They Run This Into Ground

Immediately, it is established here that no grudge exists against people who run marathons. This is a free society. If the principals know that the first guy who runs a marathon enters Athens crying, “Rejoice, we conquer”--and drops dead--we have no quarrel with them.

They know, too, the orthopedic and cardiac problems that can develop from running. In the East and Midwest, running serves as the bridge for orthopedists, carrying them from the end of fall until the resumption of tennis, golf and softball in the spring.

In order to drive a Mercedes-Benz, often the first prize, a runner must win a marathon. Orthopedic surgeons drive them all the time, except when they move up to a Rolls-Royce.

But if one wants to run a marathon, the choice is one’s. All we try to do each year, at the time the Los Angeles Marathon approaches, is implore authorities to keep the runners out of the streets.

California is a spacious state, embracing 158,693 square miles. It offers sprawling deserts, national parks, mountains, shore and forest.

What are marathon runners doing in the streets of Los Angeles, already engulfed by gridlock? Our thoroughfares are losing the battle to the gas-driven machine. Must runners further impede traffic when they could run a course, say, through the rustic quiet of Griffith Park?

The original marathon in 490 BC wasn’t run through city streets. The guy covers back roads, mountain terrain and plains. And he does it, what’s more, without eating spaghetti the night before.

Naturally, marathon experts today second-guess, “If he does a better job with carbohydrates, maybe he doesn’t drop dead.”

But at least he has the decency to stay out of the streets until he arrives in Athens.

Recently, they ran a marathon through the streets of Osaka, Japan. Have you ever inspected traffic in Osaka? By comparison, Los Angeles is a freeway in Montana.

They run marathons through Tokyo, London, Paris, Rome, Toronto, Montreal, Boston and Rotterdam. And they turn 16,000 runners loose through the streets of New York.

The race is considered a cultural triumph because a marathoner passing through the neighborhoods has yet to emerge festooned with graffiti.

“Try that with a subway train or a bus,” marathon people crow.

At time, you sit down thoughtfully, trying to probe the reasoning of those whose world we share. People, for instance, decide to stage a motorbike race on the Colorado Desert, near Palm Springs. It is called an off-road race. It should suggest to marathoners an off-street race.

Well, the environmentalists move in and try to stop the bikers, claiming their race is a threat to yucca and traumatizes jack rabbits.

But where are these environmentalists when 20,000 marathon runners swarm through the streets of Los Angeles?

In Pamplona, people at least have a reason to be running through the streets. There is a herd of bulls behind them.

When you stage a marathon, you need water stations where runners passing through pick up water, dump it over their skulls and toss the cup into the street, creating a litter problem. Has anyone ever tried to tell a marathoner, “Please crush the cup and carry it with you until the finish, where you will deposit it in a receptacle.”?

It is noted that 322 doctors ran in the L.A. Marathon last year, a statistic we now wish to address.

First, we want to know why a doctor will run 26 miles 385 yards in a marathon, but won’t drive a mile and a half to make a house call?

Second, jaded by life’s hardness, we raise the point suspiciously whether those doctors entered in the marathon are shills, planted by orthopedists who would create the illusion that if doctors run, it has to be safe.

Others follow suit--and the patients roll in, needing treatment for shin splints, hamstring pulls, sprained ankles and the multitude of other afflictions resulting from pounding that hard pavement.

Do you recall the old purveyor of magic elixir guaranteed to grow hair? Finishing his pitch, he asked the villagers, “Now who will buy the first bottle?”

And, from the audience, a plant stepped forward to trigger the flow of sales.

That’s how we see doctors in marathon races, which, in our bigness, we tolerate, with the tearful entreaty they take them to the country.