trophy, a solitary standard-bearer of athletic superiority lost amidst a spate of similar honors earned by my triple-threat stepdaughter for her accomplishments in tennis, softball, and track and field. A few nights ago I spied the graceful, gold-plated (or painted) figure astride a gray-stone pedestal boasting a small engraved medallion: the NHFA All-Industry Convention Berkline Challenge -- a 5-kilometer dash through Washington, D.C.'s Anacostia Park which I licked in a blistering seventeen-plus minutes, besting about twenty women and four men, the fastest of whom I blazed past at the halfway point en route to victory. The moral of this historic footnote: furniture dealers are as deficient in foot-speed as they are in natural intelligence.

Exploring places like Washington, D.C. -- or wherever one's business or pleasure travels take him -- is one of the constant delights of compulsive running. I approach each new venue fraught with anxiety, desperately seeking a sidewalk or bike path or at least four wide lanes of slow-moving traffic and thus avoid the nasty vehicular flow, especially during the predawn hours, lest I be compelled to resort to the bane of the serious runner: the monotonous fixed roll of an on-site treadmill.

Like photographs in a scrapbook, running routes from past ports of call are more clearly etched in my memory than their typical tourist attractions.

My running has propelled me into the depths of Central Park, where I discovered pastoral retreats, topographical challenges, multi and horticultural diversity, and expansive fields of dreams;

Along San Francisco's bustling Fisherman's Wharf, after I had been warned to turn left out of my hotel, lest I stumble into the shadowy Tenderloin District;

Past one stunning antebellum home after another lining the placid Charleston Harbor;

Through the bleak inner city of Savannah, Ga., which sadly diminishes the elegance of the historic downtown it so tightly encircles;

Along Amsterdam's canals and into a crowded park one crisp January morning after an overnight flight from JFK en route to Nairobi;

Through the rustic town of Bagnoregio, in the province of Viterbo, glancing back at the awesome sight of Civita "teetering atop a pinnacle in a vast canyon ruled by wind and erosion," (Rick Steves Europe) and linked to its sister by the footbridge I have just crossed and out into the Italian countryside, attracting the curious gaze of early risers opening their shops for the day;

Three times around a vacant Disney World parking lot not yet open to family fun-seekers, all the while cursing the Orlando Hotel where I was staying for its inhospitable lack of sidewalks and trails and its outrageous $35-a-day fitness center fee;

Past the baleful stares of the shivering homeless, huddled against winter's grip under their ragged cloaks, scattered like boulders along the gray Chicago lakefront;

On another cold morning, into a bone-chilling wind as I fought my way up Philadelphia's Schuylkill River Trail from Rocky's Art Museum and back;

And past the grand Caribbean residences of Michael Jordan and Oprah Winfrey (or so I was told) while circling the Ocean Club Course on Paradise Island.

I have run through residential neighborhoods from the grandiose to the decrepit, through commercial strips of the Nordstrom variety to those fronted by tattoo parlors and tire stores, through the seediest downtown areas to the most luxurious, in places like Playa del Carmen (Mexico), Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Vancouver, New Orleans, San Diego, Montreal, Boston, Key West, Naples, Boca Raton, Dallas, Myrtle Beach, Virginia Beach, West Palm Beach, Newport Beach, Wilmington, N.C., Wilmington, Del., Columbia, S.C., Charlotte, N.C., and Scottsdale, Ar.

Traveling my fifty-one stores, I have staked out the best running courses in several key towns, even if that might require a sixty-mile morning drive to my final destination: from the Travelodge in Winchester, Va., past Shenandoah University through Jim Barnett Park; from the Comfort Inn in Franklin, Va., down an Armory Drive lined with secondary strip centers (one housing a Schewels), a new Wal-Mart, and a new Lowe's, and into an eclectic neighborhood of vintage and contemporary homes; from the Best Western in Emporia, Va., through a 1970's lakefront development and into the quiet countryside, where only a barking dog or an isolated farmhouse disturbs one's solitude; from the Comfort Inn in Washington, N.C., thirty miles from the nearest Schewel store, along a slowly-recovering Main Street one block from the Pamlico River, across a small inlet, and into the hamlet of Little Washington, where I pass by twenty elegant gabled mansions whose front yards stretch a football field across the narrow road to the tree-lined river, a scene so pastoral and enchanting I think how delightful a second home there would be.

In 1989, I learned that one can't run everywhere. I was in Taipei, Taiwan, having been lured there by a salesman friend, ostensibly on a buying trip, although visiting our suppliers' ramshackle cottage factories left me less than enthusiastic about their finished products and merely served as a prelude to a more pleasurable excursion to Hong Kong. Not only did I look like the Ugly American after mustering enough courage to venture forth in nylon shorts, tee-shirt, and canvas shoes, I found the sidewalks so clogged with frantic pedestrians, the streets so choked with miniature automobiles and reckless cyclists, that I was literally stopped in my tracks. I bowed my head, slunk back to my hotel room, and socked away the running garb for the duration of the trip.

The Grove Park Inn is a stately, sprawling gray stone resort nestled in the hills of Western North Carolina, or should I say perched atop one of those hills, since it is the site of the steepest climb I have ever encountered in over thirty years of running. One innocently exits the lobby and jogs smoothly past several service buildings before gliding down a winding, switchback road which, after about a mile, deposits him in a middle-class neighborhood. From there, it's an easy mile-and-a-half to downtown Asheville. The return trip is grueling, slowing even the most seasoned Virginia Ten-Miler to a crawl, as he plods steadily upward and onward, peering vainly around each wicked curve for the elusive crest and welcome relief.

I never feared cold weather until one January morning several years in Woodstock, Vermont, where my wife and I were combining skiing at Killington (for her, that is; I spent those days warmly ensconced in the local library, my nose buried in a book) with a visit to her brother. My impression of Woodstock is that it spends three months of the year with no less than six inches of snow on the ground and the temperature never higher than twenty degrees. Dump trucks and front-end loaders regularly patrol the narrow streets to make passable at least one lane of traffic.

For three straight mornings the thermometer hovered at zero -- and, if that wasn't cold enough, on the way out I was battling a savage fifteen mile-per-hour wind, reducing the effective temperature an equivalent minus-fifteen degrees. Fortunately, I was well-prepared, having donned long underwear, tight leggings, two tee shirts, a double-insulated jacket, wool gloves, and a pullover fleece cap, although the piercing wind seemed to penetrate every covered surface. But I didn't have a face mask. I had never before felt it necessary to wear one -- until that day, when the brutal combination of wind and cold froze my skin like the touch of dry ice. Heading home with the wind at my back was no less daunting, yet in comparison it felt like a sauna.

My fanaticism reached its apogee (or perigee!) three years ago when some early-rising Egyptians may have spotted a half-naked Jewish man running through the streets of Cairo. (Since he was only half-naked, the traditional evidence of his religion was well-concealed.) Creeping surreptitiously out of my room at the historic Mena House Hotel, I left my wife in a sphinx-like slumber, for surely she would have barricaded the door had she suspected my intention of endangering my life -- although in fact the quizzical natives were probably more terrified of me than I was of them. My justification for such rash behavior: I was hell-bent upon preserving my fatuous record of 2000 consecutive days (six years) of running, swimming, or working out. (Alas, the DiMaggio-like streak suffered an ignominious end eighteen months later when I missed an overnight flight to Rome, was rerouted through London's Heathrow, and arrived twelve hours late.)

Since our arrival in Egypt, I had managed to persevere on treadmills at the Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo and on board the mini-liner on which we had cruised the Nile, and in fact my internal compass had zeroed in on the Hotel fitness center until two inoperable treadmills set it off in panicky gyrations. With no other choice, I slunk apprehensively through the gated entrance and set off boldly in search of the Great Pyramids.

Of the few people shuffling about that morning, all had their entire bodies clothed and there was nary a runner in sight -- Muslim, Christian, Jew, or agnostic. Near a bus stop a small crowd coalesced around the sizzle and smoke of an entrepreneur grilling beef or pork and hawking it for breakfast. I breathed a little easier when I noticed through the gloom the outstretched wings of a police or military complex -- where the officers on duty imparted a momentary sense of security. A credible sighting of the Pyramids might have excused my folly, but, even if I had stumbled upon the right road, the darkness obscured them as thankfully it did me for most of those nerve-wracking fifty minutes.

Flaunting my wife's disbelief and distress -- all in the interests of my safety -- I was too guileless to lie, and suppressing my own trepidation, I repeated the adventure the next day.

Equally intimidating but leavened with a dash of humor was a run I took while on a photo safari to Kenya in 1999. My regimen had been curtailed in Nairobi by impassable roadways and in our tented camps by pregnant warnings not to venture outside their confines -- until one free afternoon I decided to attempt a run along the perimeter of our current spacious grounds, staying inside the wire fence, of course.

I could not circle the entire camp; in one direction, I could run only as far as a waste disposal area adjacent to the kitchen facilities; in the other, access was blocked by some permanent structure. On my first semi-circuit, I observed three or four large chimpanzees (or some member of the ape family) outside the camp making a beeline to the same garbage dump that marked my stopping point -- which really didn't trouble me, since an electrified barrier protected me.

I had turned around and was retracing my steps when I heard a heavy-footed thumping sound behind me which seemed to get progressively louder, as if I was being chased down by some relentless stalker. Having seen no other creatures in the vicinity but the chimpanzees and having coincidentally had to sidestep a few treacherous cow pies, I fell prey to a fertile imagination. A chill shot up and down my spine at the thought of being overtaken and attacked by one or more ravenous apes. I picked up my pace, but the thumping only got louder. Heeding one philosopher's sage advice, I refused to look back, anticipating certain embarrassment and perhaps disaster, when a strapping young man sans tee shirt and sporting a deep tan and blond crew cut -- whom I had never seen before -- burst past me with a friendly nod.

Cowering in relief, I hastened to my tent and vowed to put away my running shoes until safely back on American soil.

In answer to the question "Why," the essence of the sport was distilled in my next-to-last ten-mile run six weeks ago. I was attending a meeting on Mackinac Island, a 100-square-mile spit of land in Northern Michigan anchored at the confluence of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. It is accessible only by ferry (or a tiny landing strip) from which one disembarks to make his way by foot, bicycle, horse, or carriage (no automobiles are permitted) through the timeless picturesque village of clapboard fudge shops, art galleries, souvenir stores, and restaurants up to his five-star accommodations at the magnificent Grand Hotel overlooking its storied gardens and the sun-drenched bay.

I was told that an eight-mile road encircled the island along the shoreline, but, too stubborn to ask directions, I had been unable to locate it on my first morning run -- a five-miler which took me through town, up past legendary Fort Mackinac, and across the center of the island to a cemetery, at which point I turned back. The next day, however, determined to run ten, I kept going, discovering the landing strip and a golf course, scaling the island's summit, continuing downhill to an intersection at the water's edge, and reaching my five-mile marker (forty-five minutes) just as the sun began to melt away the darkness.

I faced a minor dilemma. Should I go back the way I had come and end up at the hotel a certain ninety minutes from my start, or turn left or right on the road I had been seeking, which should take me around the island, but at some unknown distance back to town? I chose left, and was justly rewarded as for five miles I enjoyed a breathtaking vista of the sun shimmering in the water and the gentle waves washing up on the rocky beach. Forested hills rose above me on the land side, their virginity spoiled by an isolated home or two intruding upon the pristine setting.

With about a mile to go, I passed a school, rounded a curve, and there they were: the familiar stores and shops I had left behind ninety minutes ago.

Two weeks later I pulled up lame.

If I'm never able to run another mile, I'll not regret any one of the 35,000 in my rear view mirror. I have seen, felt, enjoyed, and learned so much more than I ever would have if I had not taken those first tentative steps on the Linkhorne Middle School track thirty-three years ago.

But hope springs eternal -- in the human breast, in the runner's heart.

I saw Dr. E., Lynchburg's foremost orthopedist, at a party last week and told him my month-old foreboding had come true. When he had asked me then if I was running the Ten-Miler, I had answered, "Yes, unless something breaks, and I have to come see you."

He worked me into his busy schedule, and the news is not all bad. I have chondromalacia patella, Runner's Knee, inflammation under the kneecap, not arthritis as I had feared. The doc has prescribed rest (ouch!), anti-inflammatory medication, the intermittent wearing of a knee sleeve, and physical therapy to strengthen the quadriceps.

"With a little luck," he says, "and your using some common sense, we'll soon have you back on the road again."