A minor matter caught in a trap like marathon man
SATURDAY night: I borrow a pair of paint-splattered overalls, fold a South American-style scarf around my neck, pull on a pair of black boots and secure a spotlight to my forehead.
Hey presto, Trapped Chilean Miner is ready for a Halloween party, a doner kebab and a local discotheque – not necessarily in that order. The craic, you can well imagine, is noventa.
Tuesday night: I’m locked in a bathroom, behind a door with a faulty lock. In a half-panic as the minutes slip by, I snap the key in half as I try to force the lock open. Hope flushes from the horizon.
A Polish man from next door arrives with a toolbox some considerable time later, a drunken Spanish tenant and his pal who arrive after the first hour in captivity try to coax me from the toilet window to that of an adjacent room. No way, Jose.
A burley Chinese student from next door is dispatched to offer his advice. I sit on the edge of the bath checking the scores of the Champions League games on my phone and text loved ones on the outside. I close my eyes and try to remember what their faces looked like as the oxygen begins to run out.
Forty-five minutes into the ordeal I’m eating toothpaste and have promoted a rubber ducky to Head of Communications.
Ultimately, Ken – the strapping Chinese lad – starts shouldering the door as if he’s played Junior B. Half a dozen wallops later he bursts into the bathroom. I tell him Crouchy has just scored against Inter.
One Spaniard peeks around the frayed door frame, runs his finger along the splintering wall, picks up one half of the key like it promises to reveal an exotic treasure and utters the word: ‘roto’. Broken.
So as Morrissey sang, that joke isn’t funny anymore – and after a weekend making light of their subterranean plight, I now know exactly how those coal workers felt trapped beneath the red Chilean earth for 70 days or whatever.
But I don’t know Edison Peña.
How exactly would the average person spend 69 days trapped underground? Peña ran three to six miles daily. As the world’s media attempted to square each man off into neat compartments – the telephonist, the footballer, the philandering husband – you might have come to know of Peña through the label he still wears like a medal.
Peña is the runner. It was said his colleagues worried for his sanity as he circled the mine relentlessly and explained in letters reeled earthwards to family that he was fighting the very earth that encased him by running and running and running.
Now he’s running the New York City marathon this weekend. I applied last year to enter too but wasn’t successful in the complicated selection process that involves a draw for those who don’t pledge to fulfil specific charitable criteria.
Peña was spared the indignity of the City Hall lottery which chooses those to fill the most valuable real estate in Manhattan – the start line in the marathon.
While he earned the nickname “el minero corredor,” or “the runner,” because he’d run throughout the network of tunnels, half a mile underground daily, he requested an iPod for his pump-up music (Everyone needs their soundtrack – mine includes Wu Tang, Gorillaz and AC/DC. Boom!).
Following his instructions, the MP3 player was filled solely with Elvis Presley tracks.
The New York Road Runners president, Mary Wittenberg, invited the 34-year-old to take part in the race itself or to attend as guest of honour, maybe see the sights, stay in midtown hotel. He chose to run.
The marathon “is all about inspiration and perseverance, and those values were never more evident than during the survival and rescue of Edison and his brothers in that mine,” Wittenberg said.
“He also demonstrated how running can play an important role in our physical and emotional well-being under any circumstances.”
He was the 12th miner to corkscrew to freedom last month.
This time he’ll be happy to be back the field a little.
“We don’t know how far he’ll be able to go,” said Julio Fiol, the UN’s Chilean consul-general this week, “but he’s going to try his best. Perhaps this time, hope will win.”
Not exactly ideal preparation on the weekend of a big race, last night David Letterman welcomed the colliery worker to the famous Ed Sullivan theatre for a recording of the Late Show.
After the race on Monday morning, Peña plans on packing his jogging gear into his bag and heading for Graceland to visit his hero.
The miner has been promised a private tour of the mansion and Elvis’s grave.
What a world – a man goes to work humming The Wonder of You, clocks off over two months later and after completing many in the interim, lies one more marathon away from the graveside of The King himself.
I’ll put my name down again for the New York Marathon next year.
But who knows what will happen between now and then?
- Contact: adrianjrussell@gmail.com; Twitter: @adrianrussell
