The art of racing in the heat

The marathon did not go as hoped.

Let me explain. I'd run two marathons previous to this one. In 2005 (Chicago), my first, I finished in about 4 hours and 51 minutes. Not great, I'll grant you, but it was my first, and I'd only been running with any kind of seriousness for about a year and half or so. In the fall of 2006, I ran a marathon in Grand Rapids, and finished in 4:27. It was better, but not enough better. I really wanted to finish in under four hours. That was the goal. I decided I'd try again in the spring of 2007, here in South Bend. For various reasons, that didn't work out, and I ended up scaling back to the half. So that's the marathon history.

But then there is the half marathon history. In April I ran a half in 1:41. Last fall, I ran one in 1:45. I've run a couple of others in 1:48 and 1:53. Looking at those handy charts I sometimes find, I was led to believe that my 1:41 half in April meant that I was potentially capable of a 3:31 full in late May. I didn't really believe that, but I thought that a 1:41 half meant a cake walk to a sub 4:00 marathon. Or, as much as any full marathon can be cake walk.

But no. 4:26. Barely an improvement on last time. A lot went wrong. It was 70 degrees out at the 6:00 start time. I went out too hard, too fast. As is always the case with the Sunburst, we got the first viciously hot day of the summer on race day. My great half time in April may have been the problem as well; it may not have been a great idea to go all out back in April in the middle of marathon training.

Next time, marathon. Next time.

So, the next day after the race, I drove to Georgia. On the trip, I read The Art of Racing in the Rain. It was really very good. The novel's first person narrator is a dog named Enzo who belongs to an aspiring race car driver. The dog--educated by a PBS documentary on dogs in Mongolia--firmly believes that this existence is his last before he is granted a human life in the next existence.

It all sounds a bit precious. But the author--whose name escapes me at the moment--pulls it off brilliantly. And the novel is not solely about being a dog or a race car driver. Enzo's owner gets married, has a child, watches his wife die from a brain tumor, and has a drawn out custody battle with his in-laws for his daughter.

One of the the things that marks a great writer, I think, is the ability to make you care about something you didn't care about. I've always found auto racing a bit odd--a car doing laps? Really? But The Art of Racing in the Rain made auto racing make sense for me. The competition, the strategy, the machines, the speed, all became clear to me in a few beautifully written passages. Towards the end of the novel, the dog watches his owner racing karts with his six year old daughter, and the investment in racing descriptions pays. The pride the father feels in his six year old's driving skills, and the importance of that pride in that section of the novel, makes for a compelling scene. And the writer can leave it understated to some degree, because he's already put the reader in the position of understanding racing, parenthood, and loss.