False dichotomies, and what keeps people running

Human minds are prone to slotting things into binary or otherwise discrete categories when this is not warranted by reality. It's an understandable that we prefer to see things as either this or that, or in terms of A, B or C, with overlaps between the items in question nominally ruled out whenever possible.

This is fine if we want know if the temperature going to be above freezing, or whether I scored the necessary 60 or more points out of 100 to pass my most recent theology exam. But in the real world, a lot of matters we typically frame in binary terms for ease of analyzing them actually occur along a continuum (a common one is "red state" vs. "blue state," and a fun one is "flaccid" vs. "erect"; I won't go into that one in detail, but most penis-owners and phallologists will tell you that plenty of intermediate states exist). And the same sort of thinking can cause problems in everyday discourse when things we envision -- often without consciously trying -- as mutually exclusive can actually occur in concert.

The Nike Oregon Project has been under intense scrutiny for a couple of years now owing to suspected doping violations. On message boards, a lot of people are quick to point out that the head coach, Alberto Salazar, is famed for operating in the "gray area" of legality -- for example, by having athletes take thyroid medications they don't need to rev up their metabolisms and messing around with megadoses of Vitamin D. What surprises me is that a lot of people see Salazar admitting to these practices (and only then under duress) as de facto evidence that he the NOP aren't actually breaking any rules. That is, if he's in the "gray area," he must not be punching past it.

This is wildly illogical for a number of reasons, but the NOP isn't the topic here. It's the question, "What is your main reason for running?"

The answer I most often give is that I run primarily for mental well-being; without some sort of exercise I would probably need some sort of psychoactive chemical or chemicals to make it through a lot of days without drowning in my own angst. In tandem with this answer, I will allow that running and runners create the framework of my social life. I go to a lot of races I'm not entered in to meet and hang out with people. I help guide the training of other runners, and from these interaction have sprung a number of delightful and lasting friendships.

As you've seen, though, I reluctantly and properly refer to my running as "training," not because it's anything impressive by any standard, but because it includes things I would not bother with if I wasn't trying to become race-fit. But while I still maintain competitive goals, I also know that I am never going to run reasonably close to the times I managed in my early to mid-thirties; because I have never liked to "compete" for its own sake, or to try to outrun other people regardless of other considerations, my running doesn't hinge solely on race plans anymore.

But did it ever, really? Even when I was a guy within sniffing distance of the Olympic Marathon Trials "B" standard who could count on being in the top handful of finishers in local-yokel events back in my native New Hampshire, was competing ever the main or even predominant reason for getting out there on days when I didn't necessarily feel like it?

Well, in the spirit of the title of this post, I have no easy "yes" or "no" answer. It's true that I would never have run up to 140 miles a week in New England winters and done 75-lap marathon-pace runs on a 400-meter track if not for what I wanted to achieve in running as a sport. But that kind of stuff was always great substrate for diverting my inner asshole to do worthy rather than cantankerous things anyway. I was always acutely aware that running was giving me a lot more than a bit of an ego boost, an excuse to coach high-school kids, and an avenue for my professional writing.

What I am getting at is that I have never functionally divorced the competitive, therapeutic, and social aspects of running even if I have appeared to do so in the way I talk about running. As I get older and more distant from my personal salad days, but remain deeply embedded in the highest competitive levels of the sport for both professional and personal reasons, my mind naturally wants to find excuses for why I am out there putting in what constitutes a good deal of work by most standards.

Pretty much every fun and rewarding thing in my life is at most a couple of degrees removed from running. My best friends are almost all runners, some of them on the upward trajectory of their competitive lives, others just trying to hang on as best they can. I even find ways to work it into the everyday writing work I do when it's not explicitly called for.

Saying that I used to run for the competition but do it now for my head is like saying that I used to eat for the gustatory pleasure but now do it to survive. In short, I run to survive in a way that makes survival important and gratifying. As much as I bitch and obsess over not being where I want to be, that's really who fundamentally I am.