Ode to Starting Lines
Why we need starting lines more than ever.
Mind your face.
Seriously. Don’t lean too far forward—an elbow might rearrange your nose. And be careful of your feet; trip now and you’ll be trampled like a dropped phone in a mosh pit.
Maybe just ... mind everything.
Because here you are, wedged in the thrum of humanity—crammed in a crush of high expectation. Bodies before you, behind you. A jostling, jittery, fidgeting, great exhaling fret of massed musculature, jammed in high hesitation.
Legs flex. Quads ripple. Seconds drip away in last-minute squats, stretches, silent prayers, and farts. Nervous banter flits across the crowd like a low hum of static.
This is a starting line, you see.
And thank God they exist.
Where else, in post-pandemic America, do we gather cheek-to-jowl with strangers on a public street? We, the once-frontier nation, long since sprawled across cul-de-sacs and four-bedroom manses, sequestered in spacious solitude.
Even in cities, the world is Doordashed and Netflixed. Each of us alone, blinking in the blue haze of our devices.
Which is to say we need starting lines. More than ever. We need a bit of hurly-burly: the sweat, the shove, a blistered ripping off of civilization’s iPhone-slick veneer.
It doesn’t have to be a race. I felt the same electricity in a concert hall: conductor’s hands poised mid-air, my lips tasting the brass of my trumpet mouthpiece, elbows pressed against my bandmates, one breath away from sound. That same sacred tension of a start.
That’s how I found myself in San Francisco, soaked to the bone.
A winter storm seeped through the seams of my singlet, cold Pacific rain tickling the brim of my hat before a half marathon. My hamstrings unstretched because I was packed in too tight to stretch them.
Did it feel like a mob?
No, too much purpose. But it looked the part. Dozens across, shoulder to shoulder, corralled in Golden Gate Park, eager bodies steaming in the chill.
The first proper start line I ever felt was at the Chicago Marathon.
Semi-elite accommodation shielded me from the deepest crush, but the sheer human volume stunned me. An ocean of bodies flowed into Millennium Park as if drawn by corporeal magnetism, roadways filled to the brim.
Such congregations in public space feel rare.
Street parades hardly count—too orderly. Protests? Maybe. Political rallies of the totalitarian sort are passé, though with autocracy on the rise goose-stepping brigades might make an appearance again. I doubt it though. Americans lack the hamstring flexibility.
Still. What does it say that starting lines resemble riots?
Sometimes, wedged in the corral, I wonder, Was this what it was like in Paris in ‘68? Or Beijing in ‘89? Or Flanders Fields in ‘17? Or Paris again, during the Commune—workers sweating nervously together tête-à-tête, waiting to scrape with the Versaillais on some bloody Montmartre avenue?
Or closer to home—the Edmund Pettus Bridge in ‘65, hearts pounding, legs coiled, facing down billy clubs and tear gas?
The politics of confrontation is in the DNA of a footrace. Track was invented on the beaches before Troy, at the funeral games of Patroclus. The marathon memorializes a dead Athenian who crowed the slaughter of Persians, then collapsed.
All start at once; Oileus led the race;
The next Ulysses, measuring pace with pace;
Behind him, diligently close, he sped …
Graceful in motion thus, his foe he plies,
And treads each footstep ere the dust can rise …
—The Iliad, Book 23
No lives were on the line in San Francisco. But there was tension.
Because the start of anything worthwhile comes with a familiar pang: Oh, shit! Now it’s real. That Great Big Thing you’ve prepared for was just an idea, a concept, a future. Now it’s here, looming heady and tangible in the awful present.
I’ve stepped over a lot of starting lines. Enough that nowadays a tired little voice rises above the chatter of nerve: “Still doing this, huh? Back at it again with your same old shit, chasing the same old thing?”
It’s not doubt exactly. More like weariness about the other lives I might have lived had I not spent so much time readying to toe the next line.
And then I see it, once again: the open road. What a gift, at any age—possibility.
A lovely thing to consider, even in the cold San Francisco rain.
Even in this moment of bristling tension. The whipcrack of the gun is coming. A horde of potential energy waiting for kinetic release and with it 10,000 dreams set loose.
The gun went off. Forward we sprang. Rushing up the road. Rushing into the great green joy of what might be.
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That is beautifully written! I have stood elbow to elbow at a start line well over a hundred times. I love the collective energy and anticipation that you describe. Now as an older runner, I get in “mom mode” by telling the shy but clearly more fit younger runners behind me or at my side, “Go on, get up front more, you belong up there,” and they always smile and seem grateful for the encouragement. Last year, I also felt this start-line power at a Green Day concert, standing close to others near the stage. Somehow, during adulthood, I stopped seeing live music. But oh my god, this Green Day show was transcendent, because of the shared experience and the power of the band, so many times greater than what we’d see and hear if watching the show alone via a screen. So one of my New Year’s resolutions, along with running goals, is to go to more concerts. Thank you for this ode.
Beautiful. Thank you.