This seems to be the year of personal challenges. Everywhere I turn, I’m seeing people running eight-minute miles, following new personal fitness regimes or hoisting up a car. Ok, well the latter hasn’t happened, but I’m sure it will with the swaths of people that seem to be pushing themselves to do more, and do better.
This has made me feel amazed and impressed, particularly when it comes to people who have faced weight challenges and for whom getting fit has been as big a challenge as climbing a mountain. But while I applaud these efforts, I’ve never understood the urge for people to push themselves to the limit of their endurance and face extreme challenges.
I remember once when I was in the Himalayas, I spoke to my aunt about the irresistible urge for people to summit Mount Everest, some dying or seriously injured in the attempt, all doing it at great risk to life and limb and asked her why anyone would bother trying to get to the top of a 29,000 ft. mountain.
She answered with George Mallory’s famous quote – “Because it is there.”
“That’s just crazy,” I said, shaking my head. I was happy to forego the extreme weather, icefalls and altitude sickness and just drive up to the top of the hilltops at Darjeeling and enjoy the view, while saying, “Oh yes, thank you,” to the nice young chai wallah that offered me a cup of tea. Ah, how civilized!
But in the past year, as home and work life gets busier, I find myself mustering not even the slightest energy to work out, and the impact of this is much worse. Besides the indignity and annoyance of not fitting into one’s clothes, you notice you have a little less energy to do the same things you used to, and you find yourself telling your child to cross the room to get you things rather than just popping off your chair and getting it your own self.
It’s easy to make excuses and plod along doing things the same way you always do, but it’s far harder to face up to the need to make changes and to make them. When it comes to working out, those people that push themselves so hard make you think – “If they can do that, surely I can manage to put in a fraction of the same effort?”
As I looked up George Mallory and that famous quote, I found another statement by the same author that shed some light on the motivation of these driven individuals.
“People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever . . . (but) if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.”
This, I understand. I feel like some moderate goal would be OK for me – perhaps just being able to run St. Paul’s rodeo mile from start to finish. I decide to make this my goal, because we all need goals.
So I put the kids to bed and finish up my chores. By the time it is all done, it’s 10 p.m. I sigh. Then I lace up my shoes and start my workout. I’ve put this off, but I won’t anymore - because I want to be able to run with my kids. I want to feel like I have energy to burn at the end of the day. I want to feel comfortable in my skin. But mostly, it’s because like Mallory, I want to face the struggle and feel the triumph and joy of succeeding.
