On Grit, On Softness

Running experts tell you to find a proper why. They tell you that facing the dozens of miles of an ultramarathon, the dozens of weeks of a training block, a goal set two years in the future, you need a proper why.

A proper why, a clear enough purpose, stands ready when the athlete has scraped themselves down to the bottom, down until they’re hollow. A proper why can fill them back up, can give them the last bit of motivation needed to get over the next ridge, to clear the fog from their face and see the aid station glowing in the night just close enough to reach it. And once that light has touched their skin, they’ll find what they need to make it to the next one.

Sometimes the legs won’t move. Sometimes the athlete is stuck. Sore. Depressed. Sometimes the seat beckons. Sometimes there’s an offer that cannot be refused. That to just stay here would be a blessing. That you could be struck from the roster. That you could walk into the woods, your home hiding right behind that copse of trees, and you could turn on the TV and watch the race like you were never in it. That you could sit on your couch, like you did the year before, and promise the empty air: “Next time. I’ll sign up for the next one.” And the miles behind you were never promises kept, and the miles ahead of you would never become promises broken. They were never the path forward, instead an amorphous idea, nothing more than red pen on a gas station map.

They say that in order to face the miles on the other side of pain, on the other side of surrender, you have to build grit. You have to cultivate hardness.

But I don’t want grit. I don’t want to cultivate hardness.

I don’t want to be the immovable object that grinds against the interminable grist of the machine of this race. I don’t want to be a block of rock pushed over the miles, through the path, my own stubbornness carving into beautiful soft nature around rabbit dens and green-stemmed saplings and the lightly curling leaves that make roofs for young frogs and the colonizing bacteria that fuels the next season of turn over, around the other runners who are finding their own way through the mountains, through the woods, through the desert. I don’t want to build my will so thick and so strong, so impermeable, that the blood in my eyes blinds me from where I am.

I don’t want to be hard. I want to stay soft.

from an Antelope Canyon half marathon, 2024

I want to let my body stay flexible, to feel the earth beneath my feet, to feel the gravel under my shoes, the shutter of a pole as it vibrates, knocking a stone I didn’t see, the iris of my eyes opening and closing in staccato between the screaming bright of a headlamp and the darkness held close by the trees.

How else am I supposed to understand the mystery of this thing? My body is meant to fit the shape of this nature, to be the medium it carves into, the canvas it marks. I’m not meant to plow through it thoughtlessly in an expression of manufactured hardness.

On the other side of a spreadsheet with elevations and aid stations, pacers scrawled in the margins with notes about anticipating fuel and layers, schedules of impulses and appetites, there’s a whole blank space that could be filled by what’s found there. But only if we’re soft enough to feel it.

I think of diamonds, I think of granite, I think of sandstone. I think of the gneiss that remains implacable, that sends shudders up the bones of my legs. I think of the sand, soft and embracing, that holds my feet for a moment before I lift them out, collapsing footprints behind me. I think about gripping sandstone in a moment of rest and my handprint’s sweat lingering for the minutes as I run away, the print fading as the sun steals the wet off the rock. The lines of mud inside my leg, left there by swinging paces. The pebbles filling up my shoes.

What does it mean for these places, these paths, these trails to mark each other? What does it mean for me to leave the impact of my footprints and the soil to leave an impact on me, the brambles a scar, the sun a burn, the air to take my breath?

I don’t want grit. I don’t want to force myself on these places. I don’t want to be the immovable object. I don’t want to make myself immovable.

I see the terrible blooms of bombs, and that hardens my heart. I see gleeful violence, I witness pain inflicted on innocent people done with delight. I see money that could feed the hungry spent on drones to make death. Each one of those faces, each one of those choices, each one of them a multifaceted stone with sharp corners invading my shoe, invading my chest, my gut, rubbing against each other as I walk, as I run, the sharpness of each cutting against my guts, sparking against each other to engulf me in flame.

I don’t need grit.

from Bimbler’s Bash “10k” a few weeks ago.

Grit is supposed to give me the will go to on. A muscle that silences the doubt, that quells the screaming of my own mind, my own body. Is it not enough that I am a part of this earth? Is it not enough motivation to know that there is a place somewhere in this earth that’s the exact shape of my body? That one day I will lay down and I will not get up and the earth will hold me, perfectly, each limb and vertebrae in holy repose? That until it’s time for me to lay down in that place, that my job is to dance on top of it? Is it not enough that this is that very dance? This mile, and then that mile, and then the one past it?

That the feeling of these compounding miles, the pains in my legs and hips and feet and gut and heart and mind and mind and mind, are the same pains as loss and death and loneliness and unworthiness and weakness. Is it not the same test?

I don’t want to pass these tests through numbness. I don’t want to scare them off, knowing they’ll meet me just another few steps away.

I want to run with them.

I want to be soft enough that I can hold them close, that they can come with me. They are my brothers and sisters, they are my teammates. They are my children, they are my twins. All these broken hearts run because they’re broken. They can say they are whole, they can say they are healed, they can fill themselves up and call it grit.

But if they didn’t need to be out here, looking for what we’re all looking for, they wouldn’t be here, too.