So then... why exactly DO you run?
On my ride today, I realized that, I've never really directly asked this of a fellow runner. The reason being, quite simply a fundamental failing of human nature that tends toward assuming that everyone else perceives and reacts to things in the same way that you do. In short, I've never asked because it never occurred to me that other people's motivations and meanings COULD be so vastly different from my own... after all, why else would you be out here with me, running the trial of miles... ?
Mark says that one blogs to understand oneself, vs. one blogs to explain oneself to the world. Reading Mark's blog, however, forced me to comprehend things about myself... ergo, I conclude that the directionality of understanding goes in every possible permutation. I think by reading other people's thoughts, you both understand yourself as well as understand them. Blogging about yourself, you understand yourself (sometimes?) and you may also grow to understand others.
Reading everybody's opinions, I realized that the fundamental reason why people don't agree with me is because running means something different to them than me... after I read Mark's post about how running fits into his life, then I understand why he does not feel the need to date a runner. Things go from "what the hell is wrong with you!?!?!" to "aaaaaahhhh, okay... interesting".
My best friend of 6 years (a non-runner), who knew me well before I became a runner, probably understands me the most of everyone I know... and its because she understood who I was as a person, and who I am as a runner is a concentrated distillation of who I am as a person. It doesn't faze her that I only date runners, she understands that I'm a person of great extremes.
The desire to be a professional athlete is basically an obsession that pre-dates my becoming a runner by about 15 years. Ever since I can remember, its been an all-consuming fixation. The sports have evolved, but the one, true desire of my heart has always been to be an olympic athlete. I must have hit 50,000 forehands, backhands, serves and volleys before realizing I would never play in Wimbledon. I've long since realized that I lack the talent necessary for my dreams to come true, but through running, I've discovered something that's equally as amazing.
Right now, its less the glory of running around with a gold medal around your neck that draws me, its the Trial of Miles, its the training, the single minded dedication, the incredibly regimented lifestyle, the sacrifice of the luxuries afforded to normal people... THAT is what I aspire to. I WANT to have to weigh out the food I eat. I WANT to look like Skeletor, even if it decreases my appeal to the opposite sex. I WANT to spend every second of every day dreaming the dreams that people don't quite believe I can do. I want to live out in a cabin in the woods by myself and run 24 in the rain. I may not be as talented, but no one can take away the right to live out that same level of dedication.
When I'm training every free hour of my day, that's when I'm the happiest. Colors seem brighter, emotions heightened, the mysteries of life dance in and out of your tired brain. When I come back down from the mountains after a 90 minute hill run at 6 am, I feel like I've just uncovered some amazing treasure that the world walks on past every day without noticing. Its like the most famous quote in Once a Runner:
"Running to him was real, the way he did it was the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as a diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free."
There ARE a lot of things that are important to me other than running... such as friends and family and love and doing something for the world, for people who are miserable and suffering. And that is why I don't just quit my job and go live up in the mountains for a few years doing nothing but running. I exist in a real world with responsibilities and ties to other people... but being a runner in an all-consuming way allows me a little bit of freedom, a taste of my one, truly selfish and hence completely, 100% me, desire. To dilute this would be to dilute who I am, to dilute the essence of my happiness...
So, like the girl with the pink iPod running to lose weight, sure, you don't have to respect my motives, you don't have to agree with my choices, but you can not invalidate my pursuit. What I derive from being this way, and running this way, is a feeling, a freedom, a sense of continuing discovery so great that I tend to view simply with puzzlement, those who seek to diminish its power by making it less extreme. But it leaves me curious, since most people seem not to share my experience, what exactly is it then that makes YOU run? And what are these things that are "more important"?
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12 comments:
I think this post brings up plenty of questions and things to be talked about.
I guess I never thought about blogging that way exactly, but I agree with Mark. I think, especially, through this community blog, I've realized how much you really have to understand yourself before you can even to attempt to explain things to the world. It's something I really haven't gotten down yet, and I guess it's something to think about before I write anything.
There's no quick and easy answer to your question. I remember writing college essays senior year about running and again this year for transferring. In 150 words, how are you really supposed to capture it? I guess I did the best that I could, probably writing 20 essays, then editing and editing until I found something halfway acceptable.
I don't want to generalize because it's not something that can I can put simply. I could try to say "I like the way it makes me feel," but I mean, there are so many workouts where I've felt terrible, where I've just been hunched over a trash can during the meager recoveries coughing up stomach acid and spit, where I certainly think "This blows."
There's a challenge to running, but I don't want to say I like it because of the challenge. There are those rare, rare days when you get out there, and your stride is effortless, and you feel so good that there almost is no challenge.
Running is such a dynamic thing, it's such a love-hate relationship.
I sometimes like the idea that it makes me free, but is it really freedom? Sometimes I think our commitment to running is more like slavery, a kind of perpetual bondage. Sure, we always have the choice to stop running, but when we have an injury and just can't make ourselves take that day off, or that week off... or when we feel terrible and just can't cut back the mileage a bit... it's times like those where I don't feel free.
I guess there are those times when I've laced up my shoes and sat there wondering whether I should head out for the run, and half an hour later I'm still there staring at my laces.
It's not always freedom.
Sure, there are a lot of things I like about running. I like to see progression, I like the sense of self-improvement. I like the way it slims me down, makes me skinny. I like the feeling I get on those good days, and I guess I just love the overall sense of accomplishment. At the end of the day, you step away, and you can say you've done something. But it's still really not as simple as that.
I guess there a lot of things I hate about running, too. It's like the fact that when you've finished up a good summer of running and you get injured how you literally get depressed. And I hate that so much.
But I guess that’s running. It’s a bit of a duality. It feels so good because it feels so bad. It makes you free because you become obsessed.
And when I step out the door for my runs, I don’t do it thinking about why I should go running that day. It’s just that I do and I have to.
Somehow I think I still haven’t answered your question, because I don’t seem to understand it anymore myself. I’ll think about it for a while and post again.
So I've done a fair amount of thinking about the philosophy of running in the past (in part because on the face of it, I think you'll agree that it's kind of a stupid sport. Basically, a track or cross country race consists of a bunch of half-clothed, emaciated sadomasochists literally running in circles as fast as possible. When viewed in this light, it's a wonder that anyone could possibly think that this is actually a "good idea"). My answer to your question might at first seem surprising, but after careful consideration over the course of several years, ultimately I've come to believe that we run for reasons that, at heart, really have nothing to do with the actual ACTIVITY of running. Now if I were to try to explain this myself, I'd probably screw it all up, because I think the explanation might be a bit subtle, so to illustrate my point, I'm simply going to use a quote that I thought captured the spirit of what I'm trying to say when I first read it. It was kind of one of those Eureka moments.
I've found (as an aside) that the REAL reason literacy is valued is because it enables us to accumulate knowledge across multiple generations. We regard literary works like Iliad as being "classic" because they express something fundamental about the human condition, something so fundamental, in fact, that it transcends the time and specific conditions of the story's setting, so that every successive generation of readers that come across it can take away something valuable. Because of this, I've found that I can often find satisfactory to some of my burning philosophical dilemmas by consulting the works of some noted luminary who himself had struggled with the same questions (and who, after having come to satisfactory resolution to the problem, committed it to paper so that others that came after him might benefit from his wisdom). This, I think, is the best and purest form of literature. In any case, here's the quote (in fact two):
"All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are th children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and when there is dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor, but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectural exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate himself by conscious endeavor."
And not to belabor the point, but I have one more, which I think also bears on this matter:
"The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money MERELY is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated; he cheats himself. If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the community will pay most readily for, it is most disagreeable to render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet-laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine, and perhaps another poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. As for my own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should do my work coarsely and not too well, aye, not well enough. When I observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer commonly asks which one will give him the most land, not which is most correct. I once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried to introduce it in Boston, but the measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly, that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge.
The aim of a laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job", , but to perform well a certain work, and even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economical for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it."
I believe that the relevant point here is not that we like running, per se, but that we enjoy that purity of essence which comes from constantly striving to be the best that we can be at whatever it is that we choose to do. I would hope that all of those people reading this would not restrict themselves solely to doing their best at running only, but would rather adopt that high and noble aspiration for whatever it was they chose to do in life. That's the kind of individual of which the world is always in dire need.
I run because otherwise my butt starts to look like this.
What?! I thought the purpose of riding your bike and going on all those monster climbs was to build an awesome ghetto booty! At least, thats why Garrett and I do it. Right Garrett?!
I think we should add references to our posts to support our oft-dubious claims, like:
"I only date runners \citep{ranger04}."
Go LaTeX!
The reason I run is because I get to wear LaTeX.
Hell yeah cupcake
you all are dorks...
i have no idea what this all means, but i suspect that i am allergic to latex.
fine, if you want to make it technical, i only *want* to date runners... i can't vouch for the mistakes i may have made in the pre-enlightenment period...
though then you could go into defining what constitutes a "runner"... but i shall spare you all that debate.
for the record, i am an NOT a renaissance man. i agree with cupcake about striving constantly to be the best that you can be at whatever you choose to do. choosing to "do" too many things at once necessarily promotes a quality of mediocrity to all of your endeavors from the lack of ability to devote enough attention to everything. because i despise mediocrity, i choose only to retain only the very most important things...
non-runner chicks are a little gooey for me
ryan, please elaborate on "gooey." Are you saying they are not only soft but sort of sticky?
I meant they were too GUI - I prefer command line
sudo make me a sandwich
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