Pre Race Idle Thoughts

The race is this Saturday. It's a 10.35 mile trail loop, hilly as shit, run three times. Kind of a bitch, in the best of circumstances. These are not the best of circumstances. About a foot of snow fell yesterday. Facebook pics and posts informed me that certain portions of the trail have drifts in excess of two feet. And more is probably on the way, including during the race itself.

So, to recap: The course will be a frozen hellscape, like running through a black metal song.

And thats... cool, sort of?

I'm asking because I'm not really sure. I know I'm excited, actually. I also know that it's going to be severely uncomfortable. But I know that there is a shared paradox among endurance junkies, that those two things coexist in ways most would find absurd.

So, yeah. That's where I'm at. Excited to go run a really long way in scenery that, if you're inclined towards the bleak, is really quite beautiful. There is an undeniable romance to dead woods in winter, I think.

Excited to race, both myself (because that's what I'm supposed to say, and it's not wholly false) and others. Mostly others, though, if I'm honest.

And, while I'm on this honesty kick, yes, excited to hurt, to earn the post-race neurochemical bath with sincere effort and strain, striving as near as possible to the point before the point of total muscular failure.

All of that is bliss, in ways that are endlessly cliche, voiced by anyone who's ever done some arbitrary physical challenge. And yet we keep giving voice to these things, because there is honesty in cliches, truth, inasmuch as there can be anything so absolute. We do these things, because we want the totality of sensation offered by such challenges; we voice our experiences, hoping to make tangible those sensations, and to hear confirmation from others that yes, yes that was real.

But then, it is just running, yeah?

Yes.

But we need the things we need, for the reasons we need them, whether those reasons are understood by us or not.

So... cool, sort of?

I've answered that for myself, it seems.