I stumbled upon your cross-country race a few years ago, and obviously I remain convinced that it runs still, and that all the marker told me was passed on honestly and was quite true as far as he understood it.
I had been taking a short-cut through some woods, and was in fact on the point of being lost, when I heard some thumping of feet through the trees around me and the hollow call of one of you runners hailing another.
I'd climbed up for I'd spotted a marker standing (with arm stretched-out and quite straight) at a wide swathe cut through the trees. I fell in with this marker. For whatever reason, whether because of his pleasing aspect or because of his undoubted liveliness, he had me standing by him and taking in all his chat for nearly a whole day. These people must be like that. And what of these markers? For they are to stand in place until the very last of you runners appears, possibly a slowish man who may not pass until well into the evening. Also they have to deal (so he told me) with crawling insects and troublesome children who hold you runners and the race in no respect at all. He told me that some of you older competitors have been running this race for more than thirty years (he is unsure of the exact number of runners and all he can say is that it numbers many) that the race covers distant lands and even continents; that the same path will never be run twice though a path may be only two trees distance from a previous one (and that it's unlikely that any runner would ever realize this) that at the end of each day, you runners relax in the next town along the way, whether it be in lodging-houses or in motor-caravans parked-up; and that on the following day you are released into the woods again in the correct order and after the correct time-lapse, and thus that the least able are running for the most part in the dark.
The facts are these. Yes, but plain enough as they are, these facts lead me on at some point to some odd understandings. And the most surprising understanding is this - that the current leader of the race, whoever you may be, is never more than some hours ahead of the slowest runner! Though the race may have been on for thirty years or more!
Surely you could be long gone? Surely? Thus you can see the slowest (at least during your recuperation time) for the slowest, far from being one thousand miles behind and in some distant town (as I would have expected) is on the contrary billeted sometimes in the same suburb as you the leader, every night of your two individual lives.
Surely most of you runners acquire friends of the same ability and probably you run together and as such the race becomes a series of mini non-races contained within a wider undoubted competition. But it is impossible that you the fastest could know the slowest well; it is a simple question of practicalities; besides which your worlds are probably alien to one another. Are they in any way similar? I doubt whether either of you has any wish at all to explore the company of the other; or if there is a wish then surely it is overrun (excuse the pun) by this desire to race? Yet you do know one another. That is the point.
You (who could surely speed off into obscurity if you so wished) seem to need to be 'seen' by the weakest. Do you who are the slowest also need to be 'seen' by your better? You are 'put in your place' daily, so it seems, but the point is that you do at least have a place to be put in.
And furthermore, do any of you runners ever accept that this race can never be won or lost? For it never finishes. Your names can never be finalised in a result-sheet. There never will be a result. Yes you know it: but do you accept it? Do you dream all along (secretly) of a surprise? You've been told that there is no finish to the race, yet perhaps you believe that you know better, that you can see through some trick and that suddenly there will appear a finishing line and that you will be awarded your place?
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