The Fight by Norman Mailer

rate when jogging by himself, and Norman felt, everything considered, in fairly good condition. His stomach was already a full soul of heated lead, and it was not going to get better, but to his surprise, it was not getting worse — it seemed to have settled in as one of the firm discontents he would have on this run.
    After they had gone perhaps half a mile, Ali said, “You’re in pretty good shape, Norm.”
    “Not good enough to talk,” he answered through closed teeth.
    Jogging was an act of balance. You had to get to the point where your legs and your lungs worked together in some equal state of exertion. They could each be close to overexertion, but if one was not more fatigued than the other, they offered some searing and hardworking equivalentof the tireless, to wit, you would feel no more abominable after a mile than after the first half mile. The trick was to reach this disagreeable state without having to favor the legs or the lungs. Then, if no hills were there to squander one’s small reserve, and one did not lose stride or have to stop, if one did not stumble and one did not speak, that steady progressive churning could continue, thoroughgoing, raw to one’s middle-aged insides, but virtuous — one felt like the motors of an old freighter.
    After a few weeks of steady running, one could take the engines of the old freighter through longer and longer storms, one could manage hills, one could even talk (and how well one could ski later in the year with the legs built up!) but now his body has been docked for two months and he was performing a new kind of balancing act. It was not only his legs and his lungs but the gauges on the bile in his stomach he had to watch, and the pressure on his heart. If he had always run before breakfast, and so was unaccustomed to jogging with food in his stomach, he was having an education in that phenomenon now. It was a third factor, hot, bilious, and working like a bellows in reverse, for it kept pushing up a pressure on his lungs, yet, to his surprise, not nauseating, just heavy pressure, so that he knew he could not keep up with a faster pace more than a little before his stomach would be engorging his heart and both pounding in his ears.
    Still, they had covered what must be three-quarters of a mile by now and were long past the villas and formal arrangement of Nsele’s buildings, and just padded along on a back road with the surprisingly disagreeable exhaust of the lead van choking their nostrils. What a surprising impedimentto add to the run — it had to be worse than cigar smoke at ringside, and to this pollution of air came an intermittent freaking of a photographic flash pack from Bob Drew’s camera.
    Still, he had acquired his balance. What with food, drink, and lack of condition, it was one of the most unpleasant runs he had ever made, certainly the most caustic in its preview of hell, but he had found his balance. He kept on running with the others, the gait most happily not stepped up, and came to recognize after a while that Ali was not a bad guy to run with. He kept making encouraging comments, “Hey, you’re doin’ fine, Norm,” and, a little later, “Say, you’re in good condition,” to which the physical specimen could only grunt for reply — mainly it was the continuing sense of a perfect pace to Ali’s legs that helped the run, as if his own legs were somehow being tuned to pick their own best rate, yes, something easy and uncompetitive came off Ali’s good stride.
    “How old are you, Norm?”
    He answered in two bursts, “Fifty — one.”
    “Say, when I’m fifty-one, I won’t be strong enough to run to the corner,” said Ali. “I’m feeling tired already.”
    They jogged. Wherever possible, Ali ran on the turf. Pat Patterson, used to pounding concrete, ran on the paving of the road, and Bingham alternated. Norman stayed on the turf. It was generally easier on the feet and harder on the lungs to jog over grass, and his lungs so close