Long Races

There were a lot of interesting characters at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, among them a power-lifter and hammer-thrower from Princeton, who explained one night, after the visiting poet’s reading, that weight lifting was the greatest sport there is. People don’t make these kinds of unqualified claims anymore; they make timider arguments, like that weight lifting is a very good sport, or that weight lifting offers something special to certain people. But, being the sort of the bold person you’d expect a Princeton power lifter to be, she went all in and explained why lifting was unequivocally the greatest of all athletic competitions. Apparently, it’s all about how in one simple movement, one single moment, your muscles endure a level of pain and expel a level of energy that they can’t and won’t anywhere else There’s no strategy, no fanfare, nothing but strength presented as simply as possible.

As you might expect, I didn’t like hearing that the apotheosis of all athleticism was something I could hardly do. (At the time, my squat record was 60 pounds. My all-time max now is 100, which is hardly a warmup for her.) Especially as a track athlete, where running 100 meters can score you as many points as running 10,000, I’ve always believed in a certain equality of athletics, that people tend to develop what they’re naturally good at and ignore what they’re not. Some sports take different kinds of effort than others, some offer more acclaim, but they all pose similar challenges, and what you do is more a matter of biology than choice. Now that I think of it, though, this sort of thinking might be more of a cop-out than anything else. People often treat me as something of a masochist when I tell them my favorite race is the 10k, but when they ask me why, I always say that it’s simply what I’m built for, that I don’t have the fast-twitch muscles you need for shorter races. I do well in it so I like it. Simple as that.

But maybe I could use some of the Princeton hammer-thrower’s uncut confidence. Maybe I should argue that the longest race is always the best; not the one that I’m built for or the one I find least offensive, but objectively the best. Because in two days I’ll be racing the 5k for the indoor conference championship, and the 3k the day after that, the two longest races in indoors, and more than anything, it’s because I love them.

When the gun goes off in any short race, every nerve in your body has to scream “Go!” That’s a thrill, I guess, but there’s a different, more interesting feeling at the start of the long race. You still have that primal urge to surge ahead, but instead of obeying it you have to wrangle it, use it, keep it under control. To race well, the front spot has to be something you desperately want, but can’t take, even though it’s open. Because anyone could take that spot. Just about everyone has, sometime in middle school, before you’d learned the unwritten rules of human endurance. That time in middle school you probably dropped out of the race, maybe cried, definitely threw up. So you have to stay restrained and keep the pace, hoping that everyone in front of you has made a mistake and gone out too fast, and that you’ll be rewarded later. And you will, if you keep running the same pace even as your body fails, even as each straightaway stretches longer than the one before. People will wear out and fall behind if you keep a consistent pace. But it takes a long time for that to happen (a 10k takes about half an hour to finish), so, unlike most other races, you have time to think. You have time to get used to your opponents’ backsides, memorize their tattoos and analyze their stride and wonder how long it’ll be before they break and you pass them. Sometimes they pass you back, and it goes back and forth like that, maybe for the entire race, so by the end of it you feel like you have a sort of grudging respect for one another, even though you haven’t exchanged a single word (unless sharp breaths and exhausted groans count). That can’t happen in other races, they just go too fast. But the long races aren’t really races at all; they’re more like wars of attrition, and the best you can do is keep up the pace and wait for everyone else to shut down. At least, until the second or third lap from the end, when everyone forgets about pacing or waiting and burns energy they don’t have trying to get ahead. It becomes sort of like a cruel mirror of the first lap: you feel like you should be able to take the lead, everyone is screaming for you to do just that, but all the power between your bones is sucked dry and all you can do is keep flailing forward, hoping that maybe a second wind will catch you. 

Is that a reason why long races are the best? I don’t know. It doesn’t have a thesis statement like the Princeton hammer thrower did, and I don’t have her succinctness either, so in a lot of ways this blog post is worse than her off-the-cuff comment three years ago. But I hope that at least I described that they mean something. Maybe I don't have the confidence to say that they're the best, but they're at least my favorite.

Heavenly Boredom

Today my girlfriend and I were watching an episode of The Good Place and she noticed me suddenly tense up at a seemingly innocuous scene. I won’t go into the details since the show is very easily spoiled, but since the entire series is about the afterlife, I think it’s reasonable to reveal that this episode was about a basic problem with heaven: wouldn’t it get boring after a while? I mean, with an infinite amount of time and a finite human imagination or attention span, it would have to get old eventually. The promise that there will be no pain, no fear, no uncertainty basically erases any reason to care about the world. It’s a problem that’s been bugging me since third grade, when I waited so long for summer vacation, then a week after it started I woke up with all the time in the world and nothing to do with it. It probably seems reductive to compare the infinite glory of God’s Almighty Kingdom to an elementary schooler getting bored of summer break, but I’ve never really been able to separate the two.

This complaint about heaven is historically rather new, actually. Last year, when I was visiting my sister in New York, we went to the Met museum, where we found a medieval painting of heaven and hell (pictured above). I said that hell looked a whole lot cooler than heaven, thinking that I was making a very original insight. I mean, yes, hell was mostly comprised of naked corpses being skewered by demons, while everyone in heaven had fully clothed and intact bodies. But at least hell had emotion and color, while heaven was just a couple dozen bearded men in robes, standing with perfect posture and blank expressions. My sister explained that she’d actually read a paper on the subject (which I’d name-drop here, if I remembered it) about how heaven was so much more appealing in the past because people back then valued order and stability so much more than we do now. After all, back then even the kings and queens couldn’t stop disease or miscarriages from claiming their children, while most of the population suffered daily toil and drudgery. A world with no work or pain seemed like an improvement, and they saw no reason to see past that. Meanwhile, us affluent people have running water, heat and cooling, light at any time of the day, and so much entertainment that our biggest problem is usually there being too much to keep up with. We’ve made what most people throughout history would call a heaven, and we still want something more.

In The Good Place, the characters decide that, just like life on earth is meaningful because it ends, an ideal heaven must end, that bliss has no meaning if it’s eternal. That’s why this episode got me so scared: they’d laid out so many of the same worries I’d had about heaven, then answered them by saying that the afterlife can’t really be a full afterlife, that even it needs death to be worthwhile. And, as I’ve said before on this blog, I’m terrified of any kind of permanent death. The idea that I won’t be able to escape it, that I can’t be happy without it looming over me, is enough to tighten every muscle in my body just upon hearing.

The Good Place misdiagnosis the problem with heaven, though. Actions on earth don’t have meaning because one day we’ll die forever. Whenever I try thinking that way it makes it seem as though nothing we do on earth is meaningful because it will all come to nothing in thousands of years. Actions have meaning because we don’t know if we’ll succeed or fail, if our lives and accomplishments will endure or not. Faith, or the lack thereof, is nothing but a hope or theory; no matter what we claim, I think deep down everyone is some shade of agnostic. Looking at it this way, eternal life and permanent death seem almost identical: an eternity of certainty.

All of this probably sounds very anti-Christian, and sometimes I question if that’s still a good descriptor of me, given my doubts. But one thing I love about the Episcopal church is how it embraces these contradictions and paradoxes and makes them part of our very creed. A key tenant is the mystery of faith: that God is ultimately unknowable, no matter how deep your faith. I can’t speak with certainty, but I think that after we die, we won’t understand or know everything. We won’t escape pain or worry. We won’t even know for sure that this lasts forever. But we’ll maintain the same faith that we had on earth, and hope to hell that it does.

Love

(Pictured above: My girlfriend Mica, a very talented artist, drew a profile view of me, which turned out pretty damn great. Then she asked me to do the same. I only ever draw stick figures and monsters, so my version of her came out a little bit as both. In real life she’s beautiful.)

I read a study once that something like 98% of American movies are about romance, or at least have some sort of sub-plot. It makes sense, then, that I’ve been looking forward to falling in love for as long as I can remember. Love seemed like something inevitable that would happen later on when I was a kid, like getting a job or dying. I never really explored dating in elementary school, mostly because I was with the same group of seven kids from Kindergarten through sixth grade, so we were all practically siblings. Part of why I looked forward to moving to a larger middle school in seventh grade was that I might finally have a chance to get a girlfriend. But middle school passed by, then high school, and most of college without anything more serious than asking someone to a dance. As I saw my friends pair up and profess love, I felt profoundly left out. There were so many milestones I hadn’t passed, not so much sexual stuff (I’d learned that “virgin” was something other than an epithet for Mary, Mother of Christ as recently as eighth grade, so even in my high school I wasn’t really in that mindset*), but so many cultural markers of what it meant to become and adult and form a real, powerful relationship with another person.

Things changed when I went to Florida with the track team last year. It felt like one of those books where a kid gets thrown into a new world: when I fell asleep on the bus there was snow on the ground, and when I woke up it was eighty degrees and the roads were lined with jungle plants I thought only existed in prehistoric times. In that different world, the bad luck I’d been locked into changed in an instant: Mica, a young woman on the team who I’d always thought was pretty but never had the courage to talk to, sat down next to me and started talking to me. As soon as we found out we were both writers, we started talking about our work and were nearly inseparable for the rest of the trip**. We went to a bookstore together and walked up and down the shelves, pointing out different things we’d read. On the bus ride back she sang selections from Les Miserables with some friends on the women’s team for me and I called a number on a billboard asking “Want to Talk About God?” and asked the guy on the other end of the line if I could have 800 concubines like King Solomon to prove to her that I wasn’t a fundamentalist. She was (and is) witty and incisive, brilliant and inventive, beautiful, graceful, bold enough to challenge me when I’m wrong but kind and supportive all the same. Less than a month after getting back we were dating.

I’d daydreamed about the stages of a relationship since middle school: first time holding hands, first kiss, first dance at a party, first date, changing your Facebook relationship status.

Through high school and into college, as they seemed less likely to ever happen, these milestones haunted me even as I fantasized about them. Once I met Mica, they all passed so quickly and seemed nearly weightless. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy them, but they didn’t have the same force I thought they would. It wasn’t the benchmark that mattered anymore, but who I was doing it with. I didn’t love Mica because she bumped up my score on some life-goal tally. I loved her (and love her) because she laughs when I overpronounce my T’s and gives me honest sentence-by-sentence feedback on all my stories and makes a big deal about using her special wash on my face to get the dead skin off and sometimes breaks out singing something I can’t understand in Spanish and hundreds or thousands or countless other things, little and big, that make her Mica, my beloved.

Sometimes I can’t believe how much time I wasted, desperately wanting something that didn’t turn out to be important. When I thought of myself with a girlfriend, I didn’t see her as a person so much as a solution to my loneliness and anxiety and feeling of failure. But love is so much more than just a solution: it’s its own being, its own creation, something beautiful and indescribable and unique to everyone who feels it. So much of life would have been so much easier if I could’ve assured my past self not to worry, that it would all turn out okay eventually. But my past self probably wouldn’t’ve believed me, at least not until he met Mica.

____________________

* Of course, I heard about non-Mary people referred to as virgins before, but I always thought it designated them as Mary like: kind, devout, and courageous. In middle school some boys, who I only later realized were bullying me, asked me if I was a virgin and I said, “I hope to be some day, but I don’t think I’m there yet.” At some point I saw a poster for the movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and decided that it was a raunchy, iconoclastic comedy in which Steve Carrel played a middle-aged atheist whose life is turned upside down when he finds himself pregnant with Jesus for the Second Coming. In conclusion, my childhood was defined by both misinformation and boundless unwarranted confidence that I had everything figured out.

** She actually got to know me pretty well from reading this very blog! Pretty meta, huh?