AUGUST 13, 2019 – “Doc” Andberg, our town vet and family friend, ran his first marathon a few years after B.C.E. 490 when Pheidippides ran from Marathon to Athens. I thought Doc was too old to be doing such a thing. He was older than my dad, for Pete’s sake. However, one day on the golf course when Doc passed up my middle school cross-country team, I decided maybe Doc wasn’t too old to be running marathons (he was 56).
By the time I was in law school, I was a serious runner. I was obsessed with it—running, that is, not law school.
In my peak years, I logged consistently over 100 miles a week, occasionally hitting 120. Life revolved around running. Three days a week, I’d run a 10-miler in the morning and another in the evening, each under an hour. Twice a week I ran five miles’ worth of killer intervals. Once a week I’d go easy—a 10-miler at around a six-minute/mile pace—the day before my weekly 20-miler right at that same pace. In my “off time” I devoured running books and magazines and obsessed about my diet.
I ran road races and marathons—Boston, New York City, Twin Cities, and a couple of other places—13 marathons in all. My personal record was 2:43:10, but my goal was a sub-2:30. It never happened. No matter how hard I trained, no matter how smart I raced, I just couldn’t break get below 2:43:10.
In early June 1982 I ran the Stockholm Marathon. I thought it would be a relatively cool race, since the course meandered around Stockholm’s archipelago. Wrong. The temperature was nearly 90F (32C) at the start, and just 10 km into the race, I knew a PR was out the question. The race finished in the old (1912) Olympic stadium, which was supposed to add prestige to the event. I can’t remember a thing about the landmark except that I ran through the gateway, around the track and across the finish line.
The next day, according to plan, I left for Poland, which was in the midst of martial law. The country was in shambles. Bread lines stretched for blocks, and behind the façade of the police state, people were seething.
It was under those circumstances that I saw how self-indulgent the running craze was. I decided that we in the West had so gorged ourselves on materialism and self-imposed stress that for relief we needed the equivalent of self-flagellation. We OCD runners realized that we could not live on bread alone—especially when bread was in abundance. We needed to create a mountain for ourselves in order to suffer our way to its summit.
I ran a few races after that, but my heart was no longer in it. I went on to other obsessions, some of which actually benefitted people other than myself.
As for Doc Andberg, he went on to win 30 national and world masters titles. His obsession took him all the way to the ripe old age of 96.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
