Accountability: Running The Race

But where was I? Oh yes.  Accountability.  Another word to chew.  I am committing, with this running account, to an indelible narrative.  These words are not just to masticate but to keep me honest.  As long as I’m chewing, though, let me spit out some gristle.  Accountability does not mean the ability to account but rather the state of being accountable.  In other words, I am not striving to run every day to demonstrate an ability to run, I am running with purpose towards that larger goal, and by these words a declared goal.  If somehow I do not reach that goal, these words, as long as I keep writing them, will serve to show the effort or, perhaps, the lack thereof.  But of course I have not set out to on this writing/running project merely to reveal successes and shortcomings.  I make this effort with an intended commitment to get to the finish line.
 
Ah yes, the finish line!  The glory, the relief, the grand finale.  That larger goal I’ve been chewing on.  But if I am going to be held accountable there will have to be more to this than running on and writing down, more than this initial reflection of the starting gun (“ready, set, goal!”) and the checkered flag of the final pages.  Readers, skip ahead, see for yourselves if I get there.  But then come back, because I want to share with you the substance of the race.  It is that substance, after all, that keeps me going.
 
Every once in a while, the story is told of a marathon cheater who crosses the finish line but is later discovered to have taken a shortcut.  Why?  Glory, I suppose, and a more immediate gratification.  But hers (I will explain the pronoun) was a race without accountability and she was a racer without much of a story to tell, one who started, finished and then put the book away, or rather had it thrown at her when th cheat was revealed.  Experience tells me — and who doesn’t know this? — that a race with a starting shot and a photo finish but nothing in between isn’t much to talk about.  But I wonder, what was her story, such as it was?

I remember, from the last incarnation I had read of her, that she was a she: my choice of pronoun was not arbitrary, but of course not relevant either, as there were, it turns out, plenty of men and women who cheated before her.  She is this year’s latest example, though, and if I call out her gender it is only because I have nothing else to say about her.  She is an empty book with blank pages.  They caught he when someone noticed she didn’t show up in any mid-race photos.  She didn’t say anything in the article I read, but what could she possibly say?  She was, and forever will  be, a runner without substance, unremarkable, unaccountable, unless... could there be more to her story than the run?
 
Let me give her a paragraph.  Her name, in this latest pose, is Kendall Schlerr.  The race she ran or didn’t run, was the 2015 St. Louis Marathon, and it appears she may not have run it for two years in a row.  This year she was briefly deemed the fastest female of the race; last year she was awarded third place, a feat that until this year had not been questioned.

Last year’s time ostensibly qualified her for the Boston Marathon, which as far as I know she also did not run.  This year’s race time was, it seemed, under three hours, even though, as internet sleuths later discovered, her last half marathon posted was over two and a half hours long.  She fooled people at the St. Louis finish line, though, long enough to get a photo taken with Jackie Joyner Kersee but not long enough to garner the $1,500.00 prize or secure invitations for any more races to come.
 
Which leads back to that question: Why?  Stealing glory and grabbing gratification, yes, but I still have to wonder: for all these words might say, she’s still an empty running suit without a narrative, the ghost the cameras couldn’t capture and, sadly, one of many like her: Mike Rossi, New York, 2015; Tony Gaskill, London, 2010; Dana Patterson, Arizona, 2009; Rosie Ruiz, Boston, 1980; etc, etc. Sure, they have name notoriety and back stories of their own, but they have no story of the run.
 
I will not dwell further on Kendall and her ilk, but their pseudo-stories nonetheless compel me to consider how I might experience that real moment of crossing the marathon finish line: with integrity and accountability, of course, but more than that, with an exhilaration of having realized what I had been dreaming about for miles before; with a satisfaction, surely, after all the regimen that will have to precede the race; with gratitude, beyond all gratification, for God allowing my knees and legs and lungs to hold out; and, undoubtedly, with perspectives that I cannot begin to fathom now and will not know the night before, or at the morning’s alarm, or at mile 14, 20, 25...

I am eager for this moment.  I am eager to finish the race and live in the thrill of the moment, but I am also eager to earn it, for all that it will take.


Whatever work you find to do,
do it with all your might,
for there is neither achievement nor planning nor science,
nor wisdom in Sheol where you are going.
Another thing I have observed under the sun,
that the race is not won by the speediest,
nor the battle by the champions;
it is not the wise who get the food,
nor the intelligent wealth,
nor the learned favor.
Chance and mischance befall them all.
We do not know when our time will come...

— Ecclesiastes 9:10-12a,
   by Qoheleth, the Preacher
   (New Jerusalem Bible, 1985)