Human Spirit

• The New Yorker
• Reporting & Essays
• The Sporting Scene
• Alberto Salazar and the art of exhaustion. by Malcolm Gladwell

For the first half of the nineteen-eighties, the greatest distance runner in the world was Alberto Salazar. Great distance runners are graceful: they float, landing lightly on their toes and snapping their calves back so that their heels almost touch the tops of their hamstrings. Salazar shuffled like an old man. Salazar’s greatness lay in his desire. Describes the 1978 Falmouth Road Race in which Salazar almost died from his effort to win. Four years of spectacular athletic achievement followed. Then, in 1994, after an absence of almost a decade, Salazar returned to competitive running, to compete in the Comrades ultramarathon, in South Africa. Salazar had never run an ultramarathon. He trained in the cool of Portland, not the swelter of southern Africa. He decided that he wanted to average a six-minute-and-fifteen-second mile. He won, of course. For most of us, slack—the gap between what is possible, under conditions of absolute effort, and actual performance—is unavoidable. We all want to try our hardest, every time. But we can’t.

Salazar could have had a longer career had he pushed himself less. A moderate Salazar never would have come so close to death at Falmouth. But it was the miracle of Falmouth that freed Salazar to run with such abandon. (“I no longer doubted my toughness.”) A moderate Salazar might have run happily and successfully into his thirties. But a moderate Salazar might never have won the New York City Marathon three times. “The pain of running is like the pain of drowning,” Salazar said. “A kind of weariness sets in and you lose the will to fight. What I could do is simply push myself through that exhaustion.”

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