The Runners

The air begins to feel a little thin by thirty kilometres. Mulberry’s Marathon boasts no elevation, no highland trails or mountaintop summits, yet Harold Jolliffe feels as if he’s spent the last four hours climbing Jacob’s Ladder, to the altitudes of daredevils who parachute from shabby planes, and the maniacs who assault 8,000 kilometre mountains…

Killer Mountain

Black Passage

Heaven’s Doorstep

Why, why, why? He would often think, brushing the spicy-noodle powder from his chest while watching documentaries on those oddballs. Why would anybody vacate their lives to conquer a monolith with a name like that?

Why ask for pain?

Why seek it?

Fools.

Such convictions were only validated by the tales of the many lives sacrificed to the altitudes of the free spirit. From the comfort of his baggy oodie, he’d curl snug, scrolling the images of the corpse checkpoints renowned as frozen warnings of dangerous terrains. Preserved in a moment of time that defines them, forever. Alien people, in body and mind of incredible things, and reduced to nothing more than a tourist attraction for the other clinically insane.

Blue Shoes, he kept hearing in his pounding thoughts, as his feet pounded the ground.

Blue shoes would be the designated title for his unsolicited grave site. Inevitably, on this endless road, his lumbering, lanky frame would collapse, and his corpse would remains for eternity, forever considering the harrowing question that was currently permeating his every thought:

Why the fuck am I doing this?

Why? Why? Why?

Only, his body would not remain.

After the children holding out sweeties and stupid signs finished their pointing and laughing, their exacerbated joy will quickly turn to an ominous horror, drawing the biking paramedics to swoon importantly through the crowds to swipe him, and his blue shoes, away….

No checkpoint.

No memory.

Just failure.

An all so fatigued failure…

Why the fuck am I doing this? Why, why, why?

Such were thoughts ensconcing the mind of the runner.

Yet, such thoughts, are also the way they survive…Captivating attention on a manageable misery, retreating the outward senses of vision away from the tarmac three yards away, inwards and inwards, until the zombified vessel looks at the hundreds passing him without seeing them.

Earphones in, vision taken.

Why am I doing this?

Still, thirteen kilometres to go.

Why, why, why?

***

“We have no other choice. This damned Technocracy of a city has too many sensors for us to get the payload moved.”

Only a day prior, Harold had sat, healthy(ish), lazy, happy.

“You can’t even daydream a crime on the streets of Mulberry without the sensors flagging you. Every doorway, alley, corner, traffic light….

We have no other choice…”

That was, Harold would soon learn as his friend presented a trio of paper bibs on the dining room table, the last lazy, happy moment of his life.

“We have to run the Marathon tomorrow!”

Herbert Duckworth, favourite of the Capo and most magnanimous of the idiots gathered in the Air BnB, was outlandish at the best of times. In the rest of his time, he was a-

“You deluded twat!”

A deluded twat.

“Run the marathon?”

Harold made a gesture to his skinny-fat frame as he roared, swathed in the baggy sweats that identified him as appropriately body dysmorphic. “I can barely run my block!”

“It’s our only choice.” Duckworth said, looking no more flattering in his matching black tracksuit.

“You can’t even be arsed to walk to the chippy!” Came the scorn of Douglas Bertholt, besides them. “You want us to run a marathon?”

“The capo needs the payload shifted to the Mossy Side by 1600 tomorrow. If we don’t, the buyers head back North, and he doesn’t get paid…Don’t you know what happens when Artutro Beltran does not get paid?”

They did know. All three of them.

“And if he does get paid,” Duckworth continued, flashing braces with a teenage grin despite his late-twenties age, and his early-forties physique. “So do we.”

He held up a finger, and Harold was sure even that effort broke a bead of sweat from his fearless leader.

“1 million, each.”

“1 million, to take a few pebbles of silver down to the Mossy Side…” Douglas said.

“The reward speaks to the risk in our business.” Harold said. “And the fact I’m considering this speaks to the inhumane terror I am presented with at the thought of Arturo Beltran’s dismay…”

“1700,” He says. “What time does it start?”

“1030. We’re black wave.”

“Ten, ten?” Douglas strained so hard to calculate he almost shit himself. “1030?”

“We five and a half hours to run…How long even is a marathon?”

“42 kilometres.”

“Awwwwwww-”

“26 miles.

“Nooooooooooo.”

“It’s our only choice, boys.”

“Not even a choice.”

“Our only torture.”

“A chosen torture, that we have much more chance of surviving than if we disappoint Beltran…

Here, I split the payload into thirds, and those thirds into thirds. I’m thinking I head out, buy a few trail vests, slap two sacks in the front pockets, and the other one is going down there.”

Little protest from the mules there.

“I’ve had pebbles in worst places.” Douglas said. “But I am still against this.”

“What other alternative do we have? There are Biological Detection Sensors on every alley, corner, tra-”

“Traffic light, I know! But you think those things are gonna stop detecting us because we’re running a fucking marathon?”

Duckworth showed that braced smile again.

“That’s the key, young Douglas. Those sensors track the nefarious elements in a person, the biological precursors to crime…The dark sides of a person’s mind…”

“And?”

“In a marathon,” Harold said. “Everybody is wearing the dark parts of their mind.”

“Correct. We’ll be running next to psychos who choose to do this shit, and hate themselves for doing it slowly!” He put two fingers to his temples as he heaved in the sweet zest of the Silverlight stones. “It’s a course full of demons. A couple of cartel runts will fit right in!”

Harold was skeptical as Herbert fled to find the gels and vests and caffeinated pills the tryhards used to survive. Skeptical, but accepting.

“I think he’s right. I think it’s our only choice.”

So, they sat down, and asked themselves the question:

“If somebody told us, waking up tomorrow, with no training, that if we make it forty kilometres in under five and a half hours, we’ll be millionaires…Would you try?”

In a rare moment, rationale flashed behind Douglas’s eyes.

“I think I would.”

“And how would you do it?”

***

Intervals. Pacing. Refuel. Calculations.

You don’t survive in the slums of Mulberry for a dozen years without a little ingenuity.

You definitely don’t survive without a little grit.

“WHO ARE YOU WHEN EVERYTHING FALLS APART?

WHO ARE YOU IN THE PAIN?”

At twenty five kilometres, he started to think Duckworth might have been getting somewhere.

“EVERYBODY STOPS TALKING! HEADS START DROPPING!”

She was a phenom, this blonde besides him. Hyrox in her blood and bones, kudos in her soul.

“AND I START TAKING MOTHERFUCKING SOULS!”

Her thighs were the size of the arm rests his Nana’s old oak, red-leathered recliners had. Her ars gave him something to chase as the Medics came flying to their first casualty.

Weaaoooohhh.

Their two wheels ate the tarmac in a wholly demoralising way, and the blonde with pig-tails surges on to compete with them.

“I DON’T LIVE OFF THAT HOPE SHIT!” Came the call of a freckled, stout middle-aged boar of man. Easy strides and proud chest, swiping his fruit shoot sized bottle from the volunteer like she is a serf and he is the Emperor.

“Many thanks,” Douglas said as he retrieved his own bottle, slowing down to a trot, with a look to his watch.

“I WISH FOR RAIN! I WISH FOR PAIN!” He shouts.

He sees the Hyrox lady look.

“WHEN THE END IS UNKNOWN!” She continues. “THAT’s WHEN YOU KNOW WHO THE FUCK YOU ARE!”

It’s love at first sight for those psychos.

Well, perhaps not psychos. As much as they wish to be…

Copycats.

And Douglas hates nothing more than Copycat wannabes than coupled copycat wannabes.

Off they went, scrunching their plastics and launching them like they’ve seen the professionals do, deciding their forward rhythm was the most important force planet-wide.

Across the horizon, that destined pair fall in side by side, pushing on.

The anger made Douglas need a shit.

Anger and caffeine..

But with some sweets, and a composing breath, and a check-in with the plan they decided that night before, he regained himself, and was certain as he wondered of his boys in the distance, that Harold and Herbert would have both shirked that plan upon the first roar of the crowd.

***

Herbert had heard of a foreground of mythical locomotion, unfeeling perpetuity, when runners see the whole world lay before them as one single flat road, and they start to feel like they can run forever.

Life, time, death, space, Heaven, Earth and all between.

The flush of motion is a tidal wave through the blood, the breath comes steadily strong, a smooth slash through his consciousness.

The pace of his steps match the techno beat passing between his ears.

Step, step, step. Onse, onse, onse, until he is numb. Flying. Rising. Ascending.

Until the synchronicity of mind, body and soul find that frequency in which the true meaning of things resides, and the barriers to that world above, or besides, behind us, waits.

He kicks his knees, frizzy dreads flying with a pleasant poof of cooling air as he feels the travel of a single sweat bead down the creases of his forehead.

And where had this waited, this glory?

Why was such beauty hiding behind the heaving pains of slanted hills, with only the arthritic knees and inflexible hips of an ingrate for support?

Only moments before he drooled sickly spittle from his lips and leaked enough electrolytes to fertilise a desert…

And now he doesn’t think he will ever stop.

He will run to the end of the baby blue sky, deep as space itself, following the pleasurably smooth plumes of marshmallow clouds, stretching to infinity.

Upwards.

The clouds are his road.

Upwards.

Valkyrie delivers him on the back of a snow-tailed stallion.

Upwards.

To the golden sun.

To the eternally sacred flame, that waits for his essence to finally expire of bodily bounds and return to the Maker’s hearth, to blend with the omnipotent soup of creation and destiny, made molten under searing silver light, and smelted into the blade, the quill and the Flagstaff by which the Maker denotes his Fates.

Arisen, Herbert Duckworth runs.

He runs for Heaven itself.

***

Harold somehow starts again. Every interval, a miracle.

Twenty miles.

The left foot drags, the right foot slaps, and he goes on…

Why? Why? Why?

Why am I doing thi-

Thirty kilometres. How many hours? Still so far to go.

Yet, come so far.

And behind, he feels the breadth of the trails he has left in wake…

5,4,3,2,1!

The countdown, the cheers, as they set away from Central Stadium. A surreal sounding stampede of soothing uniformity in the steps of the hundreds in the black wave.

They still stampede.

Efforts of the dozens laboured by the thirty kilometre mark, with the echoes of their steps still clapping the air behind, a crescendo made by those following the prints Harold and the many runners have left behind.

90,000 people will run a Marathon today! 90,000 people set forth on an adventure that only 1% of the world has the chance to enjoy.

All those early wake up calls.

Those miles in miserable Winter.

Every time you laced your shoes when you didn’t want to.

Every time you surged, wondering where you got the Spirit…

Those moments will carry you today, on this roller coaster.

You will feel atop the world.

You may feel the lowest you’ve ever felt.

Enjoy this journey.

Enjoy this pain…

It was a bizarre sensation, sharing the start line with so many. Each a story, each attributing unique meaning to their marathon, while sharing one orientation. All nodding along as the MC set their mantra.

All knowing they had done the miles. The work.

Except him…

The air begins to feel a little thin.

Harold wills his stubby toes to a skip, and begins.

Adding the miles piled up behind,

He barely feels a smile, deep inside.

And he begins to envy the flocking birds, flying south.

Wondering when his feet will crack, and his soul might fall out.

But then he remembers, back to that start.

The red shirts, with the image of the heart.

The blue shirts for cancer. the papyrus running against suicide.

****

Chills scratch Douglas’s bones.

A breath escaped him, and he is not sure it is his own.

He knew by now, that the skin that wrapped his frame, wasn’t made to play this game.

But then her saw her, bottle in hand,

And it’s laid out, what the Fates have planned.

God, He says. I will take the grave.

Please just send this woman on her way…

“Need a Magneisum?” She asks him.

And it’s over, then.

Life before her.

Red as a beet, red as the Horatian Heart Foundation T-shirt for which she ran.

“Ye-yes.” He admitted. “Magnesium will heal me?”

“If you think it will.”

She turns the clearness of his spring water to a cloudy yellow, makes the guzzle of his fluid fizz down his throat and fill his limbs.

“Ignorant fuckers, aren’t they?”

She smiles, while Douglas squawks.

“They act as if running in under four hours is the same as the Baharan fella trying for a world record.”

On queue, a stout, striding young fellow obviously enjoying a second wind and a sense of grittiness set forth his used bottle like a missile that completely missed the bin and cracked a volunteer in the head.

“I’m starting to wonder,” Douglas said between heaves. “Watching them. If I treat the world as they do.”

“Like what?”

“Like something to achieve.”

“Keep going, 20510!’ Called the crowds, and ripping a smile from his leathery cheeks.

“Take a jelly bean, 20510!’

“Many thanks.”

“Shouldn’t it be something to enjoy?” The woman said.

“You’re a superstar, 20511!’

“You’re almost there!’

“Yes,” Douglas decided, as the marching flag of a pacer trotted upon him, and made an overtake. “Yes, it should.”

And so, watching the five hour pacer disappear upon the horizon, he detached trail vest, withdrew a bag of sweets in which Herbert meticulously counted 1700 calories, and offered them to runner 20511.

“My name is Douglas,” He said. “What is yours?”

***

The angel sat, and beckoned to Herbert Duckworth from her porch.

She looked an awful lot like his sister.

Or what a boy can remember of a sister.

A sister who used to run.

A sister who used to fly.

A sister, who when he cried, out of sight.

Would take him into her room, and hold him for the night.

***

Harold felt it in his bones, and saw that breath that was not his own.

He knew the skin that wrapped his frame, wasn’t made to play this game.

And then he saw him, torch in hand.

Herbert Duckworth at the end of the land.

And he hears: I’ll take the grave…

Please just set them on their way!

And he does not stop placing one foot in front of the other. Running for duration of a song, walking for the next. Running for half a song, walking for two.

He moves forth in clothes of purple, red and blue.

With the blacks and whites of his town.

With the golds on one comrade ahead, and the crimsons of the one behind.

Coming to a conclusion, on that concrete:

The only one that stops you, is you.

***

Douglas began to understand why God died.

She ran ahead at kilometre 38, and he collapsed when she was out of sight.

I’ll take the grave,

He thought of his boys.

Just set them on their way.

***

Push Herb!

They have messages, for those who make it to the last mile.

We are so proud!

Push, on!

***

There was no million waiting at the finish line.

Nothing waits for Harold.

The trackers say Herbert is by the massage tents.

That massage tent has become a Medical outreach.

“Seizures are averaging 170 seconds each, intervals of 90.” Says the medic, hovering over the familiar, flabby body of his best and worst friend.

“Check his pockets for the refuelling sources! Fetch me his medical info, his allergies, someone phone the emergency number, this young man is in danger!”

It is a strange sensation, to be swarmed by a joyful city of runners and supporters, and wishing the whole thing would burst.

Even stranger, watching the medics frisk Herbert’s pockets, vest, waistband, and bring out the packet payloads for which he suffered.

To toil for nothing, but the sadness held for twenty kilometres.

A wanting of something to run for.

Of being colourless.

Of wishing for unendurable pain.

And the ephemeral joy those sufferers trade for in return.

His vision dizzies now the singular objective was done.

Dehydration. Warm day, after all.

But the medic soon has an insight, that Harold laughs upon realising it might be the last he’ll hear.

“Empty packets by the stomach,” They said. “Smooth, silver residue on his skin. Whatever was in there has soaked in.”

“Vaseline?”

“Could be. Similar texture.”

And he starts to smile at that, as his legs seize, and he falls, and his whole body becomes a single cramp.

Least I die on a trip, he tells himself.

The magic of the Silverlight takes him, and shows him the most bizarre of hallucinations.

Shows Douglas spryly hobbling, smiling, besides a woman from the starting line.

Red shirt. Big heart. Phenomenal thighs.

A million waits for his friend at the finish line…