SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2010
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They were looking for a reason to get rid of me because I appear on Fox News.” — Juan Williams, who was fired from National Public Radio after saying on Fox News that he gets “nervous” when people on planes wear “Muslim garb”
Before the marathon, an ode to the losers
by Alex Hutchinson
he long loop from Arlington National Cemetery to the fin- ish line at the Iwo Jima Memo- rial will take runners on a 26.2-mile tour next Sunday of
most of the city’s major icons. But the es- sence of the Marine Corps Marathon will be found at two more prosaic spots — the corner of 14th and Madison Drive, in the shadow of the Washington Monu- ment, and the 14th Street bridge. That’s where, amid thinning crowds and impa- tient motorists, you can witness failure in action. The race issues 30,000 highly coveted entries annually (they sold out in six days this year), yet last year’s record- breaking field boasted only 21,405 fin- ishers. For some of the 8,595 lost souls, their fate was decided at “The Gauntlet” (Mile 17.5) or “Beat the Bridge”(Mile 20), where runners are plucked from the course if they fall below a 14-minutes- per-mile pace. To suffer such a humiliating end, pre- sumably after months of training, is not something I would wish on anyone. But these time cutoffs aren’t just a necessary evil to win approval for road closures. Whether or not the organizers realize it, they’re a crucial part of the event’s char- acter and appeal. Year after year, the people who fail to meet them are the race’s unacknowledged (and un-med- aled) heroes.
Of course, not everyone sees this sil- ver lining. Runners from a Canadian group called Jean’s Marines cut four miles from the course in 2005 by dash- ing across the Mall after their coach, To- ronto physician Jean Marmoreo, warned them that they were in danger of missing the 14th Street bridge cutoff. Even more than the cheating, what bothered people was Marmoreo’s logic afterward — that it was the effort that should earn a medal, not the actual re- sult.
Still, course closure remains contro- versial. “I resent cut-off times,” one read- er wrote during a pre-Marine Corps Marathon live chat on the Washington Post Web site in 2007. “I think they’re elitist . . . and they discourage participa- tion. If I pay to enter a race, I should not be kicked off the course just because I can’t run fast.” You could counter this argument by pointing to traffic concerns. Last year’s final finisher, even with the cutoff times in force, exited Route 110 nearly 71
⁄2
hours after the starting gun. That’s how I would have responded — until this past May. That’s when I went to South Africa to cover the Comrades Marathon, a hilly, 55-mile slog that’s widely considered the most prestigious ultra-distance race in the world. It has five cutoff points along the route de- signed to ensure that the runners — all of whom qualify by, at a minimum, com- pleting a standard marathon in less than five hours — will reach the finish line within 12 hours, a pace of about 13 min- utes per mile. As the sun set after a long, hot race
day, exhausted runners continued to stream (or stagger) into Durban’s cricket stadium, a few blocks from the Indian Ocean. As the final minutes before the 12-hour limit ticked away, the race direc- tor walked to the finish line, stood with his back to the oncoming runners and pointed a starter’s pistol skyward, while thousands of spectators exhorted the re- maining competitors to sprint. With one minute left, a limping run- ner with knee-high socks stopped to stretch his right calf less than 100 yards from the finish. He hobbled a few more steps, then stopped again, leaning against a barrier at the side of the course. He wouldn’t make it. I was watching with a group of inter-
national runners who had already fin- ished and were basking in the pleasant afterglow of a difficult job well done. Having devoted the better part of a year to preparing for the race, they knew how much the runners still out on the course had invested in this moment. A Canadi- an woman beside me turned away. “I cried last year,” she explained. “It’s just too much to watch.” As the crowd counted down the final seconds, one man staggered across the line just as the gun fired, earning an offi- cial time of 11:59:59. Mere strides behind him, another man caromed off the burly course marshals who had linked arms to barricade the finish chute, while vuvuze- las sounded a mocking raspberry of de- feat. The runners beside me were silent for
a few moments. Thousands more com- petitors continued to make their way into the stadium toward the now-closed finish line, their faces revealing varying degrees of dejection. But it was the one who had missed by inches after a 12- hour struggle — a 44-year-old named Mawona Dudley, it turned out — who was on all of our minds. “You know,” I said finally, “if it wasn’t for him, none of you would feel as good as you do right now. You need him.” It’s like a famous short story by Ursula
Think this economy is bad? Wait for 2012.
by Greg Ip W
e’re barely two years past the banking crisis, still weathering the mortgage crisis and nervously watch- ing Europe struggle with
its sovereign debt crisis. Yet every eco- nomic seer has a favorite prediction about what part of the economy the next crisis will come from: Municipal bonds? Hedge funds? Derivatives? The federal debt? I, for one, have no idea what will cause
the next economic disaster. But I do have an idea of when it will begin: 2012. Yes, an election year. Economic crises
have a habit of erupting just when politi- cians face the voters. The reason is sim- ple: They are born of long-festering problems such as lax lending, excessive deficits or an overvalued currency, and these are precisely the sort of problems that politicians try to ignore, hide or even double down on during campaign season, hoping to delay the reckoning until after the polls close or a new gov- ernment takes office. Perversely, this only worsens the underlying imbalances, making the mess worse and the cost to the economy — in lost income and jobs —much higher. Election-year prevarication has a sto- ried history in the United States. In the summer of 1971, President Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls in hopes of suppressing inflation pressure until af- ter the 1972 election. He succeeded, but the result was even worse inflation in 1973 and a deep recession starting that fall. During the 1988 presidential cam- paign, Vice President George H.W. Bush and Democratic nominee Michael Duka- kis largely ignored the mounting losses in the nation’s insolvent thrifts for fear of admitting to taxpayers the price of cleaning them up. The delay allowed the losses and the price tag to grow, and the burden of bad loans hamstrung the economy into the early 1990s. Go back to 1932 for an even more dra-
matic example: After defeating Herbert Hoover that year, Franklin D. Roosevelt refused during the four-month transi- tion to say whether he’d support the lame-duck administration’s policy for fixing the banks and keeping the dollar linked to gold. Depositors fled banks and investors dumped the dollar, resulting in another wave of bank failures that vastly worsened the Depression. But perhaps the most poignant exam- ple of election-year myopia came in 2008. After agreeing to an ad hoc bailout of Bear Stearns that March, then-Trea- sury Secretary Henry Paulson knew he needed authority and money to deal with such situations. But he didn’t ask Congress for either, reasoning that law- makers would never approve something so contentious just months from a presi- dential election. (He was probably right.)
election-year “tequila crisis” of 1994, which forced a massive and sudden deval- uation of the peso and required tens of bil- lions of dollars in international assistance. Even when a government tries to do the right thing, electoral politics make it difficult. During the 1997 Asian finan- cial crisis, South Korea negotiated a $55 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and others to avoid defaulting on its private bank loans; in return, it promised re- forms such as closing weak banks. But confidence evaporated and the curren- cy plunged when the leading opposition candidate in that year’s presidential election attacked the agreement. A similar situation occurred in the
election to succeed Brazil’s President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had brought stability to his country during the 1990s after decades of inflation and default. When it became apparent that his handpicked successor would lose in 2002 to leftist challenger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s stock markets and currency plunged, and the government lost the ability to issue long-term bonds. Inflation and interest rates shot up, hammering the economy. These countries actually offer an up-
lifting lesson: The damage wrought by the crises helped build support for solutions. In Korea in 1997 and Brazil in 2002, popu- list challengers ultimately embraced their predecessors’ reform plans. Greece’s so- cialists campaigned last year promising to raise public salaries, invest in infrastruc- ture and help small businesses. But they are now undertaking painful reforms, such as raising retirement ages and in- jecting more competition into protected industries such as trucking.
Of course, these countries are rela- tively young democracies with legacies of economic mismanagement. It couldn’t happen here anymore, right? Think again. Yes, this year the United States passed the sweeping Dodd-Frank Act, seeking to make financial crises a thing of the past. But there are count- less problems that can develop into dis- asters (think Foreclosure-Gate). And Dodd-Frank is useless if the next crisis involves our tattered government fi- nances.
as a share of GDP, is at a peacetime rec- ord, and the debt is climbing toward a post-World War II record. Thoughtful economists agree on the response: Combine stimulus for our fragile econo- my now with a plan to slash the deficit and stabilize the debt when the recov- ery is more entrenched. Yet the approaching November mid- terms have made it impossible to ad- vance a serious proposal for doing that. Congress has been unable to pass a
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With neither party mustering the support to tackle the deficit, both may prefer to kick the problem down the road.
So when Lehman Brothers foundered that fall, Paulson, with no orderly way to wind the company down, let it fail. He then proposed the Troubled Assets
Relief Program to deal with the resulting chaos, but the House, gripped by an elec- tion-year aversion to bailouts, voted it down. The defeat sent markets into a tailspin. Lawmakers changed their minds and passed the TARP, but the in- tervening panic worsened the economic pain.
MICHAEL BYERS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
K. LeGuin, I said when they protested. “The Ones Who Walk Away From Ome- las” describes an idyllic town whose citi- zens are uniformly happy. Yet the condi- tion for that happiness is that one young child must be locked away in perpetual squalor and misery. The happiness of the many can’t exist without the pain of the one.
Both the Comrades and Marine Corps
marathons are blessed with an over- abundance of sufferers, but the principle is the same. For those races to continue to have significance — to be the affirm- ing and life-altering experiences that they are for many — at least one person has to sincerely try and fail. This has nothing to do with speed.
Wherever the cutoff time is set, there will be someone who just barely makes it and someone who just barely misses. Fast cutoff times limit the size of the field, while slow or nonexistent cutoff times trivialize the challenge; events such as the Marine Corps Marathon, sometimes called the People’s Marathon, tap the rich middle ground.
Some runners argue, of course, that
their goal is simply to finish and that time is absolutely irrelevant to them. These people have invariably covered more than 26 miles in the course of their training. But somehow, completing a marathon over a week doesn’t have the
same appeal. They want to do it under the particular conditions offered by a race, one aspect of which is that the time available to finish is finite. They care about time; they just don’t realize it. I think the same is true of the online commenter who believes that cutoff times are elitist. He wants to be out on the race course, rather than running alone in Rock Creek Park, because of the energy that comes in part from the lurk- ing fear of failure. The feeling in the stadium in Durban
that night in May was magical, despite the thousands of non-finishers. We should all be so lucky to find challenges, in running or some other aspect of life, that present a real chance of failure — and consequently, a sense of achieve- ment like the Comrades runners felt. That may be cold comfort if you find yourself on the wrong side of a cutoff next Sunday morning. But take heart: You, as much as the winners on the podi- um, helped make the race what it is. And besides, the preparations for next year will start the very next day.
alex@alexhutchinson.com
Alex Hutchinson is a columnist for Toronto’s Globe and Mail and a senior editor at Canadian Running magazine. He blogs about the science of fitness and exercise at
sweatscience.com.
Elections are even more of a trigger for crises in other countries. When Greece’s national election campaign began in Sep- tember 2009, the government claimed that the budget deficit was more than 6 percent of gross domestic product, high but manageable. Yet shortly after the so- cialist government took power, it revealed that the deficit was in fact closer to 12.5 percent. The previous government, it turned out, had been issuing optimistic forecasts and hiding some of its spending. As foreign investors’ confidence in Greece evaporated, interest rates on its debt soared. To avoid default, it was forced to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. The Greek economy will probably shrink at least 3 percent both this year and next. Mexico’s financial crises regularly co- incide with presidential elections. In early 1982, the government knew that its deficit was too large and that its cur- rency was overvalued. Investors were pulling their money out, draining the na- tion’s foreign currency reserves. Govern- ment officials hoped to postpone action until after the July election, and the Fed- eral Reserve helped by making short- term dollar loans to Mexico designed solely to make its reserves appear larger. “We were trying to buy time until the
election and new government. We failed,” recalls Ted Truman, a Fed official at the time. Money continued to flee, and a month after the election, Mexico an- nounced it couldn’t repay its bank loans, triggering the Latin American debt cri- sis, a severe recession and what many called the region’s “lost decade.” A similar dynamic brought on Mexico’s
budget, and the government is operat- ing on a short-term “continuing resolu- tion.” President Obama’s plan for rein- ing in the national debt consists of ap- pointing a bipartisan commission that won’t report until after the midterms. Even if the commission can agree on a realistic plan to chop the deficit, the po- larized state of Congress suggests slim odds of adoption. With neither party able to muster the
support to get serious about reducing the deficit, both may prefer to kick the problem down the road to after 2012, in hopes that the election hands one of them a clear mandate. For now, there’s enough risk of Japa-
nese-style stagnation and deflation that U.S. interest rates could remain very low for a while yet. But if that risk fades, investors in U.S. Treasury bonds will want to know how we’ll get our deficits and debt under control — and could de- mand higher interest rates to compen- sate for the uncertainty. By then, though, the 2012 campaign may be upon us. The Republican nominee will assail Obama’s fiscal record and prom- ise a determined assault on the debt. Obama will respond by blaming George W. Bush and promising to unveil his own plan once he’s reelected. Neither will commit political suicide by speci- fying which taxes they’ll raise or which entitlements they’ll cut. Will investors trust them, or will they
start to worry that the endgame is ei- ther inflation or default, two tried-and- true ways other countries have escaped their debts? If it’s the latter, we’ll face a vicious circle of rising interest rates and budget deficits, squeezing the economy and potentially forcing abrupt and painful austerity measures. And if, instead, the markets continue to give us the benefit of the doubt, re- lieving our politicians of the need to act: Circle 2016 on your calendar.
Greg Ip is U.S. economics editor of the Economist and the author of “The Little Book of Economics: How the Economy Works in the Real World.”
hich brings us to 2012. Let me take a stab at what the next crisis will be. Our deficit,
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