(Pandemic Diary - day 174)

From my journal: 19 August 2020 (Wednesday)

It’s a classic exercise for runners, and especially for ultra-runners: explain your “why”.

Sometimes it’s outwardly directed, a way to try to explain to people who don’t do this kind of thing. Other times it’s a legitimate effort to answer it for ourselves, to find words for something we sort of know, but have trouble pinning down.

I have a long list (in fact a collection) of my own whys [see My running whys], and one of my favorites is: “I want to know who I am at second sunrise”.

I love it, and I use it, but I also recognize that it has problems when it comes to explaining what I do, because I already know. I already know who I am when I’ve been in constant motion through an entire day, an entire night, and into the next day, because I’ve been there more than a few times (and even into “third sunrise” once).

So maybe I could rephrase and say that “I like to be reminded of who I am at second sunrise” or “I want to see if I am still that person I respect and admire at second sunrise”.

That gets me closer to truth on this, but I realize now that those modifications don’t really go deep enough, or at least they lead to another question, a deeper one: Why do I want to know (or be reminded of) who I am at second sunrise? What possible purpose does it fulfill? Beyond being slightly poetic, it’s an arbitrary measure of an arbitrary characteristic. I could just as well ask who I am in the dentist’s chair or at the funeral home or towards the end of a 10-hour through-drive or after an all-nighter study session.

These are valid questions, and there are probably valid answers that will allow me to keep this why on the pedestal I’ve given it, but I’ll have to dig for them.

To start with, the modality in question is not arbitrary. Being able to move competently through the natural world under your own power is fundamental to our nature as humans, and testing our ability to do that for extended periods of time over extended distances is one obvious way of measuring our personal capacity.

And the distance and timeframes involved in our races may be somewhat arbitrary, but not as much as they might first seem. The day, 24 hours, is not arbitrary, it’s built into the natural rhythm of life on Earth, and it is a valid natural length for a test of this sort. The distance — 100 miles — is arbitrary, because its roundness is man-made, but it’s also a pretty good estimate of the distance a reasonably healthy and competent young human should be able to cover in that natural cycle of 24 hours.

There’s more to talk about here, but I’m going to let it rest for now…