Why

When I think about it right now, I picture myself in a chair in Manchester, Tennessee.

The chair is tucked up against the side wall of a small building, maybe ten steps off the course, shadowed from the streetlamp out front by a corner of the building. It is two or three o'clock in the morning - on the second night.

Mostly it is quiet, as you'd expect at two or three o'clock in the morning. The late-summer night air is warm and humid and still, not rustling the leaves of the trees that shade my spot during the heat of the day, though I do hear an occasional rustle in one of the nearby tents. I try to be quiet as I rummage through my ice-filled, cheap styrofoam coolers for whatever I'll be drinking, hoping to avoid disturbing those resting around me more than I have to. I know they will understand my need though, just as I understand theirs. I'm among friends here.

There are occasional voices as people go by on the course - usually just one or two at a time, a few words shared with the folks in the timing tent as the runners who have just finished a lap pass through, either to start another or to find their own places for a few minutes before going on. In some strange way you can 'hear' their voices traveling out and getting lost in the night, mixed into and quickly diluted to inaudibility by the one constant sound: the din of countless insects, so loud but so ever-present that most of the time you forget to be aware of it.

The darkness, the one-mile loop, and the blanketing white noise all contribute to the very strong impression that I am living for the present in a very narrowly circumscribed parallel universe - and what a simple universe it is. It's one fundamental natural law is motion. Right now I am violating that law, but not for long. A body at rest must never stay at rest. I sit in my chair and, unseen, I watch the people go by. I am always interested to see who is passing.

I actually have two chairs - two of those standard, straight-backed, metal-framed banquet hall chairs from inside the building that I have commandeered and relocated here to create my personal aid station. I can sit in the one, put my aching legs up on the other, and have my coolers of drinks right at hand. I rest, occasionally taking a swig from my gallon jug of Milo's Famous Sweet Tea, waiting for the relief I know is coming as the blood flow to my legs clears the waste products of the last ten miles from the muscles and carries some of Milo's sugary goodness in.

In about ten minutes I'll be ready to tackle another five or ten miles, but for right now I sit, occasionally shifting and stretching my legs to aid the recovery, and I drink in not only the tea but the experience. When I think of multiday races I think of times like this, hurting, tired, sweat-soaked and stinking, alone with my thoughts in the night - at least a day in and still nowhere near done - and a scene from the film "Patton" often comes to mind.

The general stands with his aide, Lt. Colonel Codman, surveying the scene of a recent battle. The ground has been ripped open by the treads of maneuvering tanks. Debris and bodies are strewn over the field among the ruins of wrecked vehicles, smoke slowly curling up into the air and drifting away. Patton, hands on hips, narrows his eyes.

"Look at this Cod..." he says, trailing off into a long pause. "I love it. ... God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life."

There are few rational reasons to love multi-days. They're usually on some short loop, where you will soon know every little twist and turn, every rise and descent, every little crack in the pavement - far too intimately. Getting to 50K, 50M, or 100K in a multi-day - those are interesting milestones, but you're really only getting started. For me, even 100M means I've just finally worked my way to the point where I can begin to find out what kind of a race I might actually have. It takes a whole race to get to the place where the real race begins.

As I sit in the dark, listening to the sounds, feeling the pain, living the moment and thinking on these things, I understand the husky emotion George C. Scott put into Patton's voice as he made his admission - emotion rooted, I think, in an underlying sense of inescapable damnation that "Ol' Blood 'n Guts" may never actually have had, or may never actually have put into words but perhaps could have.

And I realize that I'm more damned than he was.

Much though we would wish it otherwise, the world still sometimes needs people who, if not for love then for the sake of duty, will dedicate their lives to war. Only if war or some other calamity brings about an apocalypse though will the world return to the days when the fastest way to get a message from Athens to Sparta was to dispatch a runner. Unless that unthinkable day comes, multi-day running will remain this odd niche, viewed by many as a bizarre, selfish, masochistic waste of time.

But I love it. ... God help me, I do love it so.