Olympic Air Quality: My Beijing Marathon Experience

[image unavailable: Kimo Marathon - image missing from source archive]

In October 2006, on a warm and very polluted Sunday, I ran in the 26th Beijing International Marathon with about 20,000 other local and international athletes. The course, like the 2008 Olympic marathon course, began in Tian'anmen Square and ended near, what was then, the to-be-completed Bird's Nest National Stadium. It was really a wonderful experience, particularly since there were not too many foreigners in the race (although I had been told that the Koreans and Japanese runners were warned not to wear running gear that signaled they were either Korean or Japanese due to tensions between their countries and China.)

One of the reasons that I had chosen to run in this marathon (other than being rejected again that year for the NY Marathon) was that I wanted to get a feeling for what the athletes might experience in Beijing two years later. (It also helped that I was attending a UN Conference on Land-based Sources of Marine Pollution that started the next day.)

On my arrival in Beijing, I was really shocked at the air quality. Although I had been in the city twice before, the previous times had been either before the industrial expansion around the city or in a good time of year. My first visit was in 1995 for the Fourth World Conference on Women and I stayed at the Beijing International Conference Centre and actually went jogging each morning with the cows along deserted country roads just outside the First Ring Road. Now you have to get to the Fifth Ring Road to find that kind of open-space, as Beijing has sprawled out in all directions and pollution levels have increased accordingly. The second trip, for the 11th Meeting of the Parties to the Montreal Protocol was in early December 1999 when the weather was very cold and windy, with bright blue skies.

However, in 2006 the row of light poles along the highway coming in from the airport disappeared into the thick brown haze less than two hundred meters down the road. And, as my friend Lao Xia explained to me, that persistent cough that the taxi driver had was due to the air quality. The thought of running 42 kilometers in this soup was, I admit, a bit daunting.

My rather stoic and flippant attitude was that at least there were no hills in the course! The marathon is an adversity sport and at least this was an adverse condition that affected everyone rather equally, although I had a feeling that I would be out there breathing it in for almost two hours longer than the Kenyan who I thought would (and did) win that day.

On the day of the race, it was the lack of preparation (not enough long runs and too much reliance on my cycling endurance training) and the extra pounds from weightlifting, pushing big cycle gears and a love for the fermented grape that slowed me down, not the air pollution. I did not feel any burning in my throat or lungs and my breathing was never labored and not a limiting factor in my athletic performance. The atmospheric particulate was certainly there but breathing it for four hours during the competition was not a factor.

So, when seeing photos this week of the US track cyclists Mike Friedman, Bobby Lea, Sarah Hammer and Jennie Reed in the Beijing airport wearing breathing masks, my first reaction was, "Please.. it is not that bad." While I can understand the importance of separating sports from politics, I also think that athletes need to be a little more politic when it comes to perception and, well, common sense. Did they actually think that breathing Beijing air for the several minutes getting off the plane, through customs and immigration, picking up their luggage and into the team vehicles would harm their performance? Well, even if it might, they certainly didn't spend much time thinking about the perception of their choice to walk through the press gauntlet masked and the fact that they were obviously making more of a statement than protecting their lungs.

Healthy lungs are amazing pieces of bio-equipment! The cilia that line your trachea and move mucous out of the 600,000,000 alveoli are incredibly efficient, with each cilium sweeping back and forth ten times a second. As long as you are not inhaling hot smoke, like from cigarettes that will singe the cilia (ah, the alliteration), your lungs do a pretty good job of keeping themselves clean all the time. In the days following the marathon, I actually checked out whether I was coughing up particulate. What I could see against a white background was not different than what I would expect to have seen after breathing normally in any large city for a few days.

So, while I think it is a great idea for the athletes to wear masks, just like they would wear sunscreen or shoes, as protection against the elements, they should restrict their use to the twenty hours a day that they are not out in the public eye. Anything else is a political statement. To be honest, the best protection against fine particulate is to keep your mouth closed (for this and so many other reasons) and let the respiratory mucous membranes of your nasal passages do their job. Oh, but don't let them catch you spitting! There is a new 50 Yuan fine for that. However, athletes may find representatives of the Green Woodpecker Project who carry tissues around Beijing, offering them to people to use for their spit. Oh, let the no-fun games begin!