It happened during an ordinary morning, an ordinary workout. My head was fine, my legs were spinning the right way, and I felt in balance with the world; all I wanted to do was run. That was the morning I got the idea to prepare for my first marathon.
My recollection of that moment is rather fuzzy, even today I am not clear about the route I was taking, how I was dressed, the weather conditions. There is only one fragment that I managed to save: as I drove through the streets of my Salento countryside, images of the Verrazano Bridge, the East River, and Central Park were projected before me.
In front of me was the New York City Marathon.
Logistical aspects then prompted me to choose Rome as the christening of my first forty-two and one hundred and ninety-five, yet during the preparation, at every training session, the thought would go at least once to New York. As if there was a magnetic pull toward that city, that race. Perhaps it is a craving that depends on popularity or charm. All I know is that since that morning I have never stopped thinking about it, like a sweet obsession.
I write. I work with words every day. For me, going to the bookstore or the supermarket is pretty much the same thing. When running came into my life it was practically immediate to write about it, to look for words to put together everything that happened to me along the way, to stop some moments, to find inspirations, until I came to the realization that writing of the race Is the best way I know to meet a sincere part of me.
To write about Runlovers is to give voice to this encounter.
In the library looking for a different kind of food
I write about a funny column that is paradoxical already in its name, it is called.
I’m not running today
, because there was this idea to talk about running in a different way, telling how the sport has also become an inspiration (and often protagonist) for books, movies, series and documentaries. I started with an article on Forrest Gump (an inescapable starting point) and for the second chapter I did what I do every time I am looking for ideas: go into a bookstore.
I don’t know if it happens to you too, but I always tend to dwell on certain books I have already read when scrolling through titles along the shelves of a bookstore, as if they are reassuring presences that make me feel at home. There is Lord of the Flies by William Golding, a book I loved so much. I’ll try to see next, maybe to read something by the same author. A celestial book, the title is The Marathon Runner and it was written by William Gold–man. William Goldman. I grab it as if it were the last book to be saved before the Apocalypse, look at the synopsis on the back cover, and, in a blur, my brain photographs scattered phrases: history student, movie starring Dustin Hoffman, noir, Bikila, he is preparing for a marathon, the New York City Marathon.
My returning obsession. It takes me a short time to realize that that novel will be the subject of the second article for Runlovers.
So we can proceed with Today I don’t run. Darkness in the hall.
Is the movie or the book better?
William Goldman’s The Marathon Runner is one of those rare works that escapes the question “is it better the book or the movie?”, in fact in the transition from the written word to the image we see a rather unusual choice in the Hollywood world: writer and screenwriter are the same person.
There is a young history student, his name is Babe (played by a sumptuous Dustin Hoffman) and he has a dream: to run the New York City Marathon. A dream that, during his training sessions on the East Side, mingled with his obsession with Abebe Bikila, his idol, who was able to win the marathon at the Rome Olympics in 1960 by running the entire distance of the race without shoes.
Like almost all entrants in New York, Babe certainly doesn’t want to train to win the race; the important thing is to cross the finish line. Despite his somewhat unkempt appearance, which leads him to run around in a creased sweatshirt full of holes, Babe is meticulous, leathery. He marks all the times of his workouts in a notebook, engages in short challenges in the park with other runners, and lets the taunts of his neighbors slide by whenever they see him running.
Running, for him, presents itself as a protected environment. But the rest is shaky, insecure. The protagonist finds himself alone in a New York apartment; his father (who died by suicide) was one of the many victims of McCarthyism, and Babe would like to rehabilitate his memory by preparing a dissertation on tyrannies. The only family presence in his life is his brother Doc, a dashing businessman in the oil business who is actually a secret service agent.
It is Doc’s double life that engulfs Babe in an absurd vortex inhabited by former Nazis, deviant services, diamonds, safe deposit boxes and false identities. And the running is there, the running is the invisible constant of the story that helps Babe engage in a borderline survival struggle with his brother’s enemies. The marathon runner, in fact, is also known for being home to one of the goriest scenes in film history, which led director John Schlesinger to intervene heavily in editing, cutting several shots of the torture Babe suffered at the hands of a dentist.
The drama of the famous dentist scene, encapsulated in Goldman’s pages and later shown in the film, is maddeningly intense, physical pain becoming the means of bending an ordinary man unaware that he is in a situation greater than himself. But Babe is no ordinary man, and he makes this clear in one of the film’s best lines: I am a marathon runner, when you run forty kilometers you don’t think about pain.
From being an invisible presence here is where running becomes a valuable ally, able to shift the thresholds of man, shape new limits and capabilities, and become salvation.
With a plot that in several passages appears to be the daughter of Hitchcock’s International Intrigue , Goldman crafts a great story about a “hero by accident,” forced by circumstances to change, grow, and ask more of himself. And running.
Such stories can only happen in New York.
And with marathon runners they work even better.
Andrea Martina