WHATEVER YOU'VE GOT

Changing what's possible, one step (or vegetable) at a time

A friend recently gave me the most wonderful gift she could have given me: she asked me to make a half-marathon training plan for her.

I don’t know how to describe the unhinged glee I felt at the thought that I was going to get to make a CHART using my KNOWLEDGE and fun TERMS that I could teach her and the SCIENCE behind each choice and that I’d get to ENCOURAGE her and talk to her about FOOD and hydration and that she’d have to WORK HARD and be CONSISTENT and that she would feel SO GOOD (ok, maybe like trash, but also SO GOOD) at the finish line but most of all that she’d get to be in the magical process of CHANGING her reality and what she thought was possible. The whole thing basically checked every single box in my brain’s particular reward matrix.

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I’ve applied for about 462 jobs I haven’t gotten and I’ve submitted about a million pieces of writing that haven’t been accepted. I’m no stranger to rejection or failure. Perhaps what interests me the most about distance running is that it takes place almost entirely in the interstices between such decisive outcomes. It is the between. Arrival at the finish on race day is just a placeholder, a pin to move towards on a map, an excuse to do a certain kind of living for months and months beforehand.

The abstract concepts of “failure” and “success” don’t have much meaning over the course of an ultramarathon: you’re just going, and going, and going, and then you keep going, and going some more. Though I may flatter myself to say so, I believe it’s deeply subversive in a culture that fixates on outcomes to do something that requires 99.99999999% process— like, thousands of miles of process— and whose end “product” is pretty much just a plastic beer mug or a polyester shirt that doesn’t fit. It’s hard, even for the daydreamers among us, to pretend we did it for the swag.

Reinforcing the delightful absurdity and subversion of this activity is the fact that probably 90-99% of the people at a race are not there to win it. They’re there… wait for it… just to do it.

There are a handful of mutants who will trammel the earth at twice or three times the pace of the rest of us, and we’ll maybe hear the air-horn when they hit the finish line while we’re toiling in the woods somewhere south of our half-way point, opening another carbohydrate gel with shaking, sweaty fingers. AND THIS IS HOW WE LIKE IT. Perhaps we are the hobbits of the contemporary general public: out in the woods eating a lot, taking our time, daydreaming while we do things many people currently consider impossible—simply by continuing.

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Lately I’ve been taking more opportunities to do things with uncertain or nonexistent “outcomes.” I think I used to require the assurance that a given activity would be “worth it”— which is hogwash, of course, since humans are especially bad at forecasting the results of their choices, and since really knowing what something meant to you usually happens only once you’re dead.

As I prepare to get out of my chair and run fifteen miles today, after having run fifteen yesterday, and while feeling vaguely like slime-mold, a reasonable question anyone might ask is WHY?

1. It’s VERY hard to be 90% committed, and relatively easy to be 100% committed.

2. My brain is not as clever as I’d like to think: it wants to have reasons and reasoning and projected rates of return at all times, when usually the better choice is to GO DO THINGS instead. From there, so much worth springs forth, in the space I carve out for it. But I have to do that carving, that making of space. I don’t get to know exactly what will grow; often it is the volunteer squash that crawled out of the woods next to the garden that becomes the heartiest and happiest plant on the property, while my well-planned and obsessively tended rows of kale sputter and faint away into dust for zero discernable reasons.

3. This is what I picture: a sound engineer’s mixing board, with hundreds of sliders. Me running an obscene number of miles each week is the process of nudging those sliders around to alter what I perceive as normal— to change my perceptions of what’s possible, what’s available to me, what I enjoy, and what I have to offer. It’s me gaining freedom. Ever so slowly.

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Now that we’re deep in Fake Spring, we’ve had a few “picnics” on the back porch (my kids spilling and walking on their dinners while I worry that mosquitoes are coming into the open sliding door since I got mad and threw the ill-fit screen into the weeds).

I imagine that after the next three snow storms, it will be Real Spring, and then Too Hot, the season of lemonade stands and overgrown gardens. Next to my kids’ card-table vegetable stand heaped with volunteer squash they picked too soon from the garden, I’ll have my own rickety set-up. It will be a-flutter with the crayon-made signs of hope, and the curiously human willingness to toil and see what comes of it. My sign will read:

HALF-MARATHON TRAINING PLANS: 25 CENTS, OR WHATEVER YOU’VE GOT.