Olympic Diary

The Olympic men's marathon and my first half-marathon are this Sunday, and I can't wait. Last Sunday morning was the Olympic women's marathon. After the race, aglow, I ran 22 miles in dry Hoboken heat, the first hour through the projects and Jersey City Heights, the city without water fountains. My fingertips and earlobes grained with salt, a fractal line of white on black triangled down from my crotch; my muscles locked and the eccentric action on every decline wrenched my left knee; rehydration beyond possibility­only 1:34 to go. My breath took on the four-beat rhythm of the reptile brain. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

I spent the day shivering, drinking water, and waiting for piss, hoping that when it came it would be clear. I spent it sprawling in an ice bath; massaging my calves, kick-shaved by stumbling strides; vaselining my nipples and my inner thighs and my red-stippled inner left knee; working up a taxonomy of my toe blisters: tip bubbles, small-medium-large; top bubbles, discolored and cracking; and ridges, squaring off my feet, connecting bubble to bubble, dot-dash-dot, an abbreviated SOS. I spent it frying protein and boiling carbs, inhaling them while watching my watch, some sports science site said so. I spent Sunday slumped on the couch, watching the Olympics with my water and eggs and rice and sore hip, sorer knee, sorest Achilles, dropping off abruptly, waking to sprinters bumping chests, divers and gymnasts sobbing, volleyball, beach volleyball, "She's off the trampoline!" I had taped the women's marathon, of course, to watch again later, but now I rewound further back, to the men's 10,000 meters, which NBC on Friday the 20th had relegated to the early afternoon.

Gripping, this 10,000, if only for its fierce nationalism: Ethiopia fending off Kenya, three on three, Kenenisa Bekele, Haile Gebrselassie, and Sileshi Sihine rotating the lead, and throwing in surges whenever a Kenyan approaches. Bekele's the world record holder, and just 22; Gebrselassie's the former record holder, and twice the Olympic champion at the distance—no one's ever won it, or any Olympic running event, thrice. But Geb is 31, has a bad Achilles, hurt trying to recover the sprint speed lost to age, hasn't trained in two weeks; the only reason he's racing 10,000, not the marathon, is because his entire country demanded it. (This is a man, after all, about whom Disney had made a movie.) Four miles in, the three are superbly efficient, elbow angles all that distinguish them; maybe Geb should go now, and exploit his presumed strength before Bekele can utilize his speed, but they're a team, and, anyway, maybe Geb really is hurting.

Five miles approach, and Bekele stays beautifully smooth, Sihine's noiseless in second, while Geb's arms go from a pump to a circle, then a gentle flail. Upper-body strength counts for little in distance running, except while fatigued; through the mysteries of biomechanics, the arms drive the legs, the rhythms equal if opposite, and strong arms can stiffen jellied legs; but side-to-side action above means slowed turnover below, wasted motion all through, carrying down to the torso, to the hips and legs, and you're losing a fraction every step. Geb falls back; Bekele and Sihine slow to pull him in, and an Eritrean, Zersenay Tadesse, comes too. But soon enough it's time to go, and the two cut the string they've been yanking for miles: Bekele runs an astonishing 53-second last lap (ten seconds slower than the world record for 400, and he's just run six miles) to an Olympic—record 27:05.10; Sihine gets second, Geb fifth, Tadesse the bronze. The first Kenyan is sixth, and the rest refuse interviews. Ethiopia, Geb in the middle, wraps itself in the flag and takes its lap. Those African distance runners, says Jim Lampley, "May their tradition continue to bring glory to their troubled continent."

And our troubled country, our inglorious tradition? An American, Dan Browne, led the 10,000 at five minutes, but dropped to twelfth by race's end, and so it's long been. Running is the finest sport because the purest, its narratives arising from lone bodies in motion, space in time, with distance running the novel to sprinting's flash fiction. America engineers the world's greatest sprinters, and seemingly half the world's joggers; we're without attention span, except when we're at hard labor. And for prime-time there is the 100-meter dash: all-American ego, muscle, shoe technology and compression suits, the wonder of super-slo-mo, now from 18 angles!; and hundredths of a second slashed like sale prices—9.84, marked down to 9.79, 9.78. "The race to crown the world's fastest man!"

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Khalid Khannouchi and some scattered others aside, the fastest runners in the world are now in Athens. But no world record will be set at any distance above 800 meters, if even that. There's a qualitative difference, psychological as much as physiological, between races run in lanes and those not. Up through 400 meters­one lap, nearly a quarter mile­each of eight runners has his lane; every footfall, every efficiency calculated. But starting with the 800, in which the eight break lanes midway, and increasingly with the 1500 and up, in which large fields waterfall two or three deep along a curved line and break to lane one on the first turn, racing differs from time trialing. There's maybe a six percent energy savings to drafting, tucking in behind and letting another break the air, though there are attendant risks: especially if long legged, you can't as easily set your stride, and in the pack, sometimes, things get ugly.

You could, of course, make a run for it, against air resistance and empty track, but your hard move better take or you're just a rabbit, and here come the headlights. Distance records are run at glorified time trials, against subpar fields. But distance championships are not the time to test natural limits; what matters only are the limitations of the competition. Championship runners thus perform a constant tactical calculus. Relative to those in the race, you may be a sprinter, or a miler; convince the pack to carry you through comfortably to your race within the race, and you have a shot.

Ethiopians, it was said during the men's 10K, are known for their fast 5K and faster finish, and for the Kenyans to win they'd need it hard from the start. That Chinese woman, it was said during Monday's women's 5K, the woman with the nearly straight arms flopping by her sides, Sun Yingjie, can only run from the front, and the field knew that if it dawdled for a couple laps she'd take the bait: the lead, and the stress of setting the pace, trading off only with teammate Xing Huina.

Cut to five minutes later, after the ad break and a furtive edit (even at 1 a.m., can't show 14 minutes 45 seconds of running!): China's nowhere to be seen, only Kenya and Ethiopia. Isabella Ochichi (K.) and Meseret Defar (E.) surge at a mile out in order to break Tirunesh Dibaba (E.) before she can outsprint them; Dibaba won last year's world champs with her blazing final 200. Self-preservation has vanquished petty nationalism. (Or not: The surge may be aimed at world record holder Elvan Abeylegesse, an Ethiopian expatriate now running for Turkey, who's also up near the leaders; for leaving them, Ethiopia hates her.) Dibaba manages third, though Defar has a kick of her own, and leaves behind Dibaba as if she were standing still. The Kenyan collapses at the finish line and while on her knees retches her stomach up, nothing but acid. Take that, you. (Abeylegesse was 12th. "We were really motivated to beat the Turkish girl," Defar said afterward.) Defar is 20, Dibaba 18, Ochichi 23, Abeylegesse 21. No Americans of any age made the final.

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There are three Americans in the women's marathon, though one, Colleen De Reuck, long ran for South Africa. De Reuck is 40, an old lioness; Jen Rhines is a tyro at 29; Deena Kastor, 31, might now be the best female distance runner in American history. She took Joan Benoit's US marathon record, has the country's 10,000 record, among others, and even for a time had the world record in the road 5K. I've been reading about her training: Hundred-and-forty-mile weeks on two runs a day. Two hours in the gym middays. Married her physical therapist; hour and a half massages three times a week. Sleeps 14 hours a day. In her approximately two free daily minutes, writes short stories. Very short. Anticipating Athens's heat and hills­100 degrees Fahrenheit and 50 percent humidity at the start, with a climb from miles 10 to 20 that goes up five floors' worth every mile, a flight a minute, before dropping back down in the last six­she's been running mountains all summer, in a sweat suit. She's been training hard for this. She's chirping about it to the TV in the royal We. I suspect the "We"s refer to her loyal training partners, all men, or to her two teammates. But if it's pretension, I forgive her. After the race she will speak of Nike. So be it. I know she's paying her bills. She has bills. She's no Paula Radcliffe, the world record holder and the most famous athlete in England after Becks and Rooney. She's no Catherine "the Great" Ndereba of Kenya, whose wedding to another Olympian was attended by 20,000, her wedding train 600 feet long, cut into pieces, sold on behalf of AIDS awareness. She's an anonymous American who likes to suffer and nap, so let her queen it up early on a Sunday.

And there's the gun.