Rise Against: marathon running and the psychopathology of everyday life

It's all well and good for Americans to say that morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun. In Europe, though, firearms are harder to come by, limiting our chances to shoot and kill those with whom we disagree. So let us assert, for those of us unprivileged by conceal-and-carry legislation, that morality should begin with orality, at the level of the mouth, the tongue, and the everyday conversation. It is in the casual conversation, afterall, that lies get propagated, evil takes hold, and infamy spreads. But not if we take a stand.

The surging popularity of marathons has to be among the most disturbing phenomenons of recent times. To run a marathon is to surrender to a frightening psychosis, to an almost medieval, self-flagellating and self-destructive compulsion. Running a marathons is not good for your body. It is not good for your soul. And yet somehow it has acquired prestige and cachêt, particularly among the young, educated, and upwardly mobile.

How many times in the last year have you let the revelation that someone is "training" for a marathon slip by without comment or rebuke? Even worse, how many times have you actually praised someone, professed your awe and admiration--to their face--for undertaking such a herculean (and purposeless and demented) endeavor?

Society asks us to respect marathon runners, to look up in wonder at their unhinged faces, perhaps even to pledge money to help support their descent into madness. Through some insidious mechanism, marathons have managed to ally themselves with a whole range of worthy causes, and we must reckon AIDS, breast cancer, and the rest to be innocent bystanders of the marathon runner's masochistic rampage. Marathons threaten to give community service itself a bad name, to contaminate the whole constellation of contemporary virtue.

Which is why, the next time your neighbors Derek and Kaitlyn, or your colleagues James and Michael tell you they're training to run a marathon together, you need to take a stand. You don't need to deliver a sermon: even a throw away line can make your resistance clear. Instead of reverentially intoning "wow, that's great", just chuckle and say "wow, that's crazy. Isn't that, like, really bad for you?" It's important to literally use a word like "crazy" or "maniacal", something to keep the register clinical.

Try it out. I swear, it won't come off nearly as rudely as it's intended. Particularly if they're in the late stages of training, marathon runners tend to be pretty dulled to subtle rhetorical warfare. Écrazez l'infâme! Each of us has to do our part.

We are the ones we've been waiting for.