Quality of life

After reading, enjoying and pondering many of the "quality of life" submissions I decided it was time to write my own, if for no other reason than to put my feelings into words. I’d like to help others understand that what drives me to train day in and day out in the ice of winter, the rain of spring, the heat of summer, and the chill of fall is not the insanity that they jokingly suggest. I’d like to describe how multisport has truly changed the way I enjoy and experience life.

Newton's laws of inertia apply to all things made of matter. This is my proof that "spirit," though boundless in its potential, has a physical mass equal to zero. My proof lies in the fact that though objects at rest tend to stay at rest, when I am at rest my "spirit" tends to do anything to achieve motion. Curiously, the flip side of this "law of athletic spirit" doesn't kick in until I’ve finished a good interval of hard motion, at which point my body desires nothing more than to be at rest—sports drink in one hand, the other taking a pulse check, burning legs thrown forward while leaning back against a sturdy log or rock. (Somehow after periods of great exertion, even the sharpest rock feels like a bed of goose down.)

Ironically, many years ago, while propped against just such a rock staring out at a beautiful vista, I would experience a feeling of incompleteness. Many would attribute this sensation to feeling dwarfed by the rolling hills, vast sea, snow-capped mountains, or whatever happened to be the particular view. But that wasn't it. I couldn't explain exactly what the feeling was, but I knew it wasn't the result of feeling lessened by the beauty and magnificence before me. The closest I can come to explaining it is to say I felt more like I was missing out by not being more a part of the places I was admiring. It was almost a feeling that desired "consumption"—to make the landscape part of me, and to make myself part of it.

Though the precise number escapes me now, the ancient Greek language has several different words for what we call "love." I'm not sure which of these words correctly describes the love I feel for nature, but I'm pretty sure there must be one. For now I find myself using the only one I know when I am in its splendor, and I even hear myself using it aloud when I am overcome by a landscape. For each of these types of love, I believe there is a physical act that is demonstrative of that relationship. As the act of making love is demonstrative of an erotic type of love, there are other ways in which the other types of love are consummated. Suddenly I understand why the term "to consummate" is used when speaking of acts of love. It is that desire to "consume," or become a part of something/someone and make something/someone a part of you, which I spoke about earlier.

All this leads me back to multisport. Through a series of random and yet intentional progressions, including cross-training to "rest" running injuries, multisport became the tool that completes the feeling I get when I’m out in awe-inspiring landscapes. It is my way to "consummate" my love of nature. I interact with nature in any way possible. I run beneath the forest's canopy, I bike over its rolling hills, and I slice my way through the water that nestles at the feet of those hills. It puts me through great rigor, and with every mile I leave my sweat—and sometimes even a little blood and skin—we, nature and I, become part of one another.

This is the key for me: becoming one with that magnificence. Some speak of their interaction with nature as a conquest: "I conquered that mountain", "I beat the hills of Sycamore Valley," etc. But I can’t compare my relationship with nature to other sorts of relationships—just as one doesn't "conquer" the woman he loves and wishes to spend the rest of his life with, one doesn't "conquer" nature. To me, "conquerors" of nature are those who fail to see the green of the forests and lands but are far from color-blind to the green available for sealing those vast landscapes in concrete and steel. "Conquerors" adapt not by changing, but by forcing change.

Alternatively, my relationship with nature has become an interaction with all that is out there through the medium of multisport. The knowledge that a colossal hill will not yield, will not be reshaped, and that you must learn to deal with its nature is a bit intimidating. But that is the quality of nature that I love—adapting. Although I may be wearing gel soles, riding atop SLR aluminum, or sporting thermo-plastic elastomer goggles—all of which someone else produced in one of those concrete-and-steel factories that I am sometimes too hypocritically ready to denounce—with every stride, every stroke, and every turn of the crank I feel I am not only adapting to the land through any way I know possible, but I also am intertwining myself with the land and returning to become a creature of the earth.