At the risk of turning this into an existential running blog (and I imagine there is very limited if  any readership for this type of thing), I have here a Part 2 to the blog post I published earlier this month, “On The Defiant Body.” I promise an imminent return to non-athletic, less existential subjects next week, but Defiant Body is still in my thoughts, and Monday’s Boston marathon has fed the subject.

Did you follow it? The 122^nd iteration of the race was run against the backdrop of some seriously gloomy weather, featuring near freezing temperatures, a steady downpour of rain and headwinds measured at 30 miles per hour. Race Director Dave McGillivray coined this year’s marathon a “Run for Shelter,” and indeed, many of the marathoners sought out safe harbor long before the finish line. There were more “DNFs” (runner speak for “Did Not Finish”) on Monday than there were in 2017’s marathon; more by a whopping 50%. Desiree Linden was among those who entertained the DNF idea. She considered dropping out at mile six, and again around the 20-kilometer mark (at which point Linden slowed down to wait for fellow competitor and reigning New York Marathon champion Shalane Flanagan to make a port-a-potty detour).

“Sometimes, it’s better for your career to step off and save it for another day,” Linden went on to say about how horribly she felt during the marathon’s early miles. This was in a post-race interview – after she’d gone on to win the whole thing with a four-minute lead.

So Linden contemplated drop-out for at least half of the race. What happened in between this and victorious finish?

I have a sense for what might have happened, and this takes my mind to every cross country and track race I ran. There was Johnny O, who you must imagine as a thin, bald and extremely ripped man in basketball shorts and Oakley’s yelling but in a way that is kind, with veins protruding at his temples, jumping and squatting athletically off the side of a track or at the lonely turnaround point on a wooded course paved with wet mulch. Then you must imagine him yelling Keep your head down and keep going, or variations of the same concept. Ridiculous things, like One foot in front of the other, or When you’re hurting speed up! I suspect Johnny O-style mantras are common among runners. They are simple, clean and uncomplicated. These elementary commands are about dominion of the mind, the starting point for any decent attempt at dominion of body. Charged with focusing on head down and keep going, the mind is too full to think of the pain in your side or the cramp in your calf.  On a good day, the mantras can work, something suddenly clicks and you go on to kick ass.

In my last post I wrote about runner Gabriella Andersen-Schiess’s struggle to finish the 1984 Olympic Marathon in a heat-exhausted body. Head down and keep going didn’t pan out the way she might have hoped it would. That day, her body imposed a limit.

Desiree Linden’s win this week strikes me as a fascinating case of mind over body. And yet we can see that mind over body is not always accessible, not even for seasoned Olympians like Flanagan. I’m referring to her port-a-potty stop, which is an unusual tactical move for an elite runner. But Nature called, and it didn’t particularly care to wait until after the race was over. Flanagan’s port-a-potty detour cost her 13 seconds, which doesn’t seem like all that much across the course of a 26 mile race (or at all as far as bathroom breaks are concerned). But these 13 seconds make me understand something I’d missed in my first blog post on this subject: our impulse to control the body is not about body at all. It is all about time.

Time is a slippery thing. Seneca:

The space you have, which reason can prolong, although naturally hurries away, of necessity escapes from you quickly; for you do not seize it, you neither hold it back, nor impose delay upon the swiftest thing in the world (On The Shortness of Life)

We collectively seek to somehow get a handle of it, and I suspect we do so, unconsciously, because time is the impetus for our bodies’ unraveling. So we rise and set to watches, calendars and schedules. We want to make time ours, because we understand it is an autonomous thing, a phenomenon that’s always somehow existing outside of us. Long after we are gone, presumably, time will be there still.

Time is a force of nature, not so easily understood. It maintains its own rhythm and pace. We observe this over the course of a too-short morning or a restless airplane ride or a vacation come and gone. Over a long silence. There may be method to time’s cadence, but somehow its inner workings are to us a mystery. Consider the New York minute and its endless possibilities, or the Southern European hour and the lack thereof. And then look closer. The qualities shift. A Portuguese hour holds little of the New York minute’s potential, but it does contain other things: its own texture, impressions and space. Here there is a different type of possibility, enshrined in a different experience of time.

Either way, time is not ours, and even though I’d love to be wrong, I suspect it’s going in one direction only. Seneca thought so too:  “Life will follow the path it started upon, and will neither verse nor check its course; it will make no noise, it will not remind you of its swiftness. Silent it will glide on […].”

This is why we carpe diem. This is why we exert control, and this is why we are indignant when our bodies defy us. Time passes. What is there to be done?

Part 1 of this unexpected series on the body defiant fielded a question: How do we live within bone and tissue that has gone rogue in a way that it shouldn’t?

There is an answer, and some comfort, in Zadie Smith’s easy observations on the way we understand Time: “Given that nobody has given you the rules – given that you have imagined the rules – how can you be indignant when these rules of yours are ‘broken’?” (Feel Free, Killing Orson Welles at Midnight)