Rocky (1976)

directed by John G. Avildsen

Brian Oliu

How I got here is an illusion.

I have driven the 292 miles home from New Orleans, Louisiana back to Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The drive home took significantly longer than the drive there, as I kept feeling sharp twinges in my calf muscles as I would switch my right foot from gas pedal to brake, with the pain occasionally shooting up my leg and into my buttock. I did a lot of shifting in the driver’s seat of my Ford Escape in a desperate need to keep moving—my body caught between the desire to remain as still as possible in order to prevent further muscle fasciculations, but also needing to fidget constantly to make sure that everything still somehow worked; that while the rhetoric of marathon running is to leave it all out there on the race course, I did not want to leave truly everything; that while some part of me had been eternally lost to the uneven pavement of Esplanade, I still needed to somehow make it through the eastward leaning highways of Mississippi, enter back into West Alabama, and make it, somehow, to my couch, eating the donuts procured that morning before my wife and I realized that we needed to get back to our house as swiftly as our blistered soles could get us there.

At 6:16 PM, shortly before my wife and I ordered gyros from the comfort of our living room, an email arrived in my inbox from the organizers of the Rock N’ Roll New Orleans Marathon: 

Congratulations on rocking your run in the Crescent City! Check out your official results, race photos and download your finisher’s certificate here!

This was the moment that I had dreamed of all day while stuck behind an overturned tractor-trailer on I-20 heading east, trying my best to rehydrate after the race had sucked all of the water from my body the day before. While I had the chaffing, muscle soreness, and Mardi Gras themed medal as trophies to undoubtedly stake claim to the fact that I had finished my first marathon, I still felt as if I needed more proof that I was there amongst the revelers, and the drumlines, and the sun-faded beads dangling perilously from sewer grates that I kept a close eye on, lest I turn an ankle, knowing that the slightest deviation from my stride could cause my entire body to shut down.

*

On my last long run before the marathon, my right leg locks up. It is a run like any other run—a celebration of the end of marathon training; of surviving something that seemed impossible months ago. The race has always been less about the race, but more about what needed to be done for the race—the day of is supposed to be a coronation; a day where everything goes beautifully: a day where there are water stations every couple of miles, rather than forcing myself to go hours without drinking, occasionally hiding a plastic bottle in the bushes for the second loop, all the while hoping that a stray dog doesn’t puncture the plastic with its teeth. The day of coronation before the coronation ends with my leg refusing to straighten—the knee permanently fixed to a half-bend, as if I were the perfect model for a caricature of a person running: leg lifted in the air while the arms punch skyward. I, too, am like the drawing, frozen in motion, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

During the race, my body behaved as I had taught it over 70 training runs. In training, there were "good days" & "bad days.” The morning of the marathon I knew that it was going to be a "bad day"—my legs felt heavy & off. I was hoping I'd knock some of the rust off as I started going, but felt no such relief. My legs never felt "good," but the pain & heaviness were completely manageable until around the 17-mile mark, which is often all a distance runner can hope for—how many miles can one go before the body recognizes what it is being put through. It was February in Louisiana, and the weather, at least in the morning, was in the high fifties—ideal for a race day, though the sun would be in full force by the time I made it to the out-and-back along Lake Pontchartrain. My body started to break down as I saw runners returning from the turn-around yelling “it’s only a little bit further,” as words of empty encouragement. I knew, of course, that they were lying: the idea of further loses all meaning when running longer than one has ever done before.

It was also at this point when my phone died, and along with it, my marathon running soundtrack—it cut out, humorously and almost perfectly before the grand crescendo of “Gonna Fly Now,” the iconic Bill Conti song synonymous with the Rocky film series, specifically with Rocky’s epic training montages: images of Rocky in his iconic gray sweatshirt running along the rail path, past a barrel on fire, as a vendor tosses him an orange (unscripted!) before the action switches to Rocky running along the Kelly Drive bike trail, the Schuylkill River broadening over his right shoulder. Of Balboa leaving his & Adrian’s apartment on South Lambert Street, covering over 30 miles through the various landmarks of Philadelphia as school children try to move their little legs as fast as possible to keep up with the uncrowned champ as he leaps over a park bench in front of Independence Hall before posing at the top of the Art Museum steps.

It should not surprise you that I have watched every film in the Rocky series dozens of times. I’ve spent entire days watching the annual Rocky November marathon on various television stations, taking a break after the first thirty minutes of Rocky V as, like any good Rocky fan, I refuse to acknowledge the saga of Tommy Gunn as canon. I have most of the films memorized down to the musical queues: the heavy synth beat switching up its cadence right before the Round 8 overlay during the Drago fight, or how both Rocky and the subsequent montage-commencing bell don’t register the weight of Adrian’s win! from her hospital bed at first. I spent many training runs recounting the plot points of Creed, which was released around the tenth week of my marathon training program. Throughout those brutal training runs, I drew inspiration from the running scenes of the films: how Rocky made each run look difficult but effortless—a testament to the will of the body; that we can struggle through something grandiose but still make our way through it until the end.

My marathon playlist up until that point had been Rocky-inspired, or at least, Rocky-adjacent. I listened to songs that were meant for hype videos and montages: growling and aggressive lyricists and symphonic blasts over trap drums. While I waited in the starting corral as waves of much faster runners were gradually let loose down Poydras, I listened to Rick Ross’s “Hustlin’,” trying to find some semblance of serendipity in the fact that my lucky number corresponded with my starting wave: 22. I purposely kept my headphones snug around my neck for the beginnings and first few miles of the race, instead allowing myself to soak up the atmosphere of the starting line to its fullest: to hear the race DJ crank “Light It Up” by Fall Out Boy as I approached the giant inflatable signaling the official start of the race. After a few miles, when the high school marching bands were spaced further and further apart, I queued up the first song on my playlist: Meek Mill’s “Lord Knows”—conjuring up images of Adonis Creed running alongside the street bikers in South Philadelphia, myself and Michael B. Jordan as one Nike Dri-Fitted super-athlete, shadow-boxing through the slowly emptying streets.

So one can imagine my surprise when I opened the link to my personal marathon photos to find myself face to face with a less idealized version of myself: my stomach sticking out over my shorts’ waistband, my Brooks Adrenaline sneakers barely off the ground, making it look as if I had been moving glacially slow the entire time, or, even worse, standing completely still.

While the concept of the “runner’s high” is well documented, most runners also talk about post-race depression—where the anticipation and excitement of running gets built up to an impossibly high level that after the task is completed, there is a huge crash. Typically, runners need to reduce their daily mileage, and so there is a void in their lives—they simply aren’t as active as they were even just a few weeks prior when they were in peak physical condition, and this can play horrible tricks on one’s emotional psyche. In that moment, looking at those photos, I began my crash—I could barely stand up or make it to the bathroom, whereas less than 48 hours prior, I was capable of finishing a marathon in six hours. My body, which proved itself to be capable of an impressive amount of running did not seem that way, nor look that way—in what should’ve been my grandest moment, I was still an overweight fraud: double chinned, struggling my way through what could’ve been a quarter-mile walk.

The “race photo fail” is a common phrase amongst runners—in a 2012 New York Times article by Elizabeth Weil, the author examines the horror of the race-face phenomenon: “Runners with two feet on the ground look as if they are walking. Photographers hired to shoot individual runners aim to capture them in the air on the way down. Ideal images also include the runner’s face and shoulders relaxed, eyes gazing into the distance, lips slightly parted.” Sean Walkinshaw, the director of business development at Brightroom Inc., a company that places photographers at races such as the New York Marathon, is dismissive of complaints by runners who claim that the photographers captured them at their worst. “I always want to say: ‘That’s the way you’re running. You’ve probably never seen yourself run before.’”

This, as much as I hate to admit it, is true. Despite running, at times, resembling an out of body experience, it is not. The only thing I can see is the way the road ahead of me dips and sways as my neck struggles to keep my head upright and calm. There are moments where I catch a glimpse of myself in the reflection of store windows and I am always surprised at how upright I am—of how stiff I look, even in moments where the weather is just crisp enough where it feels like I am effortless on the air, cutting a path through the city like it’s no effort at all.

The trick to the montage is that it is meant to convey growth in a short period of time. We don’t have much of a concept of how long Rocky spends in the cabin in Siberia training—we just know that by the end of things he is able to scale the mountain in the snow while “Hearts on Fire” reaches its eventual climax, and suddenly, it is Fight Night in Moscow. The narrative is stitched together to make it seem like it is one long and continuous shot—while the geographic landmarks make us believe that Rocky covered over 30 miles in one training run, we are meant to infer that these were separate runs (albeit with Balboa in the same all-gray sweat suit and red headband). The music, somehow, stayed the same, rising and falling at the exact perfect time throughout the autumn morning before the Thanksgiving bout. The greatest piece of fiction would be to believe that Rocky was uncertain at the beginning of his run and triumphant at the end of his run—that over the course of one training session he had somehow gained flawless control over his body; that the lessons of the run were concrete and final—that through the miles he had transcended to something resembling clarity.

Perhaps this is what I wanted from my first marathon. I would cross the line, making sure to step on the raised rubber in order to make damn sure that there would be a record of me, finished, here. That through the course of the run I would learn the lessons that I was supposed to learn from the world—there would be a street corner or hand-written sign or fellow runner that would unlock some key as to why it was I was doing this; why I was putting my body through so much. Someone would throw me an orange, and I would catch it, mid-stride, and I would have the wherewithal to peel it with my opposite hand, leaving rinds strewed through the streets of New Orleans as the juice dripped down my chin. There would be victory at the end of this—not in the form of a best in age group medal, but over myself and all I had done; that I could be proud of what I accomplished. That this part of my life would be complete in the way that I always imagined it being. For me and my story, the true end would be the montage: of me hugging the two women from Black Girls Run! who I had run with over the past four miles or so, willing me forward through intermittent walking and running. Of eating four mini Moon Pies and drinking a tiny bottle of chocolate milk, which might still be the greatest thing I’ve ever tasted in my life. Of seeing my wife, long finished with her own marathon, cheering me on from behind the barricade at the finishing chute. Of walking with my mom and dad to the tent where I’d get the back of my medal engraved with 06:09:08—of how I marveled at how fast the laser cut through the zinc and iron to make everything seem so official.

Instead, there’s still a fight after the celebration at the top of the steps. It never starts out well for Rocky or Adonis. They get their ass kicked in the early rounds. My fight started as I got my Marathon Finisher jacket and they asked me what size I wanted. When I replied large, a runner next to me said, “There’s no way you’re a large. Get this man an XL.” It started when it would take me a good minute and a half simply to stand up from the couch after scouring through dozens of photos that made me look like I was standing still when I knew I wasn’t. It started with me gaining thirty pounds after the marathon in less than a month as my body seemingly fought to get back to what it once knew: that this was all a phase, that I was a bum, that maybe they were right about me, that maybe this was a mistake, that I was a mistake, that I was mistaken.

But then again, there are those moments—whether it was getting my legs finally under me as I descended down into the French Quarter and saw my parents cheering me on; or when my wife’s brother joined me shortly after the point where the half-marathoners and marathoners split off, where it seemed like the world was going to end and we ran side-by-side for a half-mile or so; or when I saw my wife smile as she recognized my slow shuffle—yo Tasha I did it!—as I crashed the quickly dispersing post-race party, or especially, especially, on those cold October mornings where I had my own river over my right shoulder: how I would try my best to outrace a slow-moving barge breaking through the water as I weaved my way through the dead leaves and dying grass where I know, deep in my heart of hearts, that I looked like a goddamn movie star.

Brian Oliu currently lives, teaches, and writes in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is the author of two chapbooks and four full-length collections of non-fiction, including the lyric-memoir i/o, and So You Know It's Me, a collection of Craigslist Missed Connections. Essays on topics ranging from 8-bit video games, to long distance running, to professional wrestling, appear in Catapult, The Rumpus, Inside Higher Ed, McSweeney's, DIAGRAM, TriQuarterly, Runner's World, Waxwing, Gay Magazine, and elsewhere.