Cynthia has made it public that she’s going to run a half marathon in two months. “It’s the Slacker Half,” she says, as if its name’s a beacon for mildly ambitious weekend runners. Cynthia’s only run a 5K so far, and that was a struggle.
The truth is, she’s scared pissless. And excited.
The Slacker Half Marathon is so named because it’s a downhill course with a 2,230 foot descent. It begins at Loveland Ski Area, 10,630 feet above sea level. Cynthia lives in Fort Collins, Colorado where the elevation is a few feet below the Mile-High City. The climb alone will suck the air from her lungs. And the descent will wreak havoc on her ankles. I don’t tell her that. She’s already scared pissless.
She’s started her training. She ran two miles yesterday. She finished it in 22:35. She posted her route on her Facebook page with the caption: “Just need to add another 11 miles to that by the end of June. Crap.”
She’s got guts. She’s got ambition. And she’ll run the Slacker Half and finish in just over three hours, even if she hobbles through stress fractures and stomach cramps, because she’s stubborn.
Ambition leeches off those who are foolhardy. There’s something admirable about that degree of recklessness.
Cynthia’s a lot like Mike, a newbie swimmer who swims in my lane during strokes class. Mike’s got a powerful build in the shoulders and when he tires during intervals he muscles through the water to the end. He wants nothing more than to lock into the perfect stroke and hold it. “It just kills me that I can’t do it,” he says.
He’s got a lot riding on a good stroke, at least one that will carry him for just over a mile-long swim without tiring his body. He’s signed up for a long-distance triathlon, a distance comparable to the Ironman 70.3. After the swim, he’ll transition to a 56 mile bike ride, then to a 13.1 mile run, a distance totaling 70.3 miles.
“On the bike, I’m strong,” he says. “And I’m fine on the run.” But in the water, he’s as tight and nervous as an electrically-charged wire. “When I signed up, my friends told me not to worry about the swim. I’ll be in a wetsuit. I’ll be buoyant.” At least, there’s that.
The 70.3 is in July. He’ll most likely not perfect his stroke by then. But when morning comes and he’s standing at the foot of the cold Horsetooth Reservoir, he’ll feel the tinges of nervousness and excitement churn in his bowels and he’ll dive in somewhere mid-pack and muscle his way to the finish, looking forward to coasting on his bike where he feels strong and confident and competitive.
The desire to want more, to crave, to pine for something beyond what we already have, in part defines what it means to be human. Cynthia and Mike might fail, but their efforts are nothing to shrug at. Like McMurphy in Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest, they’ll be able to say, “But I tried, though…Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, didn’t I?”
Occasionally, someone with that kind of reckless ambition succeeds. When my friend Peter told me that he wanted to publish a novel and be famous I regarded his comment as a silly, naked aside, easy to throw away. When he told me he was writing a horror-genre novel because “it’s fun to blow off steam and kill a few zombies every night,” it sounded like the literary equivalent of playing a video game. When he told me that he sold his novel to Random House, my jaw dropped.
Writing a novel is its own kind of endurance test. Peter didn’t just write one during the three years he spent working on a Master of Fine Arts degree at Colorado State University; he wrote several. It was ambitious to throw his chips into such a strange, risky lottery. But he did and he came up a winner. What dumb luck.
In just a few months, Cynthia and Mike will stress their bodies beyond what they are prepared to endure. They will hurt and they will suffer. And with a little dumb luck, they might succeed.
