For my job
yesterday, I was talking on the phone to a physical therapist in Pittsburgh
who, four times now, has completed the 34-mile Rachel Carson Trail Challenge,
and once placed ninth out of 600 finishers. “Unlike in a footrace,” its Web
site tells readers, "the ‘challenge’ is not to win, but to endure—to finish the
hike in one day.”
There’s a clickable
video on the event’s home page with the still image of participants engaged in various
states of movement—running, walking, testing their footfalls—as they try to
negotiate a downhill gulley in the middle of a forest. Above this scene appear
the sentences, “This time [the event always is held on the Saturday closest to
the summer solstice], the Challenge starts at North Park at sunrise, 5:50 am.
The deadline for finishing is sunset, 8:54 pm, or 15 hours 4 minutes, whichever
comes first.”
Below the video
image, under the heading “Course Description,” are advisories that the trail is
“primitive,” that it features “no special grading or surfacing materials,” that
it isn’t always clearly marked, and that it includes “poison ivy, nettles,
bugs, loose gravel, wet stream crossings and steep hills.” Participants are
advised to “expect the unexpected and think the unthinkable.”
The PT with whom I
spoke—a 45-year-old father of three who’s a university professor, researcher
and clinician—conceded with an appreciative whistle that the course is indeed “brutal,”
but added that he finds himself “chuckling” when the marathoners start fading
at around mile 28. This guy also has completed the Mt Washington Auto Road
Bicycle Climb in New Hampshire, described on its site as “the toughest hill climb
in the world, at 7.6 miles in length, with an average grade of 12%, extended
sections of 18% and the last 50 yards an amazing 22%.” (It’s probably worth
noting, too, that Mt Washington is more
than a mile high and, per Wikipedia, is “famous for dangerously erratic
weather”—which has included a wind gust of 231 mph that was a world record for 76 years.
The previous day
I’d been speaking on the phone with a different PT—a woman ’d interviewed for a
story about 10 years ago. We’ve kept in occasional touch over the years, and I often
kid her about her athletic mania. Kim and her husband compete in all manner of
long-distance mountain biking and cross-country skiing events, and she’s placed
first in her age group (she’s in her mid-40s now) in a multi-race cycling
series in Wisconsin. We’ve only ever met in person once, but I’ve issued a standing invitation for Brian and her to cycle to DC from their
house in Iowa for a visit—or to hop a freight train and leap from it at 100
mph at a local rail yard, or perhaps parachute onto our yard from a military cargo
plane.
When we spoke the
other day she regaled me with the story of how once, in the midst of a
leisurely hike up a steep mountainside while on vacation in Colorado, Brian pointed
to a guy hiking at a rapid clip in the far distance and suggested they try to
pass him. Kim, of course, was up for that. A hiking competition ensued. Kim and
Brian won. Kim, oxygen-deprived and as exhausted as she’d ever been in her
life, celebrated by spiritedly vomiting off the mountaintop.
This story came
after she’d noted that, in addition to being a PT, she now works two days a
week for Brian’s construction company—roofing, tiling, pouring cement, hauling
plywood, laying drywall. All in order to ensure, you see, that she gets enough
exercise.
I conceived the
story for which I interviewed Kim and the Pittsburgh guy. Its working title is
“Extreme PTs and PTAs [Physical Therapist Assistants].” My idea is to
highlight two things: 1) the ways in which these individuals’ background in
physical therapy helps them train for demanding athletic pursuits and avoid
or at least limit injury, and 2) what these PTs and PTAs have learned in
competition that informs and enhances the patient care they provide. It’s
slated to be published early next year in PT
in Motion, the magazine my employer, the American Physical Therapy
Association, distributes to its 80,000-plus membership.
Given that physical
therapy is all about motion science, it’s not surprising that within the
profession’s ranks there are many individuals who practically make it their
second job to move around quite a lot. By the time I complete my interviewing
process for the story I’ll have spoken with triathletes, Ironman competitors, and an array of other men
and women who may see the pavement or trail about as much as they see their own
families. But it isn’t just PTs and PTAs who do this, of course. Rather
counterintuitively, as our nation gets more and more obese there’s also been
an explosion in recent decades of interest and participation in endurance competitions,
with mere 26.2-mile marathons being the least of it. (I myself lack the
endurance at the moment to seek out supporting statistics, but I know they’re
there. My God, every other burg hosts a marathon these days, and it sometimes seems
there are so many Ironmen and Ironwomen walking among us that it’s a surprise
Robert Downey Jr still sells movie tickets each time he dons the suit.)
Maybe it’s another
1% versus 99% thing, with the health-wealthy on top of the heap while the rest
of us simply hope we can afford the health care we’ll need to battle sloth-and-gluttony-fueled
type II diabetes. But that’s not quite right, because then there are people
like me: those who get a reasonable amount of exercise and try to watch our
weight, but to whom “thinking the unthinkable” is trying to picture ourselves tripping
over exposed roots on some damn Pennsylvania trail for 15 hellish hours, or vertically
cycling up a mountain into gale-force winds.
It’s my friend
Kim’s philosophy that life is all about seeking out, facing down and overcoming
challenges. I suspect a lot of extreme athletes feel the same way. In an e-mail
this week she wrote that one of her favorite quotes is, “There’s no growth in
the comfort zone and no comfort in the growth zone.” She added that she
believes “growth only comes from a person’s ability and willingness to
experience discomfort.”
I’ve been thinking
about all this quite a bit over the past few days. My route to and from work
takes me past the staging area for the Marine Corps Marathon, which will be
held this Sunday. I entered that race only once, several years ago. Though I
thought I’d trained sufficiently, and had successfully completed half-marathons
in the past, I had a miserable experience that day. I developed a foot injury
about halfway through the course that forced me to walk the last several miles,
and I posted what I considered to be a shameful time. I had experienced
discomfort, all right, not to mention embarrassment. But, growth? I grew all
the way to never entering the event again.
For years afterward
I continued to enter shorter races, however—10Ks, 8Ks, 5Ks. But I always
dreaded them, and I never enjoyed or got any kind of adrenaline rush out of
participating. The only part I liked was regaining my breath afterward and
feeling I’d “earned” the T-shirt for which I’d paid $20 and most of my lung
capacity. Again, the discomfort seemed less to me like a growth opportunity
than like what Lynn called it: idiocy. I used to tell people that, for me,
running in a race was like hitting oneself on the head with a hammer: It feels
so good when you stop. For years, Lynn essentially had been reminding me that
if this was a vaudeville joke, the punch line would be, “So, don’t do that.” A
few years ago I stopped running in races entirely.
I do still run, of
course, but at my own plodding pace, which I purposely don’t time. The only
time I’m interested in is one hour. That’s how long I generally run. Sometimes
a little longer, every once in a while 90 minutes or even two hours. There are various
routes I like—in DC, my neighborhood, sometimes Arlington on the Virginia side
of the river—and as I lope along I watch the world wake up, in that post-dawn
period when people are out walking their dogs or heading to work or the gym,
when traffic is light, when stray deer sometimes linger at the edge of the
woods. It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say I enjoy those runs. It’s still work
to keep at it for an hour, however slowly, and it certainly feels much better afterward,
when I’m sipping coffee somewhere and reading the newspaper.
I mull this
equation of discomfort with growth, which hardly is original to Kim. It echoes
through a thousand books on entrepreneurism and maximizing one's potential, and it’s filled
countless arenas where motivational
speakers preach the gospel of shaking up your life and laying bare the power,
will and fortitude you never knew you had. The thing is, though, that I’ve
never really seen comfort as an enemy. If I did, I’d no doubt be more ambitious
professionally, more knowledgeable about any number of things and less
intimidated by 21st century life. Perhaps I’d be a supervisor or
a manager. Computer savvy. Fluent in French. I’d undoubtedly run faster—and force
myself to compete.
For better or
worse, however, I seem unable to push myself any farther than earning
a decent living, staying sharp in the one language I know, and remaining an
obesity outlier among our, um, growing population.
Last Saturday,
Lynn, our friend Julie and I went to Arena Stage to see the musical production One Night with Janis Joplin. I
referenced the play’s subject in an e-mail to Kim this week, writing, “It
occurs to me that you are to athletic competition as Janis was to boozing and
pouring out raw emotion. It’s just that you and your Bobby McGee leave it all
out on the trail rather than on the stage or at the bottom of a bottle of
Southern Comfort. (Interestingly, though, both hard-driving lifestyles seem to
involve copious amounts of puking.)”
Maybe that’s what
it boils down to for me. A little bit of discomfort—as I huff and puff my way
down city streets or face occasional obstacles in my relatively low-pressure
job—is one thing. Vomit-level discomfort, however, is quite something else.
I’ve visited the Rock ‘n’Roll Hall of Fame, but I never will be enshrined in it. I
jog, but I don’t race
Am I growing? Not much, I suppose. But even
jogging is not standing still.
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