I heard Bob Dylan’s lines, “The streets of Rome/ are filled with rubble/ ancient footprints everywhere…” when I was a young man , maybe I was seventeen. Even so, I thought I knew what he meant. I have loved that line ever since with its implication that things past are here with us in the present, that we are informed by, driven by, the daily creation of our own lives, our own art.

I was fourteen when I saw my first marathon. I watched it on an old black and white Dumont TV, in the dining room of the house where I grew up. I was idly watching the 1960 Olympics in Rome, wasting time, chillin’ you might say, when I came upon the marathon. The race was run at 5:30 in the evening to lessen the effects of the heat of the day during the Roman summer. The organizers lit the route with hundreds of torches. Abebe Bikila, an Ethiopian policeman, a palace guard in the service of the Emperor Haile Selassie, won while running in his bare feet. I remember the black and white screen, the light of torchbearers beside the road, the barefoot African running past the ruins of the Coliseum, arms low by his side, running easily, relentlessly. He seemed in my youthful imagination to be like the sirocco wind I had read about, bringing the sense of the desert into the dimly lit dining room, cleansing the earth and sky, leaving a hint of stories past, of dreams and glory, escape, of the seductive mystery of some other place.

I also remember that in my confused teenage night (weren’t we all confused in those years) I began to dream that I would go to Rome. Maybe I would get there for the marathon as an event, or maybe it was just an idea, an attitude I was after. I imagined me cruising past the Coliseum, free and running easy, everything that troubled me in the rear view mirror.

It seems this early morning that it will come to pass, that with Dylan’s lines in my head, his song on the IPod, I will line up after sunrise, to run a marathon through the streets of Rome.

Bikila’s accomplishments are legendary. He won 12 out of the 14 marathons he ran. He was the first African to win gold at a modern Olympics, the first to repeat a marathon victory in consecutive Olympics when he won in Tokyo. Even this morning, as I read the marathon magazine for tomorrow’s race, his name is included not only as the winner of the marathon all those years ago, but as a symbol of what the miles can come to represent for any of us, for all of us who put in the miles and show up on the day. He is a hero to this day in Ethiopia and wherever runners gather. For me this early morning he is still present, graceful, outlined in courage, glorious, unfathomable, a freeze frame carried forward from that long ago night.

It is a few hours before the race and I am slowly going into the place where I go before an event. It is a quiet place, sometimes sad, often melancholic, visited by the memories of what it has cost in miles, in obstacles overcome, in absent friends, in the time gone by to get here. There is a slow building of clarity of purpose, respect for the journey and a sense of connection to the people I have met along the way.

Eventually, as it must if one is to do this uncommon thing, it seems like everything that has come before is gone. That there is only now. I like what James Shapiro says in Meditations in the Breakdown Lane, his story of running across America, “Past life is gone, future life will never come, so there is only the doing.” he wrote. “I could talk for ten thousand years, but it wouldn’t carry me one inch closer.” For me that would be something about reading ten thousand running books or training programs (are there that many?), but with Shapiro, it brings me not one inch closer.

I open the patio doors in the hotel room and watch night sky slowly fade. There is mist in the trees, the seven hills are stark in the distance, the streets oddly quiet for a city that rarely sleeps. There is the smell of bread baking and the far off sounds of barking dogs. So many hours to go before the run. I’ve laid out my clothes, checked all the pockets in my Race Readies for goo and the requisite Ibuprofen. I’ve done it ten times tonight, twenty. It is way too early to call my friends who will be running the race with me, or more accurately, at the same time. I can’t figure out the time difference from Rome to Ottawa where my daughter is, so I can’t call her nor can I call my son who is playing poker in Vegas. So, now it is time to put on my headphones, dial up Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton, drink some espresso prepared by the gracious night porter and get inside what’s coming. Bob and Eric and I are getting it together, “…knockin’ on heaven’s door”. I have never figured out why that song or the ritual but I guess I don’t have to.

The race begins at 9:00 AM, which is normally too late in the day for me to start a long run. My habit is to be out before daylight and run into the sunrise. I go down to the hotel lobby after several hours of sky watching, and begin to pace. I talk with Jeremy and Julie who are still up; with Erin’s brother Anthony, who will run the race in a time of four hours. Together we watch as the support crew begins to filter in. John and Ginger, Kristi and Erin, the various Susan’s, Tom and Louise who are parents to several of the group, all here for the trip to Rome;their first to Europe, here for the sights and sounds and later for the food and wine of Tuscany, but before all that, here for the marathon support thing.

Mark and Erin, with whom I shared the Avenue of the Giants and so much more, Aura and Judith, Team in Training alumni, Anthony and I take a couple of cabs to the start. The city is deserted, the streets empty, resonant. The locals say that it is the only time, the best time, to see Rome; on marathon day when the center is closed for the race. It is still dark when we arrive at the starting area at the Coliseum. Unbelievable, the Coliseum, the Forum in the distance, runners slowly gathering, the sun rising fiery over the ancient walls and of course, the blue porta potties. This being Europe, there is also a low level wall where apparently it is required that all men pee in some nod to tradition or, more likely, the fact that there are not very many porta potties.

The organization seemed quirky, the staging area separated from the course in a serpentine gate system, the buses for the bags parked in a long line, men to the front, women way to the back, protected from the crowd by a long fence. It all works out, runners figuring out, as they always do, what they need, but it is very different from the sometimes obessional organization of US events. The race began with hand waving and shouting, cheering sections from the roadway above; 10, 000 runners, we are off to circle the Coliseum and into the town. I knew almost immediately that this wasn’t my day. The foot pain that has become a neuroma and which normally holds off until twenty plus miles started in by the end of mile one. Between the cobblestones, the heat and the extra weight I am doomed, it seems, to forever carry (sigh) the pain becomes a constant companion.

I swore to myself after the run at Avenue of the Giants last May, that I would not run a city marathon ever again. Something about the trees going all the way to heaven and the silence that surrounds every footfall in the deep forest. But here I am in the ancient/modern streets of Rome, where there are buildings are as old as the redwoods I ran through and the silence is in cobblestone roadways underfoot. The sightlines, some unchanged since Caesar’s armies marched through the hills to the city, are riveting, breathtaking. For centuries the soldiers came, bearing news of victories in far off lands, telling tales of great valor and lost heroes, of comrades left in foreign soil, Pax Romana, Rome the eternal. After the conquering heroes came the vanquished armies running from the Goths and the Mongolian Khans, the decadent centuries, Constantine and the burgeoning church, the marauding crusaders, the Knights Templar, the relentless pursuit of art and commerce, DaVinci, Caravaggio, the Borgias, and later, Mussolini, the Sixth Army, pizza and eventually, Abebe Bikila. Everywhere along the route are the remnants of that astonishing parade of days.

Brass bands in traditional Italian costume announce our passage as we circle the Coliseum. We head out past Michelangelo’s Campidiglio, an enormous plaza. Once the seat of government and religion in Rome, it is “one of the most significant contributions ever made in the history of urban planning. The hill’s importance as a sacred site in antiquity had been largely forgotten…” says one writer of the Campidiglio. Not so I think. The sacred feeling of it remains, palpable in the rising heat of the morning, backlit by the sun. On to the Circo Massimo, Circus Maximus, built in the time of the Etruscan kings, enlarged by the Romans, restored by Constantine and now a public garden, misted, glowing on this morning; peaceful now, where there were once 200,000 spectators watching the chariots race.

Past the gardens, then a turn up along the Tiber and past the Sinagoga. It was built in 1897-1904 by architects Asvaldo Armanni and Vincenzo Costa or so I am told by one the runners passing me by. Of more interest to me is that on the wall facing the Tiber the big memorial tablets remind one of the martyrdom of Roman Jews in Nazi concentration camps. So much blood in this city, not all of it ancient, but so much of it remembered, honored, part of the eternal struggle that has been waged here for the souls of men. My own struggle seems inconsequential, Quixotic, but even so, the continuing on is a part of the fabric of this city, a tiny part of the seeking out of what is best in me under the knowing gaze of those who came before.

We cross the river and wind our way past St Peter’s Basilica, past the Sistine Chapel, not yet filled with worshippers, empty, waiting, poignant with an ineffable sense of grace.
Down the streets and along the river, we run past the Foro Italico, a grand, imperial complex that survived Mussolini and became part of the Olympic Stadium Village. It is hotter now and the cobblestones have done their work. My foot which was uncomfortable in mile one is now very painful and my run walk strategy is not any longer a matter of choice. Run a little, walk until the pain subsides. Run some more.

At one of the water stops I feel a hand in my back, shoving me out of the way. I get furious in an instant and turn on the culprit, who it turns out is older than I am, speaks no English and has a delightful smile in the face of my unconscionable rage. This has never happened to me in a race before and it leaves me very uncomfortable. A little while later a couple of guys come up to me and by means of gesture and much effort at speaking English, tell me that it is nothing. That the old man didn’t mean anything by it, that he stumbled, that he is from Germany like they are and is running in Rome to get ready to run in America. In New York, they say. I apologize for my attitude, telling them I am from New York which causes much laughing especially when they tell the old man. All’s well and we run together for several miles.

By the half I have decided to quit, but I keep running anyway. Just to the next kilometer sign I say to myself. I’ll quit then. After a couple more “next kilometer” promises, I begin to realize that I love the kilometer signs since they come more quickly than the mile signs and it seems so much more impressive to have run 20 something rather than twelve something. This has become a long day.

The course heads back to the city center and we pass the Belle Arti, the Piazza Navona, and eventually we get to the Piazza di Spagna, home to Lord Byron and Keats. The Spanish Steps are crowded with tourists but no less inspiring for that. I remember, as I run by oh so slowly, going there the night before, the stairs awash in the moonlight, the crowds gone, the words beneath the stones for all time, there for the lovers and the dreamers of any time, of any age. The Sunday morning streets are overflowing with pedestrians who quite rightfully believe that Sunday is for espresso and fresh bread at the cafes, and then some sightseeing, some shopping. We, however, are still running. It is an odd feeling, somehow consistent, that in this most complex of places, life and sport are interwoven, not as metaphor but as “get out of my way, I’m running heah, can’t you see this is killing me”. The Trevi fountains are sparkling in the noon sun, mocking me with their tranquility,their ease. The crowds are lively and sometimes they even get out of the way. This is less of a problem if you are a front runner but if you are me, a back-of-the-pack runner; it has its moments to be sure.

Past the Campidiglio again and there we are a 35K. The road widens out and heads away from the Coliseum, a tease if ever there was one. Down the road, past the water stop when suddenly there are Kristi and Erin , water in hand, looking great, falling in step, saying all the right things. Across the way Mark is still running, his son Jeremy running alongside, taking pictures, being there. I don’t see Erin, Marks’s wife, but I am told that she is still moving, still running, still getting it done. Mark hurt his ankle before we got to Rome and this has been a hellacious day. I can see it from across the roadway. It is in his face, in his stride. He keeps going, the finish line just out of sight, the day belongs to those that stay in the arena, that contend, that do what they can with what they’ve got.

For reasons that are obvious to me if no one else, I can’t help but put Erin and Kristi into Leonard Cohen’s song, Sisters of Mercy, which begins with “The sisters of mercy are not departed or gone/ they were waiting for me/ when I thought that I just can’t go on…” and so it was at 35K and 36 and so on. I always thought that Cohen was saying that these strangers knew him, saw him clearly, that he was revealed to them, that he was set free by their knowledge of him, that all his artifice was gone. So it was for me, nothing left to hide, no ability to hide it, speaking things out loud better left unsaid, seeking absolution, a necessary part of the leaving behind, of the cleansing and clarity that all such effort brings. We are all of us revealed in the last miles of a marathon. Ask anyone who has stood at the finish and watched the faces of the finishers.

Down to the turn around and back to the Coliseum ever closer, 39K, 40, 41, and over the last rise and down the hill to home. Much of the crowd has dispersed but no matter. There are John and Ginger, soon to be married; hands full of drinks and food, smiles and something like admiration mixed with a sense of “what is wrong with you people” in their eyes. Tom and Louise are there, Tom’s white hair a compliment to a smile that gladdens my heart. The run is done, the finishers’ medal around my neck, the pain and soreness to come. But for now, briefly, there are private tears… it has been a long, long journey from the old black and white in the dining room, down so many wrong roads, past all the empty mornings, the desperate broken midnights; a life lived in addiction, despairing of hope, lost somewhere under a jagged rainbow, my own personal metaphor for the promise and the failure inside the journey to the marathon. All that is long gone; the boy inside the man has lived to run his far off dream.

The Rome Marathon was for me the culmination of a lifetime of dreaming of  both a way out and ultimately, of a way in. I knew again that day that in the running there is something that lives on levels well beyond my ability to articulate. It feels like connection. In the pain and beauty of the miles, both on race day and in the preparation, the continuity/community/ solitude of the journey dissolves the barriers between us as people. We look at the other runners and see everyone we ever knew, and beyond our imagining, on levels we rarely touch, we love them, we forgive them their sins, as we begin to forgive our own. We, each us, knows something of value about the other, something of what we have been through, possibly even what we dream of being. The run is solitary, the victory entirely personal, but the community exists in the effort put out, in the inhale of the moment, in the exhale of a million breaths, woven together in the light of the day. Our day. We have shared life itself in some intangible form as we endure. We overcome our worst fears as we embrace our greatest aspirations, the best parts of who we are. We are reassured of our place in the world and of our connection to the forces of the spirit that make us holy, that make us altogether human.