英语书籍：The Coolest Race On Earth（二）

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THE COOLEST RACE ON EARTH
Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the
Antarctica Marathon
by John Hanc (nonfiction)

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
ISBN: 9781556527388
Copyright (c) 2009 by John Hanc
RACE (Part 2 of 5)
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Yes, it took me almost half a century to decide that I really wanted
to do this. Looking back, the urge for some kind of adventure in a
really faraway place started as a child growing up in suburban Long
Island, New York. I remember reading books about travel to the
"North" Pole, but I was only vaguely aware that there was another
pole at the bottom of the Earth. The real frontier that intrigued me
involved not the blank spaces that cover the top and bottom of the
Earth but the infinitely vast spaces that surround the entire
planet.

In May 1961 my first-grade class had gathered in the cafeteria with
the rest of the children in the aptly named Corona Avenue Elementary
School to watch Alan Shepard go soaring into the morning sky aboard
"Freedom 7." I sat, mouth agape, no doubt dribbling milk on my chin.
From that moment I had yearned to be an astronaut. I read everything
I could, collected everything about the space program I could find,
and memorized the flight crew assignments for the Mercury, Gemini,
and early Apollo missions. I still know the Gemini teams by heart
and will happily recite them to anyone willing to listen (there are,
alas, few takers). No matter, Grissom and Young, Borman and Lovell,
McDivitt and White...to me, they're as memorable as Orville and
Wilbur or, for that matter, baseball's Tinker, Evers, and Chance
were to earlier generations. I also liked reading the NASA pre-
dictions of the time, which ended up in "Life" magazine, or maybe
"Highlights for Children"--and must have been written by some guy in
the space agency's PR department who was told to just crank out
whatever he dreamed up, because in these articles there was talk
about a lunar base being established by the 1980s, a Mars expedition
in the 1990s, and perhaps the first human colonists on Mars early in
the twenty-first century. I took it all as gospel and began making
plans for my life as a Martian colonist. Being born in the mid-
twentieth century, I thought, was perfect timing! I was all set for
a rewarding career in interplanetary exploration when I learned that
in order to get into astronaut school, you needed to be really,
really good at math. I was really, really bad really, really early
on. And as the math got harder, my dreams of space-flight went into
their own orbital decay.

My disenchantment grew as I got older and the electrifying first
Apollo missions turned into the ho-hum later ones where the guys
(including my old hero Alan Shepard) played that most conventional
of games, golf. Then came Skylab and the Space Shuttle, and while it
still gives my heart a rise to watch a launch, American space
exploration suddenly became unimaginative, humdrum, and about as
appealing as working in a cramped warehouse. It also became
increasingly apparent that there would be few if any opportunities
for someone like me to ever experience space-flight, something that
had seemed inevitable to me as a kid.

With outer space off the list, my idea of an adventurous place to go
became California--where, some would say, many people from outer
space actually lived. Alas, plans to drive or hitch there like Jack
Kerouac evaporated with my need to obtain gainful employment upon
graduation from college (a college, I should add, that did not
require math for graduation).

Settling into newspaper work, first at a weekly "alternative" paper
in Boston, where I'd gone to college, and later, back home at the
big Long Island daily "Newsday," I was still restless. I'd been
running for a few years, mostly to complement my weight training,
and I'd begun to enjoy it and demonstrate some very, very modest
proficiency in it--meaning, I suppose, that I didn't detest it or
pass out while doing it.

In summer 1985 I separated from my wife, and, looking for something
to fill the time that had previously been taken up by arguing, I
decided to train for a marathon. Just before Labor Day I began my
training for the Marine Corps Marathon, held in Washington, D.C., in
October. It was an absurdly short time to prepare for a marathon,
and the regimen of long runs, track work, and lunchtime runs--we
used to change and shower in the pressmen's locker room of
"Newsday," surrounded by two-story-high rolls of newsprint--took
their toll. At night, exhausted by the training, alone in my
basement apartment, I couldn't do much of anything except sprawl out
in front of the TV. What I watched, on my local public television
channel, was a seven-part British miniseries based on a famous book
by Roland Huntford, "The Last Place on Earth." This was the riveting
(and, I would later learn, highly revisionist) account of the race
for the South Pole in 1912 between Roald Amundsen of Norway and
English explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, the latter of whom
died in the attempt. Well-written and well-acted, it was filled with
gripping scenes in the Antarctic, which, I began to grasp, was an
entire continent. My first marathon turned out to be a Scott-like
disaster, with the notable exception that I didn't freeze to death
in D.C. I did, however, do almost everything wrong: didn't train
long enough (only eight weeks), didn't have a race plan (just went
flying out from the start when the gun was fired), never ate
breakfast the morning of the race (and bonked). I finished, in great
pain, in a time of three hours and fifty-six minutes. As I limped
past the Iwo Jima Memorial--the finish line of the race--I swore I'd
never run another marathon.

That vow was quickly broken. As it does for many, the marathon had
gotten under my skin, and I was determined to get it right.
"Everyman's Everest" is how former Boston Marathon winner and
"Runner's World" editor Amby Burfoot describes it, the challenge of
running considerably farther than is either comfortable or
warranted--in the fastest time you can. Fred Lebow, the visionary
founder of the New York City Marathon, understood the appeal of the
event better than almost anyone. "The marathon is a charismatic
event," he said. "It has everything. It has drama. It has
competition. It has camaraderie. It has heroism."

And it had me. I was soon a devoted fitness Nazi, training with a
group of very talented local runners (all of them more talented than
I) who became my close friends and colleagues in our annual marathon
quest. The years, and the races, went by. The sting of divorce
disappeared; a new and happier union was formed. A child arrived.
Middle age was reached, and a career--granted, an unconventional one
that involved a sort of mishmash of teaching, writing, and this
newfound passion of running--was established. Strangely, the kind of
stories I became known for (in a word, "quirky") allowed me to
pursue some of the adventurous travel I had craved as a younger man.
Writing for "Newsday," "Runner's World" magazine, and other
publications, I earned a reputation for being willing to train three
months and then hop on a plane--or two or three--in order to run
26.2 miles in some very unusual places and then hop back on a plane
and write about it. My travels have taken me to a former war zone
(Belfast), a formerly Communist capital (Prague), a Civil War
battlefield that is supposedly haunted (Chickamauga, Georgia), and a
marathon held in the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico, where the
heat was so intense that I saw flying saucers orbiting my head at
the finish line.



===========作者John Hanc简介===========

John Hanc is a contributing editor to "Runner's World" and has also
published in the "New York Times," "Smithsonian," "Family Circle,"
"Newsday," and "Boston Globe Magazine." Hanc teaches writing at the
New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, is the author of
seven previous books, and has completed 24 marathons.