High Expectations
I do my share of mostly casual endurance sports. Ever since I started running in high school, I have been familiar with the high-profile athletes in this world–especially in long-distance running. Right now one of the foremost athletes of extreme endurance is Kilian Jornet, a Spanish ultrarunner and mountaineer who has been winning some of the hardest distance events in the world for some 15 years.
More recently, however, he has distinguished himself less by his achievements in formal races than by self-designed challenges. Examples include his “Summits of my Life” project, where he attempted and set speed records for high peaks (Mont Blanc, Denali, etc.) on various continents, and his just-announced “States of Elevation” project, in which he will climb 40 or more of the highest peaks in the US spanning from Colorado to Washington state, travelling only by bike between each peak, several thousand miles in total. To add to the demand, he aims to do it all in less than a month.
It’s obviously an exhausting and demanding challenge, that much harder to assess because it’s never been done before. And since Jornet not competing against anyone else, how would one measure this effort? Probably by whether he completes the challenge at all, under the limitations he sets out for himself.
I will follow his progress, and of course be impressed by some of the numbers he puts up: by his pace running on trails at high altitude, by the number of miles run and biked day after day, etc. I can respect the artistry in designing your own event. Extreme distance running has this basic conceptual problem: you could always go further. And for the endurance athlete, the experiences of most events–even the traditional distances and competitions–is mostly that of a competition against oneself: can I be convinced to go a little faster, for a little longer? Jornet’s evolution as an athlete has something of a final frontier quality to it. By deciding not to run a regular race over a repeatable course and distance, it’s as if he’s saying: “I will define what long–really long–means for me.” The athlete not only runs the event, he has the chance to interpret it. Most athletic achievements have a “stands-for-itself” quality. Athletes are famously–maybe necessarily–inarticulate. But not here: Jornet has to tell us why this combination of feats is important. There is also a chance for the spectators of the event to evolve in their understanding as the event happens. Long distance sports are also slow motion sports: we have a chance to change our view of them as they unfold.
But there’s also a part of me that’s ambivalent about this trend in extreme sports, even a little bored of this challenge–no matter how unique. Ordinary people scale peaks like Longs Peak, Pikes Peak, and Mt. Whitney all the time. Some of them even do it quickly. Many anonymous people bike long distances, even across the country. Jornet will do all these things faster and with a more unrelenting pace than anyone else. But he is still linking individual achievements that are “on the map,” findable on a computer, accessible to any fit person with the time and minimal equipment. By this point all of the peaks, trails, and roads that make up his challenge are thoroughly mapped and cataloged. The route is pure data, waiting to be chopped up into a spreadsheet and GPS coordinates. Is it unreasonable to point out that there is very little of mystery or uncertainty about this type of feat? It is all in the doing, I guess–and this guy does it better than almost anyone else alive. But it’s a feat for the digital age, where the imagination goes first to what can easily be discovered and tracked on a computer.