The moon breaks through the twilight. Its light glows on the path before me. Over my head looms the night’s sky and in front of me the steely blue horizon is fading. I notice a tiny yellow star, twinkling. Then it finally occurred to me why I’m out here.
This week I signed my name on an application, licked a stamp and dropped an envelop in a big mail box on the side of the road. I drove away and looked in the rear view mirror. I could feel the skin tingling on my back. That feeling of anticipation, kind of like jumping from a cliff to a lake far below. I’m now airborne, and there is no turning back. Exhilaration seeps in.
Inside the envelope was an application to the Angeles Crest 100 mile run. But sealing the envelop was my decision to run at least six ultras this year as part of the
Southern California Ultra Runner Grand Prix
. This is a “points earned for races completed” series of ultras with 19 races from 50k to 100 mile distances.
Sometimes people ask why. Why do you do this...run 50, 100 Miles? Ok, yes, its a little different, I’ll admit. What are the alternatives, golf? Tennis? Enough said there. I used to like surfing, but found it to be a little boring, waiting for the waves and all. Cycling? Way too much emphasis on equipment to be a genuine endurance sport for me. Swimming? Great for kids.
wrote in
that the prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps, men suffering in horrid conditions “experienced the beauty and art of nature as never before“. In this book he writes “If someone would have seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor—or maybe because of it—we were carried away by nature’s beauty...”
Frankl published more than 30 books on theoretical and clinical psychology. He maintained that the primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud believed, but the discovery and pursuit of
what we find meaningful
.
So what does all this mean? I’m not really sure and I wish I had the answer. Maybe being carried away by a moonlit path or a steely blue horizon, or feeling the simple exhilaration of sealing an envelop, has something to do with why I do this. Maybe I've come to realize that it's the simple things, those I used to take for granted, that matter the most.
I hope you are carried away by your own moonlit path.