Leaping Coupled Lovers

Wherever one goes these days in Los Angeles there are runners. They run when snow blankets the earth and freezing rain lashes the streets, their $100 Nikes flapping on the wet pavement. They run when night has fallen and the decent folks of Bellflower and Culver City have settled down to their tuna casseroles. They are still running when dinner is over and whole families have gathered around a warm television set to learn what new satanically inspired sexual atrocity has tweaked the ratings-conditioned conscience of Geraldo Rivera.

They run down city streets and state highways, over canyons, through alleys, up fire trails, in traffic, across parks, around buses, down mountainsides, through movie studios, along beaches, past dogs, by gang wars, through protest demonstrations, over coupling lovers, alongside funeral processions, around wedding parties and near hospitals where babies, perhaps their own, are being born.

They run with a ferocity of commitment which, in simpler times, would have been reserved for more enlightened pursuits. But these are the 1980s, folks, the Era of Fitness, the Age of Personal Best, the epic of, God help us, the Marathon. It comes to L.A. March 5 for the fourth consecutive year and we’re already in there by the thousands, lubricating our chafing areas, heaping up on carbohydrates and running until fame or death assures us a place in the Book of Those Who Tried.

Not since Churchill summoned England to bloody heights of grandeur have so many been called to a quest of almost spiritual endeavor: the muscle-wrenching, gut-grinding, soul-ripping, mind-blowing run of 26 smoggy urban miles, just because they’re there.

I sing today of Marathon IV not because I share its mad quest to run grim-faced through the storied streets, but because I’m trying to figure out what kind of people would actually do it and why.

Toward that end I met with some of the runners at the L.A. Marathon office: an old man, a young beauty, a towering Adonis, an educator who runs in a clown suit and a woman who began running every day at the cocktail hour to avoid drinking. I’m sure her problem was moderate in nature, however, because a serious drinker could have figured out how to drink and run at the same time without spilling a drop.

The Adonis, whose name is Mark Harwell, has been an athlete all his life and in fact once dribbled a basketball up Pike’s Peak for charity, a 20-mile effort at a 12% grade in sub-freezing weather. Marathon publicist Aileen Katz, in discussing the idea for a column on runners, said he had dribbled the ball up Mt. Everest, which, I’m certain, was more an error of enthusiasm than outright mendacity. It was Tenzing Norgay, not Mark Harwell, who first dribbled a basketball up Everest.

Harwell runs at least 10 miles a day and when I asked how many miles he ran a year he really didn’t want to think about it because it becomes a kind of psychological hang-up. But I kept pressing because that’s what happens when you hand your soul over to a journalist. He finally guessed it was probably over 5,000 miles a year and then shook his head in disbelief. “Five thousand miles a year,” he said, not quite believing it himself.

Normally when Harwell runs, he thinks of pleasant things, not about running, “because if you thought about running you’d die.” Now, of course, he’ll think about nothing else but those 5,000 miles a year and we may find him on Marathon Day in a heap off Sunset Boulevard, vowing to have the hide of the man who tampered with the mind set required to win. Well, get it out of your head, man. Think of a Reebok rep prancing just out of reach with a million-dollar contract, or the whole half-naked chorus line of “Oba, Oba” dancing at the finish line.

I treadmill 2.1 miles every day, not out of choice but out of medical necessity, after which I fall exhausted on the couch, cursing the past excesses that force me to undertake even this modest amount of physical activity, like a squirrel in a cage spinning its heart out, going nowhere.

Unlike Harwell, however, when I treadmill I don’t think at all. I watch television: The “Super Sloppy Double Dare” game, the “New Gidget,” “Ducktales” or Phil Donahue, any one of which will drop me into the state of somnambulism necessary to finish what I am doomed to repeat day after mind-numbing day.

I would think about the Oba, Oba dancers instead of Phil Donahue, but that creates the risk of breaking my concentration and hurling me doll-like into the machinery of the treadmill, flapping around for all eternity while Donahue goes the distance. It’s an ugly way to die.

Saturday: T-Bone the Clown and Don’t Do It, Grandma.