In the year 490 BCE, a Greek messenger named Pheidippides was dispatched to run from the town of Marathon to Athens. The Greeks were fighting the Persians in Marathon, and Pheidippides’ task was to deliver the news of Greek victory. According to one source, he ran the 26 miles, shouted “rejoice, we are victorious,” and promptly dropped dead.
All over the world, people run to raise money for cancer research and for people with cancer, many of whom have often been stripped of the ability to exercise vigorously enough for anyone to hang a medal around our necks. And yet, the person who earns the headlines at the end of the race is the person who somehow managed to beat back the cancer enough to start running again.
Americans. We love a comeback.
We also love the narrative that people who get sick must have done something wrong. “I did everything right!” is what people say when the doctor tells them it’s cancer. I said it. Maybe you did too. Health is righteousness in a society that fears death and sickness. Wellness will cost you, though, and so will gym memberships, trainers, race fees, podiatrists. Sickness is for the poor, the weak and the weak-willed. After all, nobody who’s sick could possibly run a marathon.
Panathenaic amphora, The British Museum
To be anointed as a “survivor” of cancer, you have to do something noteworthy, something spectacular. If you just go back to your regular life and your disappointing body, what’s the point?
One side effect of many cancer medications is weight gain, yet you’re told not to gain weight, because that can theoretically increase the odds that the cancer will come back. Take this pill to stay alive, but it will make you fat, but also, don’t get fat, but also, we don’t have a way to prevent you from getting fat. You try to exercise more, but your body just can’t do what everyone else is doing on your behalf: performing feats of physical strength and endurance. It can move, but it can’t do so in ways that would impress a marathon runner.
The limit on the weights I’m allowed to lift is three pounds. I lie on a mat pathetically pushing these skyward, remembering the statistics: exercise theoretically prevents cancer from coming back, (push) theoretically, (push) exercise, (push) cancer, (push) coming back.
At the end of a marathon, people stagger, vomit, drop to the ground. Their hips and knees may need to be replaced earlier than most people’s, but that’s the good kind of surgery, because you earned it by being spectacular.
In many parts of the world, people don’t run for their health. They run because they are in great danger.
Wikipedia has a list of marathon fatalities that is quite exhaustive. Many of those who’ve died running marathons were quite young – as young as 19 in one case, but often in their twenties and thirties. Marathons are often run in the summer, and the heat and exhaustion can lead to electrolyte imbalances that can trigger a cardiac arrest. “Collapse” is how it’s described. What is it like to be that young, that strong, that determined to succeed at a massive physical effort, and to feel death arrive like lightning?
In every cancer support group, women talk about exercise. How they’ve had to abandon rock climbing, HIIT classes, salsa dancing, swimming, lifting and running. How they’ve traded vigor for collapse. How they can now only walk a few blocks, how they are getting fat and being told not to get fat, how they learned that these miraculous GLP weight loss drugs don’t really work for people on hormone blockers, how their knees ache, how old they all feel, so suddenly.
Faujah Singh, a Canadian Sikh, ran a marathon at the age of 100. After the death of his son, grief led Singh to running as a mental escape, and somehow his grief was so enormous that it pushed his elderly body further and further. He ran marathons until he was 102. What is it like to be that old, to be in a body that survived wars, famines, immigrations, deaths upon deaths? Singh is now 114 years old, an age that would make many Silicon Valley tech lords envious.
In the singularity, we will all live forever, but until then, even the most ketamine-addled billionaire dreams that he will be the one to outrun death.
A recent study showed that regular exercise can be just as effective at warding off a cancer recurrence as some medications. Considering the laundry list of side effects most cancer drugs come with, this seems promising. But now we have to live with the knowledge that if the cancer comes back, many people will sigh and say, “well, you know, she never ran a marathon.” The day when I didn’t work out might be the day a cancer cell woke up somewhere in my body, and once again, the failure to survive will be the fault of a body that just couldn’t conquer itself.
Every day I plod through my neighborhood, walking mile after mile, watching people run by, sometimes shoving me out of the way, probably training for a race to raise money for cancer. Their joints smack against concrete in expensive running shoes, their long ponytails bob in the wind, their technical gear gleams. Men run without shirts on, seeming never to worry that their chest might someday look like one does after a double mastectomy, a smeared landscape of scars and loose skin. But men can get breast cancer, too. And even those who run the furthest will die.
Prolonged physical strain can lead to a condition called “Pheidippides cardiomyopathy,” named for the same messenger who died running the first marathon. The strain of extended running can lead to a cascade of organ failures, and the heart can seize and clench, overtaxed muscle matter trying to outrun its own death. Chemotherapy and radiation and hormone suppressing drugs given to cancer patients, too, can catastrophically damage a heart. One medication I was offered is so toxic to the heart that I would have needed an EKG every month to make sure I wouldn’t drop dead shopping at Trader Joe’s or while pathetically pushing my three pound weights. You need a heart to survive a marathon. Cancer treatment, we’re so often reminded, is a marathon and not a sprint. It’s just a very ugly one.
A man runs by, shirtless and sweating.
A woman runs by, long hair streaming.
Children run by, egged on by a shouting teacher.
Armies run by, under the will of a commander.
Refugees run by, pursued by their hunger.
The sick? We walk, we crawl, we stumble.
The world runs by all of us in our ruined forms, wrapped tight around our battered hearts.