Calderwood in China: Day 10 — Men's Marathon

by Stuart Calderwood

I've been a marathoner long enough to have run one in just about every kind of weather—freezing cold, big rainstorms, desert-like dryness, falling snow, and the occasional beautifully crisp, cool day—and, like just about everyone else with marathon experience, I've learned that the worst conditions of all are the unfortunately common combination of high heat, high humidity, and direct sun. Climate change seems to be blessing us with more such marathons every year—even the traditionally temperate Chicago and Grandma's marathons were run in awful heat and humidity in 2007—but the Olympic Marathon, perversely, has almost always been run in this worst of all possible weathers. It's part of the Summer Games, of course, which are held in countries where the weather will be nice for things like soccer, rowing, and beach volleyball—and sprinting, for that matter. And the gymnasts and swimmers and fencers don't care much either way.

I've been on the marathon courses at seven Olympics now, running around from one place to another to watch the race, and on five of those days I've had the same thought: "Man, I'm glad I'm not running a marathon in this weather." It rained in Montreal and times were fast, and in Sydney the conditions were miraculously excellent. Everywhere else it's been the kind of day when marathoners wake up and start revising their pacing charts and wondering whether wearing a white hat makes you cooler or hotter, and when the commentators start talking about how it's "a nice day for the spectators." (In Athens four years ago, I actually ran the whole course—but I started before dawn to avoid most of the heat and sun. It was still a bad day to run a marathon.)

For this reason, Olympic marathons often produce unexpected winners. Juan Carlos Zabala, Sohn Kee-chung, Delfo Cabrera, Josiah Thugwane, and Hwang Young-cho were far from favorites before their Olympic marathons, which they all won. Even Abebe Bikila, legendary now, was unknown before his miraculous-seeming barefoot victory in Rome, where the weather was so hellish that the marathon was run at night. But all these men came from countries with dependably hot, humid weather, and such acclimatization more than compensated for the superior racing experience and faster personal records of the favorites they defeated.

That's never seemed quite fair to me. I'm not so much a fan of the underdog as I am of the athlete who has proved to be the best over time, and I've hated the sight of people like Alberto Salazar, Toshihiko Seko, Rob de Castella, and Paul Tergat reduced to survival mode, too proud to drop out when the medalists have long since disappeared in the shimmering heat haze, finishing Olympic marathons in times 10 minutes over their usual world-leading bests. (I wouldn't want to see Usain Bolt have to run the Olympic 100 meters on a 40-degree day, either.) The feared air pollution hasn't been a factor in Beijing, but in my two weeks here, all of my runs—except one right after a rainstorm—have been, well, great for the spectators. I've been worrying for people like Martin Lel, Samuel Wanjiru, Abderrahim Goumri, and Ryan Hall, all of whom have excelled in good conditions in the past year and been touted as favorites for Beijing. I've been lucky enough, because of working at NYRR and covering the world-class races that we've put on, to have met and interviewed Lel, Goumri, and Hall, all of them friendly, earnest, and humble, and I wanted to see them have the chance to show the world how fast they are.

The men's marathon was run earlier today, and it was not a good day for the spectators. It was too hot.

I was sitting in the stands in the Bird's Nest, where the race would finish, having decided that seeing the runners out on the course, as I'd done during the women's race a week ago, wasn't worth the media blackout that I'd then have to go through while taking a bus or cab for the hour-long trip to the stadium. Instead, I went early and watched the whole race on the big video screens, able to hear commentary by Track & Field News editor Garry Hill, whose nonpareil knowledge of the sport and rich baritone voice have made him an ideal announcer at many World Championships and Olympics. As I sat there sweating through my shirt, joining in the long Chinese tradition of fanning oneself by hand, I felt the worst dread in my 36-year Olympic spectating career about the fate of the runners. The heat was already in the mid-80s, the sunlight was of a brightness that made you wince and squint if you had to look anywhere but straight down, and the 95 runners had yet to reach the 5K mark.

Then came the first race news: Wanjiru had eschewed usual championship-marathon protocol and made an early break. Olympic packs usually stay very large until past halfway, when the serious moves start to be made; early breakaways are almost always doomed. But Wanjiru is the world half-marathon record-holder and ran 2:05:24 in London last year, and no one could take him less than seriously. A group of 11 men had gone with him. The 5K split was shocking: 14:52—near world-record pace. But Haile Gebrselassie had run the record in near-perfect conditions in Berlin. No, not here, not in 85 degrees, I thought. They can't do that.

They ran the next 5K in 14:33.

At 10K, nine men were still together. They came by at 29:25. This pace, if continued, would produce a marathon in 2:04:08—18 seconds under Gebrselassie's record of 2:04:26. Everyone there was a serious contender: Lel, Goumri, two-time world champion Jarouad Gharib, defending world champion Luke Kibet, two Ethiopians, two Eritreans…surely they couldn't all be this suicidal. Hall and his American teammates Dathan Ritzenhein and Brian Sell were out of the picture, and I was glad of that. They could move up later; they weren't being sucked in past the point of no return.

Soon after that, several men fell away. Five remained: Wanjiru, Lel, Gharib, Deriba Merga of Ethiopia, and Yonas Kifle of Eritrea. They ran another 10K in 29:45. No one dropped.

My wife and I were using the snack-bar as an iced-tea aid station and wearing broad-brimmed hats to create some artificial shelter. I truly felt like watching the race was an endurance event in itself. What on earth must it be like to be out there, running that hard? There were no clouds, the course was on wide, unshaded main streets, and the temperature was climbing. Then Wanjiru did the most amazing thing yet. He ran the 11th mile in 4:30.

No one dropped.

Wanjiru began to run in a pattern: He'd push to the mid-4:40s-per-mile range, then back off to 5:00 pace. The group of five passed the halfway point in 1:02:37—and Wanjiru threw in another surge. This had a very surprising effect, one that no runner has been able to produce in two years of major marathoning: It dropped Martin Lel. Kifle, too, was unable to hang on. But Gharib and Merga grimly stayed with the leader. Merga seemed the stronger; Gharib let a gap of a few yards open ahead of him several times, but each time he'd work his way back to Wanjiru and Merga.

Behind them, the weather was destroying great runners. Hendrick Ramaala, a 2:07 man and a frequent podium finisher in major marathons, would trail in at 2:22. Kibet, who'd won the World Championships marathon in Osaka in similar weather, dropped out. So did Mubarak Shami, who'd been second in Osaka, and 2006 ING New York City Marathon winner Marilson Gomes dos Santos. Defending Olympic champion Stefano Baldini, who has also run 2:07, would tough out a 2:13:25 for 12th place and announce his retirement. Meanwhile, Ritzenhein and Hall were benefiting from their patience and had moved through the deteriorating field to 10th and 13th places.

With just over three miles remaining, Merga and Gharib still clung to Wanjiru, who had slowed to 5:00 pace again. But his next acceleration finally proved unmatchable. Merga fell back immediately, but the tenacious Gharib, who had looked to be in the most trouble among the leaders for the entire race, kept fighting even as precious yards were added slowly but inexorably to the gap ahead of him.

Now Wanjiru was on his own—but it's incredibly difficult to maintain a pace in the final stage of any marathon. What must it be like for him to maintain such an effort now, I thought, in this heat, with all the cards on the table and a proven big-race winner only steps behind, waiting for him to crack?

There's a moment, for people watching a race on a video screen from inside the Olympic stadium, that I can only call "magical." While you're concentrating on the screen, you can become temporarily unaware of where you are. While your attention is held completely by the drama of the race, the moment comes: A cameraman in the lead vehicle gives you the view of what the leader is seeing, and what he is seeing is the Olympic stadium. You experience a brief, thrilling shock: He's out there now. He's coming here. And you know, too, that the lead runner is thinking of what every runner has at some point imagined, if only as a fantasy: the Olympic stadium crowd's huge, wordless tribute that awaits him when he emerges from the tunnel onto the track. And you're there to be part of that tribute.

When Wanjiru had about two kilometers left to run, his face showed strain for the first time, and I had one last fear that he would falter. There was a long, cruel stretch alongside the stadium at the end of the race that kept the runners from reaching their goal for longer than they first might have thought. Maybe Wanjiru had studied the course carefully; in any case, he didn't falter. In fact, when he finally did come out of the tunnel and we shouted ourselves hoarse for him, he actually sprinted the last lap. I've always hoped to see someone do that in an Olympic marathon: run hard all the way, even when the win is assured. Wanjiru did it on the right day: His incredible time of 2:06:32 broke Carlos Lopes' 24-year-old Olympic record (set on another horribly hot day, in Los Angeles) by two minutes and 49 seconds. Hierarchies of this kind are always subjective, but half an hour after the race, people were already calling Wanjiru's race the greatest marathon of all time.

Gharib never faltered, either; he just couldn't speed up any more. He, too, obliterated the old Olympic record with his 2:07:16. Merga probably suffered the most of anyone in the race: He came onto the track in third place, but he had used very nearly all the energy in his body, and his countryman Tsegay Kebede was closing fast. The whole crowd willed Merga to hold his position, but Kebede caught him with a mere 200 meters left in the race and very publicly took his bronze medal away from him. Merga began to stagger and barely reached the finish line on his feet, with Lel closing to within three seconds of him at the end.

Ritzenhein and Hall finished ninth and 10th—the first time since 1976 that more than one American has been in the Olympic marathon's top 10. Ritzenhein had run particularly well; his 2:11:59 was only 52 seconds slower than his best time—a smaller differential than even Wanjiru's. He, like Hall, would seem to have much faster marathons in his future. Brian Sell, who moved up about 40 places throughout the race, reached as high as 15th before finally succumbing to the heat and struggling to a still very respectable 22nd-place finish. Only Ethiopia, with third, fourth, and seventh, had a better team finish.

Nineteen men couldn't finish the race at all. Whole groups of sub-2:10 marathoners, all among their countries' best, were slowed to times over 2:20. The more men I watched persevere, near-trudging, on that last lap through that awful, typical, Olympic-marathon weather, the more what Wanjiru had done amazed me. Total commitment to a full-out effort from the gun. No pacemakers; only a pack of the toughest runners in the world following his every move for more than 20 miles. Terrible, sapping, dangerous heat and humidity. No shade, no clouds. 4:49 per mile for 26.2 miles.

My own "event," as a spectator, was over, too, and so were the 10 days of Olympic athletics competition. Walking to a bus and riding it back to my hotel, I felt too drained to go for a run of my own. Watching great races usually makes me want to get out there myself, but this had been awesome in a way that was humbling rather than immediately uplifting. They can't do that, I'd thought to myself. But a couple of them had done that. How could I be anything remotely related to them; be "a runner," too, when I'd be lucky to run a single mile at the speed at which they'd just run a whole marathon, in Beijing, in the summer? Every now and then, numbers like these coalesce in my mind in a way that can be vaguely translated as "What's the point?"

I dragged myself out anyway, naturally. I've done this long enough to know how a run can start bad and get better. I jogged off toward the park I'd found to train in; you could do about a mile-long loop in there and be free of the traffic. But for the first time during my stay here, it was fenced off—something about security; the closing ceremonies would be going on tonight, and they were clamping down. I kept going on a street I hadn't run on before. It was miserably hot.

After another mile or so, I came to a major intersection. I reached it and turned right. Within five minutes I saw the outer wall of Tiananmen Square. A thought hit me, and I looked out to my left. There in the middle of the road was the blue line, the course marker for the marathon.

At a great, great distance—a distance that would only increase, no matter how I tried, how long I ran, I was following Samuel Wanjiru.

And Gharib. And Kebede. And Merga. And Constantina Tomescu-Dita. And Catherine Ndereba. And Paula Radcliffe. And Carlos Lopes. And Joan Benoit. And Frank Shorter. And Abebe Bikila. And Emil Zátopek.

It's the Olympics, and I was on my last run in Beijing. I picked it up.

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(posted on nyrr.org since Feb 2008)