The Illegal Marathon
I joined a marathon, and I stole their Gatorade. I felt bad, because we ran past a church, but not too bad, because ran past pretty quickly. It happened like this:
I went for a run because it was the summer I needed to look like I knew it was the summer whenever I was near a beach or a lake or a swimming pool. I went out on my usual route, down past the tennis courts with their faded green lines and limp green nets, past the sidewalks where girls and women would sometimes run with their dogs or their strollers, over to the Coca Cola plant with its two huge water tanks painted to look like tremendous cans of Coke. And it was there, where the road curved up toward the rock quarry, that I found the marathon.
They came around the corner strung out like a thin line of ants, one after the other after the other, like a chain stretched to the breaking point. There were men in orange and black, bald, with numbers taped to their chests; there were women in blue and grey, not bald, numbers taped to their sides. They were running in the street because there were no cars and because they were so tired they no longer cared. They were sweating and panting and grimacing as they worked for each step.
I fell in among them. I ran off of my sidewalk and across the street and I fell into that line with three men ahead of me, spaced out by ten yards each, and another group further back. I took the end of our little cluster so that they wouldn’t see me even though they had to have seen me coming.
A strange thing happened, then: my pace quickened. Their pace, running, was faster than my pace, jogging. So I lengthened my stride and I took deeper breaths and I matched them. I fixed my posture, standing up straighter. I wiped away the sweat as if I’d been running for more than five minutes and I grinned. I grinned widely, my teeth feeling the air, and I ran along with them.
There was a station with a table covered in cups; two little girls and two men where handing out the cups as people went past. We neared it, and I knew I didn’t have a number taped to my chest or my side. “Gatorade?” one of them said, and held out a paper cup, a cup with the name of a restaurant on the side but filled with orange water. “We’re the Gatorade men.”
I took their Gatorade.
I was a deceitful runner.
I was an illegal marathoner.
I ran with them for as long as their path intercepted mine: the whole length of the Coke plant and all the way to the corner where three roads came together in a sloppy bit of planning that was begging for an accident. I ran with them that far, feeling I was a part of them. I even looked back, once, thinking of Steve Prefontaine and the famous photograph where he is looking back and there is no one behind him because he is so far ahead. But there were people behind me, far back, getting Gatorade from the station.
And then our paths split, at that intersection, at that web of roads.
I ran back across the street, out of the line, and turned around. My house was the other way, after all, and there was no way to fake that. I got back on my sidewalk and ran the other direction, alone. I looked down, as I went, so I wouldn’t have to look at the eyes of the other runners, that steady stream of them who were still coming around the corner and running in the street. I looked down so I wouldn’t have to see their inquisitive glances, their sharp, confused, accusing eyes. I looked down at my feet, running slower again, and watched the sidewalk.
And how like life that was, I thought, that all our lies found us out after all.