SAMUEL KAMAU WANJIRU (10 November 1986 – 15 May 2011)
A Kenyan athlete who specialized in long distance running

To An Athlete Dying Young
AE Houseman

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields were glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Boston was mental—insanely hot. This was a qualitative heat, a nefarious heat, a heat that pressed down on your shoulders as you stepped off the shuttle bus in Hopkinton for the start of the race, it had you saying goddamn to anyone who might make eye contact but no one would look you in the face, if you’ve ever spent a summer in the city with no a/c then you understand the ways in which heat can affect you even as you sleep, how heat can effect your dreams, how heat will imprint itself on your waking thoughts and actions and take up fearful residence in your imagination, “add a minute of time to your goal for every six degrees over 54 degrees Fahrenheit” and you don’t even know what that means.

My mind failed me long before my legs did. Everything was fine and humming along at 5:45 per mile when about a half an hour in—two hours to go—a voice in my head said, Yoooo…you might have to drop out. Drop the fuck out? But the heat made the shadeless course a pressure cooker, everything was amplified, so intense that when the idea of quitting materialized suddenly the goals of a fast time, a high placing, a strong finish all vanished.

How do you prepare for failure when things are going well—how would I complete the race? There wasn’t an easy answer—it wasn’t a simple question of slowing to a conservative pace; for a handful of reasons I’m in the best shape of my life so it was already decided I would run hard til the doors fell off, confident in my fitness and thinking a late-race fade would only have a relative impact on the clock. And even now my body was performing as it had been trained to do: I stopped for water or an orange slice offered by a spectator along the course, but once I started again I slipped effortlessly back under six minute miles—running fast towards the blow-up I knew would come eventually.

But the heat demanded a fresh calculus and putting together mile after mile in my head, thinking my way through the personal drama that the marathon holds specially for each of us was mentally exhausting. In the end—which is to say, from the beginning when I struggled not to quit—I had to turn my brain off. I had to turn back all thoughts of the race around me, I had to forget the months of training and preparation leading to this epic disappointment and then I had to forget the disappointment itself. I had to move beyond all the sporting life cliches we toss around with ease, I had to erase the dead celeb quotes we fawn over, all the encouraging tumblr jpegs and retweets so readily bandied about now, all the good luck charms and superstitious pre-race rituals, I had to jettison all the motivational slugs put to us by our brands so that we may feel inspired to consume their products. Shortly before I lost the plot completely three beer-bloated college girls on the roadside cheered me on in tie-dyed tank tops that read YOLO and I had to forget them, too. You Only Live Once but all of it was already dead to me, I had to forget all that language in a way that makes it difficult to put down words after the fact, I had to disavow all the times I had profited from something pure and those episodes in which I had run roughly over someone I had once loved well, it’s not too much to say I had to forget myself on the road to Boylston Street. I don’t begrudge any of part of this life and now after the medical tent, after the double IV drip and the packing of my body in ice that brought my temperature back down from 103 degrees Fahrenheit, after a few rounds of frozen margaritas that accomplished what the medical tent could not, after coming back home with nothing to say for myself, after reading about the heat so diligently reported in the press and nonchalantly debated on our social networks, after briefly marveling that the brain, a hard-wrought evolutionary weapon, would understand the danger zone so long before it materialized—how the brain could go so far to shut the whole show down—I’m back to buying new running shoes online and searching for fresh training motivation in the quotes of dead celebrities and is the next race a 5k, a 50k, a 50 mile trail race, but it’s difficult to shake this shadow, the sense of how much is disposable when your brain is off and you’re just a dark crystal skull tapping into the central enterprise of simply running, a skeleton tearing its way through an abnormal heat towards an arbitrary resting place, a random line painted on the ground a little more than 26 miles from the place we all started, running down the road in good faith.

Photo Nouf Al-Jasem
Text Knox Robinson