Runner writes memoir based on JFK races

Name: Ed Ayres

Age: 71

City in which you live: Green Valley, Calif.

Day job: Retired environmental editor

Book title: “The Longest Race: a Lifelong Runner, an Iconic Ultramarathon, and the Case for Human Endurance”

Genre: Memoir

Synopsis of book: A runner attempts to break an age-group record in America’s largest ultramarathon, and finds himself on a journey of discovery as well as a test of physical endurance.

Publisher: The Experiment (New York)

Price: $23.95

Tell us a bit about your background.

For half a century after graduating from Swarthmore College in 1963, I pursued two passions: environmental science and long-distance running. For 14 years I was editor of Running Times magazine, which I had founded on a shoestring in 1977. Later, for another 14 years, I was an environmental editor at the Worldwatch Institute, publisher of the annual State of the World, in Washington, D.C. Both interests began in my youth when playing in the woods and meadows of rural New Jersey, where I grew up. My Quaker parents wouldn’t allow a TV in the house, with all its violence and noise.

Then I discovered the pleasures of cross-country and track in high school. Those interests became even more compelling to me after 1970, the year of both the first Earth Day and the first New York City Marathon. I had worked with Earth Day co-founder Gaylord Nelson on an editorial project, and I ran in that inaugural New York Marathon, finishing third. I never dreamed, at that time, that these two interests — endurance running and environmental science — were as closely related as I now understand them to be.

What inspired you to write the book?

My work as an environmental editor was incredibly stressful. In the early 1990s, the scientists I worked with began issuing warnings that global warming would generate extreme weather events of dangerous intensity — the very kinds of events that later began to occur with Hurricane Katrina, the past year’s unusual tornado activity, and the recent East Coast Superstorm. But those early warnings were largely shrugged off by the politicians and media, and I felt a lot of anxiety.

After work in the evenings, I’d go out for long runs along the D.C. bank of the Potomac. Running gave me a needed escape from the stress, but at the same time I found myself pondering the parallels I noticed between our troubled industrial civilization and our overstressed selves. A smokestack or tailpipe emits waste carbon gas, and so does the exhalation of an athlete. Could our bodies be microcosms of our industries?

I sensed that humanity was in a race for survival, and it struck me that what an endurance runner does in a long distance race can offer important clues to what the human race may be facing in the years to come. That triggered the book.

Say a bit about your views on applying endurance to a person’s life, as portrayed in the book.

Over the past 30 years, evolutionary scientists at Harvard University and the University of Utah have confirmed that humans evolved not just as biped walkers, but as long-distance-running “persistence hunters” who could outrun animals like mammoths and wild horses, not by outsprinting them but by wearing them down. It was endurance — not power and speed — that enabled early humans to bring home the meat and to survive.

It was endurance and patience, not power and speed, that made us human. Yet, in our power- and speed-infatuated modern world, we have begun to abandon those very qualities that enabled us to develop and build civilization in the first place.

We have forgotten what brought us to the dance! If we want to achieve sustainability as a civilization, we’ll need to rediscover our endurance and toughness as individuals.

How did you come up with the idea of using the JFK 50-mile race as the backbone for ruminating on modern civilization, memories, purpose and endurance?

For endurance runners, the annual JFK 50-Mile is an iconic race. It was originally inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s call for Americans to become more physically fit in a dangerous age, and the first running took place just three months before Kennedy was assassinated.

The JFK is the oldest and largest ultramarathon (out of about 550 ultras each year) in the country. I got the thrill of my life by winning it in 1977, so it has a special place in my heart. The course this race follows also evokes vivid memories of our country’s history, as it passes the Civil War battle sites of South Mountain, Maryland Heights and Antietam and Harpers Ferry, W.Va.

It was the perfect venue for exploring both our turbulent past and our now incredibly challenging future.

Who was your primary audience? Runners? 

In order to properly market a book, publishers and bookstore managers like to identify the genre or “niche” it belongs to. I wanted to write for everyone who is alive and values life! Of course, I had to be practical, so my solution was to build my story around a rather dramatic competition I had entered in 2001, just nine weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

That was the year I turned 60, and I was feeling not only the huge anxieties many Americans were feeling that fall, but the sense that I had entered the autumn of my own life. So, while the primary audience is runners, many of the people who have responded strongly to this story are nonrunners — people who’ve been caught up in the environmental drama and the growing global threats that now affect us all, as well as the prospect of personal decline we all face as we grow older.

You’ve got a lot of experience as a runner and a writer who writes about running. What fresh perspective opened up for you as you wrote this book?

I began to understand that running isn’t just a special interest of a small segment of the population, like playing the violin or collecting rare coins. Running is a fairly universal capability of healthy and fit people, or at least it was until civilization made us increasingly sedentary. It’s a basic element of many, if not most, major sports. And it’s basic to children’s play.

For many years, I had written about running as a competitive sport, but as I worked on this book I began to think of it more broadly as a practice of fundamental human capabilities — endurance, patience, the ability to envision the results of hard work and practice — that apply not just to sport but to almost everything we do.

What is your favorite part of the book? Are there any passages that you thought worked particularly well?

I particularly like the opening chapter, about the start of the race (“Boonsboro: Dawn”); and then chapter 7 (“Antietam Aqueduct”), about the conundrums of sport, war and redemption; and chapter 11 (“Taylor’s Landing”) about how consciousness can turn arduous hours into memorable moments.

What was your writing routine for “The Longest Race”?

As a retiree, I no longer had to commute to work in D.C. Of course I had to reserve time for my family and household (and for my running) but beyond those needs I worked on the book dawn to dusk, virtually every day for about three years. I’ve never had writer’s block, so my challenge was to channel the rush of memories and epiphanies into a manageable story.

Long-form writing isn’t always easy. What was easy for you about writing this book? What was hard?

The easy part was gathering the material — from old issues of Running Times and World Watch magazines, archives of newspapers, and my own mementos and memories. The hard part was wrestling all that material into a readable and well-documented story.

When my literary agent first considered the manuscript for publication, it was fraught with digressions and ruminations. But she directed me to a publisher who asked me if I’d be willing to restructure the narrative to hew more tightly to the JFK race. I did, and to my amazement, instead of marginalizing the deeper themes, that rewrite actually strengthened those themes. It brought into clearer focus the natural connections between the challenges of an endurance foot race and the striving of the human race.

Did you learn anything about yourself while writing this book?

Oh, yes. I learned that even after having made my living as a writer for 45 years, I still had a lot to learn in my late 60s. I also came to understand that what was happening to my knowledge of writing was also happening in every other area of my life: my relationships with family and friends, my grasp of science and history, and my hopes for the future.

Somewhere in the book I make the wry comment that when you stop learning, you’re dead. And, most importantly, I realized — not with regret, but with some surprise and fascination — that the more I learn, the smaller a fragment my knowledge appears to be of what’s out there to be known.

One of the rewards of growing older (or slower) is a growing humility.

What do you want readers to take away from reading the book?

First, as one of my reviewers wrote, “Enjoy the journey — it’s a fun one!”

Beyond that, I’ll be very happy if readers come away with a stronger sense of how intimately connected our brains are to our bodies — and, by extension, how connected our physical existence as living individuals must be to the sustainability of the human prospect on this very fragile planet.

What sort of response have you got from people who have read the book?

The early responses have been exciting. The book got very strong pre-publication reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus Reviews, among others.

But what pleases me most is that it has been enthusiastically endorsed both by iconic runners like Bill Rodgers and Kathrine Switzer and by leading environmentalists like Lester R. Brown and Bill McKibben. My big dream is to catch the attention of Sports Illustrated or National Public Radio, or a widely watched provocateur like Jon Stewart.

Are you working on another writing project?

Not yet, but that will be coming. I cannot not write, any more than I cannot not run, or breathe.

Is your book available in bookstores in our area? Where? If not, how can a reader buy a copy of the book?

“The Longest Race” has been distributed to Barnes & Noble and other bookstores nationwide. It’s also available on Amazon.com and the other online bookseller sites.

In addition, the publisher and I will be coming to the Clarion Hotel in Hagerstown on Friday, Nov. 16, with copies to sell at a book-signing from 3 to 7 p.m. That’s the headquarters hotel for the next day’s 50th anniversary running of the JFK 50-Mile, and for me it will be a reunion with some of the country’s most legendary ultramarathon runners.

— Chris Copley, Lifestyle Assistant Editor