Long Distance: Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously Book

It's funny, I actually came to Goodreads today intending to make an entry for Kirk Johnson's "To the Edge" -- which I am about two-thirds through and am enjoying -- but before doing so stumbled upon a review that included mention of "Long Distance." The reviewer saw the books as very similar and that's a fair enough point to make in offering a few sentences of analysis. But I want to suggest an important difference.

"To the Edge" is a story of man who embarks on a search for what it means and what it takes to do the seemingly impossible: to run Badwater, 135 miles in the middle of the summer from Death Valley to Whitney Portal. This search leads author Johnson to attempt the run himself. This is an immense physical and psychological challenge, one that few of us will ever have the courage to undertake. But it is not at all the same challenge that McKibben takes on. McKibben isn't trying to cover a ridiculous distance in ungodly conditions; McKibben is trying to become a racer. The distinction is huge.

McKibben tells about his coach John Freeman, who had a fine career as a collegiate runner then, after not having run in nine years, got back in shape and set a goal to win the World Masters Championship at the steeplechase. When he succeeded, doing so with a final-stretch sprint, Freeman called it his "greatest victory in thirty years of racing." McKibben writes:

"It's worth noting that this was essentially a private victory. The world barely notices the Olympic steeplechase champion; the sport's only exposure at the last Games came when a trailing American decided to amuse the crowd with a vault into the water pit. The forty-ear-old steeplechase champion of the World Masters Games is slightly more prominent than the employee-of-the-month at the Shop'N'Save. No, his triumph had nothing to do with fame and everything to do with the fact that down that last stretch he went when he could have eased up. And it is a victory (or a failure) equally available to the less genetically endowed stuck in the middle of the pack. As with writing a book, exactly one person knows if you've given it your best shot, or if you've been satisfied with something less."

I was talking to a client recently and it came up that she runs marathons, as do I. I was amazed that she had just run one the weekend before and yet had another on her schedule in just two weeks. I told her I could never run marathons just three weeks apart, that my legs and mind needed more time to recover. She said for her, that wasn't the case; after all, the races were just a few miles longer than the long runs she did pretty much every week. "But they're more intense, right?" I asked. No, not really, she said. "I don't take them seriously. I just run for fun. Usually with friends. It's about the enjoyment for me. I'm not serious about running a time or anything." OK. That's cool. We're all in it for our own reasons. But: There was a way in which she disavowed taking running "seriously" that annoyed me. Her remarks seemed in line with a tendency to view a non-elite's efforts to become better -- faster -- as silly, self-indulgent, misguided ... the list goes on. After all, who cares if you finish 254th, 255th or 789th for that matter?

Who cares? This is the question McKibben explores in "Long Distance," and which Johnson does not in "To the Edge." Which isn't to say one book is necessarily better than the other, but just to make the point they are very, very different.