The Essential Sheehan: A Lifetime of Running Wisdom from the Legendary Dr. George Sheehan by Sheehan George

Author:Sheehan, George [Sheehan, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rodale Books
Published: 2013-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN I RETURNED TO running some 20 years ago, it had nothing to do with health and fitness. I wanted to relive my competitive years in college. I wanted to feel again that competent, responding body, the excitement of the race, the struggle down the homestretch, neck and neck with an opponent.

I wanted once more to be a hero.

I did not realize then that this drive toward immortality is universal—that I would be followed by millions of others Americans. But I and the other runners who followed me were simply repeating something that had occurred over the ages: men and women answering the ascetic impulse, the inborn need to be heroic.

William James felt that this drive to asceticism was characteristic of the twice-born—those who saw the evil in the world and knew it could only be dealt with on the individual basis, through meeting pain and guilt and death squarely. Mankind, James said, has taken it as reality that the world is made to be a theater for heroism.

If so, we are like so many out-of-work actors. There were few chances, it appears, to find such a part. The call to do an heroic deed occurs rarely, if at all, in day-to-day life. American poet James Dickey once said that you could go throughout your entire life in these United States without ever finding out whether or not you were a coward.

I now have the chance offered to me every week. The race has become my theater for heroism, and of all the races there is no better proscenium—no better stage—for heroism than a marathon.

Each marathon is a stage on which I must write and act out an epic drama—one that, as American philosopher George Santayana said of the football game, involves all the values and virtues of the race. And while the marathon stirs my soul, and every marathon stirs my best, none stirs the heroic more than the Marine Corps Marathon.

The race begins in Arlington National Cemetery. The start is at the foot of the hill where the Iwo Jima monument stands; the finish of the race is at the monument itself. As we make our final preparations, we can see across the Potomac the various monuments we will pass on the course. Surrounded by the graves of heroes, we visit tributes of other heroes along the way.

Getting to the starting line in battle trim is itself a heroic enterprise. Marathon training, for someone who works for their daily bread or raising a family, is little different from going to Marine boot camp.

In one of this earliest works, Meditations of Don Quixote, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset discusses the hero. “The hero,” he wrote, “is someone in continual opposition to the status quo.” As I stood on the line at the Marine Corps Marathon, I was surrounded by such people—no longer satisfied with the status quo, desperately involved in the heroic project of becoming themselves.

I had met many of them the evening before at the clinic I give here every year.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.