Life Is A Marathon.

 

This book is and isn't about running.

I really loved the exploration of the entanglement running has with the human condition and how the sport is a microcosm of life itself.  The author is a runner for sure and the book is about him running marathons but it parallels his marriage to a woman named Nataki whom he has been married for some 20 years or so. She isn't a runner and also suffers from bipolar disorder and the author does get honest about marriage and about mental health and about what he and his wife have gone through. It doesn't paint a picture such that running solves anything. It is a raw and honest look at what we do and why we do them and I would recommend this book to people even if they aren't runners. It's about commitment and endurance.

Love is sacrifice. To love is to put another person's needs ahead of one's own, to donate a kidney to a dying sibling, to skip a few meals for God, to (as the song goes) "climb the highest mountain ... only to be with you." The more we love, the more we are willing to sacrifice or suffer for the beloved. There's not much difference, if you think about it, between climbing a mountain to be with someone and running a marathon to cure cancer or bringing joy to a friend who used to run marathons before the accident. A person may choose to run a marathon for personal or even selfish reasons initially, but once he's neck-deep in suffering at mile twenty-four, he starts to think of others, because that's just how the human heart works. A runner who's neck deep in suffering needs the most powerful motivator he can find to endure the suffering he must endure to finish the race, and nothing motivates like love. Even the most competitive runners, the professionals, the Olympians- who may seem to race only for money, fame, and the thrill of victory, if you talk to them about their motivators (as the author has), will tell you they never run harder than when they are running for their family, their team, their tribe, their school, their god, or their country. 

There are so many things about running and life the author delves into this book that it is difficult to jot them down in a blog, his interpretation of "Real Runner" is something very striking to me. He says, 

All runners learn to be "real" runners. The definition of this term, however, is relative, not absolute. The runner who cannot yet complete a 5K without walking may define a real runner as one who can, and strives to do so. The runner who can already run a full 5K but has never run farther may define a real runner as one who has completed a marathon, and strives to do so. And so on. At every level, runners define "real runner" in such a way that it is just within their reach to become one, but only if they take the whole trip, giving everything they've got to realize whatever amount of potential they have. All runners who try as hard as they can to become the best runners they can be discover something in themselves the author described "real satisfaction that I've got the fire in the belly to dig deep and not fade away when the going gets tough" which heightens their self-image. All runners who try as hard as they possibly can to measure up, do.

The one thing everyone wants is to be happy. We seek happiness in all we do, however misguidedly at times. The most obvious way to go after happiness is to satisfy our worldly wants: to get the house we want, the spouse we want, the food we want, and the social media recognition we want. But this way never succeeds. None of us can create a world in which we have everything we want and nothing bad happens. Disappointment, pain, and hardship are inescapable.

 The other way to chase happiness is to change not the world we occupy but ourselves.  Fitzgerald says, "The happiest men and women are those who have become or are becoming, the persons they want to be. The folks among us who have consciously chosen themselves possess more strength and harbour less fear than do those who have everything they want (for now), and it is strength and fearlessness, not luck, that we need to face life's unpleasant parts. To become the person you want to be, you must first define that Person and then you must work hard to close the gap between your current and best selves. This work may take a variety of forms, but in my experience, none is more effective than running marathons."

 In the pain of a marathon, we learn who we are, discovering within ourselves both the weaknesses and flaws that hold us back and the strengths and virtues that drive us forward, which are different in each of us. To the extent that we keep going, finishing today's race and trying again tomorrow, we actively choose our strengths and virtues and reject our flaws and weaknesses. Over time, the good things in us grow as the bad things shrink, a process not unlike building muscle and burning fat. It is simply impossible to become a better person in one's own estimation through such a process and not at the same time become a happier person. 

My perspective after reading this book:

So can people really be addicted to something as challenging and uncomfortable as running marathons? I wondered. The answer to this question was all around me and within me too. Too much is made of human laziness. Yes, we are lazy. That's why 75 per cent of us don't exercise at all. But we're also not lazy. That's how we peopled every habitable inch of the planet within 85,000 years of first venturing out of Africa and how we landed on the moon a mere 15,000 years after that. George Mallory famously said that he climbed Mt. Everest "because it's there.' It would have been more accurate of him to say he climbed the mountain because he's human. There is an instinct within us as irresistible as our instinct to take the path of least resistance to set and achieve goals, to complete tasks, to test our limits and to discover what we are capable of. A person can become addicted to anything that brings pleasure, and achievement is one of life's most transcendent pleasures because it is attainable only by passing through pain and struggle, pleasure's antipodes. 

The marathon is a Mt. Everest for everyone a healthy challenge, universally respected, that rewards its conqueror with a sense of earned pride that, on the spectrum of life's satisfactions, falls somewhere between splitting the last log in a pile of cordwood and being the first human to set foot on the moon.