about getting from point A to point B in the most interesting ways possible

If you're a large woman in America, your whole life is an opportunity to feel self-conscious, embarrassed, resentful and way too big. You can hide in the corner or on the couch, you can go to therapy, or you can put on your lycra bike shorts and get out there and move.
—Jayne Williams, Slow Fat Triathlete

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March 16, 2005

life is in the struggle permalink

Dean Karnazes thinks that comfort, convenience and quick gratification - the Big Three of the middle-class American lifestyle - are not making us happy and that we should seek out more suffering.

"Dostoyevsky had it right: 'Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness,' " he writes in his new book, "Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner" (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin).

But an ultramarathon - technically any distance longer than a 26.2-mile traditional marathon - is not really a race at all in the ordinary sense, Mr. Karnazes said. A day and a night of running, he said, is more like a melodrama than an athletic contest - full of euphoric highs and gloomy, dispiriting lows. The emotional climax - the Dostoyevskian moment of suffering - comes when exhaustion and despair loom up and smack you in the face and the finish line seems unattainable.

"That's exactly the moment I seek," he said. "To me, life is in the struggle, and I never feel more alive than when I'm struggling."

from ON THE RUN WITH DEAN KARNAZES: A Runner's Quest for the Ache of Life, the New York Times, Books, 3/16/2005, by Kirk Johnson

Posted at March 16, 2005

Comments

Well, THAT'S not a very nice thought about running! That guy needs a big group hug. :)

Posted by: Jon in Michigan at March 17, 2005 6:45 AM