On August 5^th, 1984, Los Angeles hosted the first Olympic marathon in which women were allowed to compete, exactly one year and six days before I was born. Fifty runners competed that Sunday and 44 finished the race. I am most interested in runner number 323. Gabriela Andersen-Schiess competed for team Switzerland in that inaugural marathon. She crossed the finish line in 37^th place.

That marathon, as tradition now holds (with London’s 2012 Games a recent notable exception), culminated in the Olympic Stadium. From the Los Angeles Olympic Coliseum, 77,000 spectators watched in 80-degree heat as American Joan Benoit crossed the finish line in first place with a time of 2 hours, 24 minutes and 52 seconds.

From what I’m able to gather, Gabriela Andersen-Schiess entered the Stadium for the final lap of the Olympic track around twenty minutes after Joan Benoit. The video footage of her marathon’s culminating quarter mile has the haunting quality of watching a maimed animal struggling to move. She does not run. She staggers on legs she doesn’t seem to command. Her knees don’t fully bend, and the wiry muscles of her quadriceps and shins appear to have independent, incoherent thought. They propel Gabriela forward in inconsiderate directions, veering her to the right as if protesting the torso that contorts left. Gabriela’s arms perform a stiff flail backwards and forwards, and her head is the extension of an eerily hardened neck.  There is a five-minute struggle to walk the final 400 meters of the race. Gabriela crosses the finish line in two hours, forty-eight minutes and forty-two seconds and collapses into the arms of medical staff.

Heat exhaustion results from the body’s inability to cool itself. The day of the 1984 Olympic marathon was a hot one in Los Angeles, and there were only a handful of water stations on the race route.  Gabriela missed the last one, and she attributes this to the heat exhaustion that resulted in extreme muscle cramping that 5^th of August.

Two hours after her marathon finish, Gabriela had recovered. This seems implausible when considering her evacuated state at the finish line, but such is the human body. It can have timing and agenda all to its own. Gabriela was 39 years old that day, and that was her first and final Olympic marathon.

Sometime last week, I awoke mid-slumber wailing. I cried indignantly and as loudly as possible, not all that dissimilar, I imagine, from the wailing with which I entered the world at the undisciplined hour of 3:46 AM several decades back. As a newborn I of course could not express my fury with words, but last week, I wailed on repeat about wanting to scratch my body off.

I’m apologize for the melodrama. In a bigger moment, I could have avoided the entire thing. But in the middle of the night that night, all of the Mindfulness and optimism and lessons from Buddha were not helping. I will spare you the details, which are not special or interesting. My bloodsugars had gone rogue for a few days, unresponsive to the helpful but blunt tools and formulas available for people with non-functioning pancreases. There was that final glucose alert that woke me, and then I lost it. This was not my fault. It was the fault of my disastrous unruly impertinent body, so autonomous that it was a stranger to me.

What must I do to get you to respond as you should? I wondered.

I thought about Gabriela Andersen-Schiess. Surely she had the same question as she staggered down the track.  After a lifetime of distance running, surely her body would do her the decency of allowing her to run the race’s final meters?

There is a category of bodily behaviors or attributes that we assume we can and should control. A marathoner expects to control her legs at the end of a race, and while the rest of us laypeople may not have this expectation, we have others. This is why we cut, fast, eat, wax, shave, pluck, medicate, hydrate, walk, rest, whiten, swim, straighten, diet, detox, ice, carbo-load, brush, monitor, log, track, weigh, moisturize, pierce, bulk, nip, tuck, et cetera. We manipulate our bodies in subtle and not so subtle ways. Control feels like our birthright, and it comes in varying expressions. Our attempts at control can be a form of taking responsibility, or an act of love through self-care. Equally, control can be hubris, or vanity, or insecurity, or thousands of other things. Regardless of the expression at hand, I suspect the instinct to control has an evolutionary explanation. The desire seems somehow linked to survival. Roxanne Gay:

It makes perfect sense that many of us obsess over our bodies. There is nothing more inescapable. Our bodies move us through our lives. They bring pleasure and pain. Sometimes our bodies serve us well, and other times our bodies become terribly inconvenient. There are times when our bodies betray us or our bodies are betrayed by others. I think about my body all the time – how it looks, how it feels, how I can make it smaller, what I should put into it, what I am putting into it, what has been done to it, what I let others do to it.
– Bad Feminist

We feel entitled to our bodies, so there is a sense of profound indignity when the expectation of control is betrayed. How do we live within bone and tissue that has gone rogue in a way that it shouldn’t? (We can accept the natural course of things – no one expects to lose weight on a diet of McDonald’s, but the indignity of those extra pounds when you have done everything ‘right!’).

Our contraried expectations can turn our bodies into foreign territory. Megan O’Rourke writes about a loss of self in a New Yorker article in relation to her experience with autoimmune disease:

My mental sensation of no longer being a Person had a correlating physical symptom: my eyes no longer seemed like transparent lenses onto the world. They seemed, rather, to be distinct parts of my body, as perceptible as fingers—oddly distant, protuberant, like old-fashioned spectacles. My face felt the same way—like a mask I was disorientingly conscious of at all times. It made me feel categorically fraudulent. I could feel the fat in the cheeks and the weight of bones as I spoke. I felt a mounting anxiety: everything was wrong, and that wrongness was inside me; only I wasn’t sure anymore what that “me” was.
The New Yorker, “What’s Wrong With Me,” August 26, 2013.

O’Rourke exposes a fundamental question about living inside a body. I suppose we all encounter it eventually: how do we find comfortable existence inside our bodies when we find they’ve become, wrongly, ungovernable?

Hinduism would give us comfort in the assurance that we are a soul inhabiting a body until our next reincarnation. Our ungovernable bodies are just for now. Buddhism has the concept of anatman. Our bodies are not our possessions, merely one facet of our experience as a sentient being. Ayurveda would encourage us to find bodily harmony by balancing our Doshas, and Chinese medicine might have us search to balance our Qi. Psychotherapy might focus on acceptance or self-compassion and Mindfulness might focus on breath. Or, the solution might just be a long run or a good laugh or a 90s playlist. I have dabbled in all of this, and I suppose each moment brings a different combination of solutions.

Still, I suspect we are to walk a line between what we control, and then, at some point, what we simply cannot.  It occurred to me: were our bodies ours in the first place? Rupi Kaur: “let it go/let it leave/let it happen/nothing. […]/was promised or/belonged to you anyway.”