Running south through Harlem on Sunday morning, Canada’s Simon Bairu probably looked fine to the crowd lining the course of the New York City Marathon.
A few miles from finishing his first try at the 26.2-mile gauntlet, the most promising Canadian runner of his generation was occupying the top 10 of one of the world’s great foot races. But something wasn’t right. Bairu had begun to feel it a couple of miles back, first a left-to-right wobble in his stride, then a bout of light-headedness. That’s when he began to realize that he was on a collision course with what marathoners know as “the wall,” the bottom of the body’s gas tank, and the end of the road of competitive excellence.
He had trained for two years to arrive at this moment, stacking 120-mile week atop 120-mile week. And yet Bairu’s race was ending in a crushing disappointment, he would conclude later, because he hadn’t gulped down enough carbohydrate-laden sports gel. While he observed some of his competitors eating a packet of energy-laden gel every two miles, he said he took one packet all day. Still, Mile 21 passed, and then Mile 22, and he convinced himself that if he pushed on to the next water station, where he could swallow some more carbs, he’d be fine.
But now the wobble and the light-headedness were accompanied by blurred vision. And now, the 27-year-old from Regina was done.
“My head got light, and it was almost like a drunken stumble. I was conscious, but I wasn’t in (the race),” Bairu was saying over the phone on Tuesday. “The next thing I knew, I was on the ground and my legs were just shaking uncontrollably. They were just twitching.”
His race was over, about three miles from the line, but his ordeal was not. Spectators immediately sprang to his aid. Someone called 9-1-1. Someone else ran to get a blanket. Meanwhile, Bairu said his spinning head felt as though “it was going to explode.”
“I kept telling (the spectators), ‘I’m fine. I just need something to eat right now,’” Bairu said. But smack in the middle of the greatest restaurant city in the world, nobody could scare up so much as a stale bread stick.
When an ambulance arrived, Bairu figured he’d get relief. But the paramedics told him it was against policy to give him anything to eat or drink, although one broke the rules and slipped him some water. Next, strapped on a stretcher in the back of the hospital-bound vehicle, Bairu heard a bang, followed by an only-New-York exchange of f-based pleasantries. His ambulance had collided with a taxi cab!
The paramedics informed him they couldn’t leave the scene. Bairu couldn’t exactly walk; he said he couldn’t feel his legs. So another ambulance had to be called. And by this point somebody, clearly, should have ordered out for Chinese. Alas, it was more than a half-hour later that Bairu finally arrived at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, across Fifth Avenue from the eastern boundary of Central Park, where he was presented with the first speck of post-collapse nutrition: Apple juice and half a turkey sandwich.
He wanted the food. He couldn’t eat much of it.
“My stomach was just destroyed,” said Bairu, who subsisted for most of the next 24 hours on Pedialyte, the electrolyte-replacement drink of diarrhea-stricken infants and pushed-past-the-limit athletes.
Bairu described his mental state as “pretty down” after the race. That’s in part because there is no tomorrow in the marathon. So taxing is the distance that Bairu, like many other up-and-comers, will race its full heft once every 12 months (although next fall, committed to besting the Canadian Olympic-qualifying standard to earn a berth to the 2012 London Games, he plans on skipping hilly New York for a flatter course).
Still, he picked an epic year to try New York. On Sunday the greatest distance runner the world has ever known, Ethiopia’s Haile Gebreselassie, 37, dropped out of the race around Mile 16 and announced his shocking retirement from the sport (an announcement on which he has since wavered).
It wasn’t long after that Bairu learned why the steady-state running he’d been doing in his so-called tempo training — wherein, from his Nike-funded training base in Portland, Ore., he had attempted to approximate race pace — was inadequate. While Bairu had been training to run at succession of miles in 4 minutes and 57 seconds, suddenly his foes reeled one off in 4:29.
“Carnage,” is how Bairu described the result. “I’ve got some work to do.”
It was Bairu’s father, Yehdego — an Eritrean semi-truck driver who, along with Simon’s Ethiopian mother, Abeba, brought their family to Saskatchewan from Saudi Arabia via Greece when Simon was four — who reminded his eldest son that what happened in New York had happened before. At Bairu’s first world junior cross-country championships, this more than a decade ago, Simon ran so hard that he crossed the finish line and collapsed of heat stroke. He couldn’t remember his name. But he still remembers where he placed: 93rd out of a field of 120.
On that day, the prospect of hanging with the world’s best had seemed out of reach. But this year, hardened with the wisdom of disappointment and years of training, Bairu went to the senior world cross-country championships and finished 13th, just a handful of seconds out of the top five.
Fate willing, there will be a next year for a marathoner named Bairu, and he will be hungry enough to feast.
“I hate dropping out of races. It’s probably the one thing I can’t stand,” Bairu said. “But I gave it all I had. I learned so much from this race that I can’t duplicate in practice. . . . The marathon is a different beast. I know that from experience now.”
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