Achievement: The Barkley Marathons, Dracula and Elon Musk
I was home sick from school the other day, so instead of getting in a run as part of my training program, I watched a movie about running to help get me into the right mental space. Specifically, I watched “The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young,” the documentary about the titular Barkley Marathons. The Barkley Marathons is a famous(ish) ultra marathon event which requires competitors to run 100 miles in less than 60 hours through some of the most difficult mountain country in Tennessee. The course is unmarked and frequently off of maintained trails. It’s routine for there to be years in which no runners finish, which the race director considers a success. The documentary happened to cover a year in which three people finished the race, which almost never happens. It follows two of them in particular, and the way the filmmakers developed their character helped me think about competition and achievement, two of the biggest themes I’m working on in this blog. One of the two runners shows up frustrated with his performance at this race in an earlier year. He establishes at the beginning of the movie that his goal is to challenge the overall course record, and that he will consider the race a failure if he doesn’t complete all 5 loops of the race in a respectable time. The other runner has adopted a life of seeking out challenges and adventures after a death in his family made him question the validity of working all your life to secure a future you might never be able to enjoy. The first runner drives himself relentlessly through the competition, barely pausing to eat and drink in between his five 20 mile loops. He does indeed smash the overall course record by several hours. The second runner struggles throughout. We see a sequence of him lying down in a creek halfway under a bridge, clearly exhausted. There is a particularly harrowing sequence where he needs to rely on the help of other runners who have already dropped out of the race to lance and dress some very painful blisters. And he finishes the course as well, literally minutes before the 60 hour cutoff time. Almost everyone in the world will live there entire lives without ever hearing of the Barkley marathons, and of the few that know about it, fewer still know much about the performances of individual athletes at it, and even fewer still care about the course record or the performance of individual athletes or the course record. So, the performances of the two runners featured in the movie— one setting the record and the other just barely finishing before the cutoff— only matter in that they have meaning for those two athletes themselves. My sympathies, and I think those of the filmmakers, were much more with the second runner than the first.
2. One interesting paradox of athletics is that performance enhancing drugs seem to be more common in events with less money and less celebrity involved. While sports like baseball, football, and basketball have had PED scandals of one type or another, they are nothing compared to the crises that events like track and field or cycling have gone through. This is probably partly because running and cycling are almost entirely dependent on athleticism and fitness, without the team elements and strategy of other games. But the explanation I’ve heard from the athletes themselves is that there is more cheating in those sports because the only thing that matters is the achievement itself. They aren’t competing for millions of dollars, or trying to become national celebrities, or hoping to make the move into movies or something. They are competing entirely because they want to win, and thus cheating becomes an appealing choice for many of them. People will sacrifice the meaning of the thing they are attempting to achieve if it means other people are more likely to be impressed by it.
3. In the Barkley Marathons movie, the race director tells the interviewer that almost everyone who has finished the entire 100 mile course has an advanced degree of some kind, and most of the people that compete have completed significant post-doctoral studies. His explanation for this is that completing something like the Barkley requires an intense amount of planning and dedication. You have to set goals, and then you have to consistently work through setbacks to achieve those goals. You have to make sacrifices, and you have to make choices that won’t get rewarded. There is a specific kind of temperament that is very useful if you want to become a doctor, but is also the tool necessary to do something like run for 60 hours through heavily forested mountains in the dark in a race that no one is paying attention to.
4. We spend a lot of time talking about billionaires these days, and a common refrain I see from people on social media is, “If I ever had that much money, you would never here from me again. I’d go live on an island somewhere.” This comes up because it seems like our many billionaires are incapable of making that decision. No amount of wealth, power, or achievement seems to scratch the itch for public acknowledgement, so it needs to be temporarily sated by even bigger achievements in new fields, or by social media popularity, or by dismantling the US government. I have two possible explanations for why this is— one is that it takes a very particular personality type to become a billionaire, an unhealthy personality type that requires constant validation and that can never be satisfied. The other is that none of us would be capable of taking our billions off to a private island somewhere if we suddenly earned them. The need to have other people compliment us on Twitter is universal, and no one would actually walk away. I like to think the answer is the former, but as evidence of the latter consider that most people living a middle class existence in America really could, in fact, go live on an island somewhere. If you’re reading this blog, you probably have the means to go live a modest life on a beach in some forgotten country. In fact, when I visited Thailand a while back I met multiple expats who had done just that— pulled the plug on an early retirement of sorts in their 40s and gone to live somewhere cheap where they could stretch their savings and maybe some kind of modest teacher income out until they died. But almost no one actually does that.
5. All of which brings me to Dracula. I attended a lecture several years ago about Victorian Gothic Literature. The speaker’s analysis was that in the Victorian Age, England was the undisputed most powerful and important country on the planet, but the most popular art of the time period was about their insecurity about hanging on to all that power. Dracula specifically, and most gothic literature generally, depicts emasculated Englishmen losing their women to virile men from Central and Eastern Europe. It’s a book about an elemental force from a forgotten part of the world that is unimpressed by the trappings and affectations of modernity and uses a kind of spirituality to imprison people’s minds and sap their strength, literally bleeding them dry. This theme is hit even harder in the recent remake of Nosferatu, which seems particularly designed for a modern American audience with its fears of plagues of immigrants washing up on shore, destabilizing society, and revealing the self impressed men who think they know everything as paper tigers. Power and success don’t bring a sense of calm self assuredness, they just bring the fear of losing that power and discovering that the success is unearned.
Anyway, I’m currently training to run 5 half marathons as part of a road trip across 5 states during the month of July this summer. I hope I’m doing it because I want the challenge and opportunity for self discovery, but it’s a distinct possibility that I’m doing it because I want to prove something about how strong and impressive I am. I don’t think I’ll really know the truth until I’m finished— will I feel a profound sense of self actualization and inner peace? Or will I feel like this is evidence that I could do something even MORE impressive next time if I just try a little harder, and then that will finally be enough. Time will tell.
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