[Expat voice] Expat academic becomes distance runner

Distance runners tend by instinct to be rather clique-ish. It’s because they know they are doing something that most other people don’t do; they know they take shape, in the eyes of the Great World, as a kind of odd-ball minority. Not so surprising, then, that Aninne, a colleague/friend at Sabancı University, with whom I reconnected at Runtalya, informed me of the upcoming Golden Horn Half Marathon. Ahh! The Golden Horn! What foreign resident of Turkey can resist the enchantment of that name, that place? Pierre Loti couldn’t, and nor could I. Aninne’s news, I believe, was really the beginning of my beneficent addiction to distance running. The Antalya experience was great. I walked away from the race, with my running buddy Guillaume, through Kaleiçi, which I’ve always loved. But the Horn, the Horn! It pierced me like a junkie’s needle.

The trouble with training

As it turned out, however, the race at the Horn was not my next event. You see, once I set my sights on the half-marathon distance, I encountered a wee problem with maintaining my addiction: I like racing, which is nervy and exciting, but I don’t so much like training, which can be quite ho-hum dull and rather too much like working for a living. My training schedule for the İstanbul race required, in addition to three or four shorter sessions, one long run per week, each Sunday. On Sunday, April 4, I was scheduled to do 18 kilometers -- just ho-hum training. But then, on the MaratonTürk website (a newly discovered aspect of my addiction), I learned of the Tarsus Half Marathon, and bingo! An inspired and inspiring idea: why not skip-and-prance through a fun and fabulous 21.1K rather than slogging through an 18-kilometer training session? So, on Sunday, April 4, I was down near the south coast participating in the 6th annual Tarsus International Half Marathon. I don’t know if I happened to run over or across the long-buried remains of the ancient road to Damascus; I do know that I did not have a life-transforming confrontation with God, of the sort that converted Christian-persecutor Saul of Tarsus into the apostle Paul (on that ancient road to Damascus that I may or may not almost have touched). I did, however, fulfill my secret ambition of completing my first half marathon in under two hours; indeed, my time was 1:55:48. Was I pleased? Yes, I was pleased.

It was in anticipation of the İstanbul race that I first conceived of distance running in Turkey as a kind of “active tourism.” On Sunday, April 25, as I ran the Golden Horn Half Marathon in 1 hour, 50 minutes, 15 seconds (yahoo!), I remember best the lingering view of Galata Bridge -- peacefully aglow in the mid-morning light and bristling as always with fishing poles. But I also recall being approached, just before the start of the race at the Horn, by a smiling, pleasant-looking man who wanted to know if I was in fact the person that I am. He’d seen my photo in the Bilkent News, and -- whoop-dee-doo! – he’d actually read the articles on distance running that I had published there! Thus, I met Ali Selçuk, computer science professor, Bilkent University. I also met his research colleague and friend, Orhun Kara, a mathematician, graduated from Bilkent University. Now, as a scholar of literature I very seldom get a chance to observe such creatures in their offices or labs, and very, very, very seldom do I encounter them in the wild. So I looked them over well. And I realized I was discovering an important feature of distance running events: you meet people that you otherwise wouldn’t.

But Ali and Orhun are not my only distance-running connections, nor even my first. About a week earlier, I’d been contacted by Joseph Addison -- not, however, by Joseph Addison, celebrated 18th century English man of letters. No, no, it’s better than that. My Joseph Addison is a young American working as a language teacher in Bilkent University School of English Language (BUSEL), an Amherst graduate and a fellow literary scholar (bravo!), AND -- Bilkent’s current champion Roadrunner (meep! meep!) or if you prefer, Speedy Gonzales (ariba! ariba! andale!), whose dust all the rest of us had been eating during Bilkent’s Republic Run in October. I learned that Mr. Addison would defend his title at Bilkent’s upcoming Spring Run -- at 3.5K, a bit short for my newly acquired, half-marathon-if-you-please tastes, but because I knew that I was now several kilos lighter and quite a bit faster than I had been in October, I boldly, but congenially, told Mr. Addison that he’d better watch his back.

Cheeky bravado

By race day, I was very much hoping that everyone who’d heard about my challenge had recognized it as mere cheeky bravado. I told Joe, as we all were clustering around the start line, that my real ambition was not to lose sight of him before I had reached the East Campus Security Checkpoint (very near the start of the race). But then, well, the ground is loose and rutted at the start of the Bilkent Run, and so I was looking at my feet, not wanting to twist an ankle and thus jeopardize my splendid athletic career, and so... well... I never saw him. Not even as a quick blinding flash of light. Not even as a smoke trail. I don’t think I even got to eat his dust; his dust would have resettled by the time I came along. Just after I passed the Security Checkpoint, I looked off into the distance and saw this little, tiny, bustling critter already more than halfway across the long uphill road to the Music Faculty Building and looking quite all-by-itself and lonesome. That probably was Joe.

The female champion, Emily Feenstra, a Bryn Mawr graduate and workmate of Joe’s, appeared at my shoulder about one-third into the race distance, on that troublesome uphill road to the Halls of Music. (I had started as fast as I possibly could and thus had started out ahead of her!) “How’s it going?” she asks pleasantly. (You’d have thought we were drinking tea together.) Maintaining my best conversational tone, I say, puff! pant! “Not well” -- pant! -- “I can do distance” -- gasp! pant! -- “Can’t, it seems, do speed” -- gasp! She rejoins, “Me neither.” And then Emily ran along with me for a while, just a little while, and showed a true champion’s grace by saying, just before loping off to her uncontested victory, “Hill’s almost finished.” This was intended to make me feel better, and it did.

After the race, Bilkent Sports Director Hayri Özkan elected me to be an awarder of medals. That was nice of him. In a way. The thing is, it made me feel a bit like Shakespeare’s aged King Lear (whose sad story I’d been teaching a few weeks earlier). There I was, dividing my racing kingdom into three (gold, silver, bronze), and conferring the portions on “younger strengths,” so that I, thus “unburdened,” would be free to “crawl toward death.” But I must say I enjoyed being a medal awarder and enjoyed getting my own bronze medal (in my age category). And so I also must say, to all those “younger strengths” -- I’m not dead yet!