Endurance
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Horror. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
“And perhaps in the years ahead he would have a new vision, one which would help him, somehow, to circumvent the fact of nothing.” — Gore Vidal, The City and the Pillar
When I first got on a road bike, I’d just moved to Venice, California, and I was working for—if not the most tyrannical boss in Los Angeles—someone who could keep them good company. My days off, when I got them, were Wednesday and Saturday. I earned $32,000 a year, of which I kept meaningfully more than I should because our company forgot to charge me for my health insurance. It was probably a Wednesday in May 2006 when I rode the ’80s Fuji my friend Larin had given me along the coast just about into the Malibu sunset, then back.
We associate the formation of self with childhood—its nurtures, its injuries. But when I think about my 20s they feel more originating, somehow, as if everything that came before (or, everything that I would hold on to) was a coat of primer, and only now the color was layering on. Some of this was reinterpretation. Athletics, defined as it had been in my Utah upbringing, was alienating to me. Riding a bike—doing this in jeans, on the beach, at the softest time of my favorite day, after sipping a Corona—slipped the bonds of that earlier conception. It became freedom. A minor ecstasy, somewhere between the first coffee of the day and running into a crush.
Everybody knows habit is an artifact of repetition. But my own experience is that certain habits form spontaneously and never waver, as if their cognitive paths were sketched long ago, toner on a printer page just waiting for the fuser. Cycling was like that.
There must have been a first instant when my body rebelled against my lengthening rides and I overruled or pacified it, and that moment must have occurred pretty early, because within months I was covering 28 miles a day. I don’t know when the first resistance was; I don’t remember the interplay of instincts and intentions that led me to an awareness and recruitment of my inner reserves. I do know that year is when I learned about endurance.
People writing about athletes love to dwell on pain tolerance, positing it as the key to the athletic psyche. And yes: If you ride or run or swim a very long way, it’s going to hurt. To some degree, the solution to this is brute psychological force; you must be stronger than the pain.
But I think the key to understanding endurance is that it is mainly not a contest. The more energy you spend in confrontation with your own resistance, the less you have to use on the endeavor. This energy expires quickly, like fuel in a retrorocket. On the many occasions when I’ve burned out halfway through my intended distance, it’s usually been that kind of burnout. I took up the wrong fight. I failed to raise an alliance.
This Sunday in Maryland I’m taking on a half-distance Ironman, my last big marker on the way to Lake Placid. This one is 1.2 miles in the water, 56 on the bike, 13.1 running. The race differs in two respects from those that came before: It’s longer. And Sam and Adlai are gone.
Endurance is a form of trust, in your capacity over time to absorb the stresses and extremes of the present. I say trust because the math in the moment may break: the opposition overwhelming, your resources faint. So you make eye contact with the enemy. You put down your spear. You turn your back and wait for the tension to break. The quality that separates this act from surrender is held wholly in the mind. It’s a kind of nobility.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.