'Did Not Start'
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The other day I found myself wishing for the sudden, mass disappearance of every bicyclist in New York City.
To explain: Admission to the marathon here is democratic, but you have to play the game. The race’s organizer, New York Road Runners, holds other races throughout the year, in the city and nearby. Once you run nine of these, and volunteer at one, you’re in the next year’s marathon. (I’m also participating this fall, through the other popular route of raising money for a charity.)
Sunday was going to be my fifth race of the nine. But this one was on the far side of the Hudson River, and I’d failed to account for an unfortunate fact of life in my beloved town, which is that it’s a shit show. My boyfriend and I drove in his car to Lower Manhattan, the midpoint of our journey, and there found—not by means of, say, a sign, or even Google Maps, just direct observation—that every east-west street was blocked off. As we snaked our way south at an agonizing pace, the reason became visible: hordes of cyclists, lit from the side in golden mid-latitude sun, halted shoulder to shoulder in the starting waves of the Five Boro Bike Tour.
Eventually it became clear that wherever the traffic snake was going, we would not make it around the cyclists and to New Jersey on time, so we peeled off and spent the morning eating pastries. In itself not a bad outcome, and yet when I pulled up my account on the Road Runners site later that day, the status listed for the race I’d missed was stinging: “Did Not Start.”
This is an unathletic phrase. For me its resonance is specific and existential: It proposes a whole other timeline. Did not start riding a hand-me-down bicycle on the sandy path in Venice Beach in 2006. Did not start again after falling off and breaking a leg. Did not start, 15 years later, to shake the conviction that running couldn’t be done on battered bones.
And, related: did not start writing the novel—just allowed it to percolate into oblivion. Did not start sending a newsletter about all of the above, the relationship of the body to its creative artifacts, and thus did not start the other projects that stemmed from conversations with people who read it, and on and on.
So many meaningful endeavors hinge delicately on a nearly fifty-fifty split of likelihoods, that we start and that we don’t. The real mechanics of human will are mysterious, but everyone knows the sensation of desiring to do something and also resisting it, of having to push yourself over the edge. Did not start is what happens when you can’t get to 51.
It happens all the time, and no doubt many of the things we do not start are things we turn out to be spared, that would have been wastes of time or worse; yet the peak experiences of embodiment, the most memorable of the things that only a conscious physical being could feel—isn’t it quite often that these arise from things we did start, from the times we figured out how to?
It’s only May, and there’ll be time for all nine races. I expect “Did Not Start” to be a rare disappointment. Missing that event was no big tragedy. It’s just an occasion to think. We always live in the reality of what we started.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.