As I prepare to run – or at least power hike – the longest distance of my athletic career, I find myself drawn back to that most fundamental question: why?
Why do I participate in races that I could never possibly win? Why do I devote countless hours of my limited free time to training for these athletic endeavors when the best possible outcome is I did better than last time? Why do I force myself out of my comfortable bed on Saturday mornings to run in the rain or snow when simply staying in my bed is an equally feasible option?
It’s been said that most endurance athletes are either running towards something or running away from something: we’re either being drawn to some lofty – ultimately fleeting – goal or we’re trying to distance ourselves from some past – ultimately inescapable – trauma. I’m sure there’s some truth to this, at least when it comes to what motivates us to start our journeys as endurance athletes. I think there’s something deeper that keeps us traveling along this path, though.
I started running as a way of distancing myself from my own shortcomings and my own mortality. My goal was simple: run a marathon before I turned 35 to prove to myself that life was still full of possibilities even at middle age. To quote Leo Tolstoy:
“One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”
I guess you could say that I started running as a way to stay intoxicated with life. And that thrill of completing my first marathon was intoxicating – at least for a time – but it was also fleeting. I had accomplished my goal, so there wasn’t necessarily a reason to try to accomplish that goal again and again. To quote John Cougar Mellencamp:
“Oh yeah, life goes on … long after the thrill of living is gone.”
I had already marked that first marathon as “complete” on my midlife bucket list, so it was something other than that initial thrill that kept me running. There was something enticing about the process of training in itself, coupled with the potential of each race day.
A few years back, Outside published an interesting article by Brad Stulberg that explored the reasons behind why so many white-collar professionals participate in endurance sports. Stulberg writes:
“What is it about the voluntary suffering of endurance sports that attracts [middle-to-upper-class individuals]?
This is a question sociologists are just beginning to unpack. One hypothesis is that endurance sports offer something that most modern-day knowledge economy jobs do not: the chance to pursue a clear and measurable goal with a direct line back to the work they have put in. In his book Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, philosopher Matthew Crawford writes that “despite the proliferation of contrived metrics,” most knowledge economy jobs suffer from “a lack of objective standards.”
This seems to be a pretty spot-on assessment to me. The sense of accomplishment that I experience at the end of every goal race is a sense that is decidedly lacking in my work life.
As someone who holds a “knowledge economy” job, I’ve had days, weeks and even entire months get derailed due to something as stupid as a single Tweet. Yes, a Tweet. In that context, getting up at 5:30 a.m. on a Saturday to run in the snow is one of the least absurd aspects of my life.
The things that cause me the most stress in life tend to be work related. These stressors are almost always:
- created by someone else,
- completely outside of my control and
- completely meaningless outside of the context of my work place.
My job is certainly an important part of my life and I take my professional standing seriously. At the end of the day, though, I fully realize that my job is a means to an end. It’s what happens before and after my office hours that actual matters. That’s what defines me. A decade from now, I won’t remember the work email or sales report that gave me a sleepless night. I will remember the time I ran the Big Sur International Marathon and the time my wife and I got to the top of Mount Elbert, though. I’ll remember breaking my toe on our engagement trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park far more than I’ll ever remember an annual performance review.
So … why do I run? Because I don’t want to be defined by my occupation. Because life is absurd and it’s more fulfilling to embrace the absurdity.
A Life Magazine writer once asked composer John Cage: “Why are we here?” He provided perhaps the ideal answer:
“No why. Just here.”
Run, Kamandi, Run! 