Life is suffering. Only through suffering can we achieve greatness. This is what I believe. Happiness is fleeting, it appears in moments and we seize them. We can be content amidst madness with the simple pleasure of sun on our skin if we only choose to. Something about life has always been about endurance and the ability to push on. One of my favorite aphorisms I saw once was along the lines of “Few die from pushing on. More die from giving up”. That brutal starkness echoes within me, even those who pursue survival may still end up dead. This is a lesson for the ages.
Endurance itself comes in many forms but an overlooked one for those across the great divide is that of the endurance sport. Here in these spaces we are more concerned about how many plates one can bench or squat. Short, explosive demonstrations of strength and raw power. It is primal and the pop-science suggests there is a correlation between muscle-mass and right wing ideas. Get swole and become based. The meme works the other way as well, every few months some leftwinger will screech about how their team needs to work out more and the replies are accusations of abelism and fascism. Discipline is fascism.
Amidst all this discourse however the endurance sports are cast aside. Frog RWBB might acknowledge the necessity of cardio but there are equally as many hysterical charlatans claiming that running is some objective evil that will kill you quick. Aesthetically endurance athletes aren’t that impressive to look at - they are optimized in a different way. Their muscles are sinewy and sleek. In the case of endurance cyclists most have almost non-existent upper body strength, it has been sacrificed on the altar of speed and efficiency. Where Woden gave his eye they give their biceps, chest, and shoulder muscles giving them a sort of ethereal frailness.
That frailness disappears on the bike however. The Tour De France is the most watched sporting event in all the world with some of the craziest fans. Fans who will see their heroes for a moment or who will run alongside them momentarily up the crazy climbs. These fans and the riders know they are doing something special, something that requires a sickening endurance and mental toughness. You can watch the greats of the past on YouTube today. Pantani attacking up the Alp d’Huez on a solo effort. The pain etched in his face but the glory of the mountains and his legs carrying him to victory. There is something in this feat of endurance that is hard to quantify, but many will know what it is. It is the reason that whilst weight lifting has seen an explosion in popularity so too have the more crazy endurance races and the interest in them.
For all their aesthetic frailty these endurance athletes know pain. They know a different kind of pain than the one the barbell offers. They took have puked from training. They too have collapsed from effort but there is a difference. My own endurance style events are minimal and unimpressive against these titans but I have tasted some glimpse of it. I’ve done a self supported effort in the Welsh mountains where we were ‘on the go for 21 hours’ covering over 26 miles and 14,000ft of elevation gain. After a certain point it is just all mental. The games you play, the memories you revisit to keep you going. The exhaustion is so bad you can barely sleep when you climb into your sleeping bag for 3 hours of kip before having to get up and hitch-hike back to the car. That for me is the stand-out endurance event I’ve done. Other big days in the mountains have come close. Yet I’ve never been a runner or an endurance athlete. The latest trend is to now be a ‘hybrid athlete’ where you train these disciplines concurrently. For all the silliness of this I think broadly speaking this is a good thing.
We are softer than our forebears. We travel in comfort and mechanized comfort most of the time. People don’t walk all that much anymore, they don’t carry their shopping home on their back. The nature of technological life turns the pursuit of everything into a hobby, wiser men in crazy cabins have written more on this than I ever could. The hobby and pastimes we have tend to dominate us and shape our thinking - perhaps this is one reason more should look carefully at endurance. We’re in for a long haul fight after all. This isn’t three single minute rounds in the octagon. This is a long slog, we fight for our children. We must endure.
You basically fight with your cardio. It sucks to hear because I hate it too but it is what it is.