LOVE AND RAGE

Pete Jacobs crossed the line in first place at Kona last year, the first words that came out of his mouth were about Love. "I raced with Love", he said during his Kona acceptance speech.  At his moment of greatness, he fell to his knees, and assumed a position one normally associates with prayer or devotion.

Contrast the image above with that of Andy Potts crossing the finish line first at Oceanside this year, moments after defeating Jesse Thomas in a hard battle on foot.

What do these two images make you think of? What is your emotional response, your internal associations to each?

Without judgment of one over the other, (and I certainly am not using this to say anything one way or the other about either individual), I would say one seems to be about loss of self, ecstasy, gratitude, possibly devotion and the other is about balls out, power, triumph and domination.  Both reflect something about the emotional state that accompanied, or even contributed to, a major athletic achievement. I believe they reflect two, polar opposite states of self that people access as they push around their personal limits in endurance sport: one has to do with LOVE and the other with AGGRESSION.

This is nothing new. Philosophers, psychoanalysts, poets and movie script writers (among others) have explicitly or implicitly either commented on, or made use of this dichotomous aspect of the human character. I have never seen it related to the experience of flow in endurance sport, so bear with me, this will either be an interesting read, or else a verbiose expression of the obvious.

I think most of us are more familiar with aggression. Think about the training scenes and plot of  Rocky 3. Mr. T's character, Clubber Lang propels himself to greater and greater heights purely through the power of his hatred and aggression. Rocky just can't match his alpha-male potency, until he reaches in and unlocks his own anger. Of course, being the good guy, his anger is righteous, and he keeps it in its place. But it is still anger that allows him to push harder, get faster, fitter, more ripped and, ultimately, to crush his enemy.

In my various blogs, I have cited inner rage as a reservoir of the emotional energy that drives alot of my training. I have seen Ironman as, among other things, an expression of defiance at the human condition. The very fact that I tend to use more heavy metal and hard rock musical references in my blog is yet another manifestation of this. I also listen to alot of electronica, world music, flamenco, classical, jazz...but they don't usually get me into a state of mind where I push through pain barrier after pain barrier...

So, endurance sport can be a fantastic sublimation of angry forces within us, that otherwise might result in more overtly destructive behavior. Anger is easy to understand. Push, get mad, push harder, channel your will to dominate, (what Nietzsche called your will to power), and you progress, you push through barriers, and you experience not only release, but a strong feeling of empowerment, an expansive sense of self, a chance to bask in the glow of your own potency, or to experience your own inner hero.

To connect with your own rage can not only help you to push beyond what you thought were your limits, but it can be very self-affirming, self-centering, or even, sometimes, self-aggrandizing.

So, what about LOVE?

When was the last time you approached a training session with gratitude? Have you ever greeted the pain in your quads as you perform supra-threshold sets by celebrating? Have you ever felt your sense of self slip away as your mind falls deeper into the total experience of swimming, biking or running? Have you ever embraced your pain and felt it transport you into an experience of extreme elation where you seem to have connected with something beyond yourself?

The great poet, and first ever whirling dervish, RUMI, wrote "let the beauty of what you love be what you do"... "your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it".

a whirling dervish

Finding this end of experience can be more difficult. In fact, the harder you try for it, the more it may get away from you.  In this context, endurance sport can be seen almost in the same vein as the spinning of dervishes, extended fasting, self-flagellation, sitting in a sweat lodge,  or any other type of extreme mental/physical experience that is designed to induce a shift in consciousness in the hopes of obtaining ECSTASY.

a dervish piercing himself into ecstasy

a philipino self-flagellator

a traditional sweat lodge

The problem, from my point of view, with most Love experiences, is that they tend to be wrapped in the shroud of self-righteousness and a mythology of goodness. They are often associated with mystical, religious and/or moral meanings or some sense of attainment or confirmation of one's piety. The people who experience them or who seek them out, often judge them as "better" or more "pure" or somehow preferable to other states of mind. This, in itself is not necessarily justified, and can become dangerous.

 And, more often than not, I think most people get mixed up about what LOVE is; they seem to equate it with duty, devotion, sacrifice...and all too often the energy of LOVE ends up getting mixed up in a sado-masochistic melange with RAGE... and then you have disaster. If things get twisted enough, the result is some of the more horrible acts that human beings are capable of.

Two days ago, I was spinning out high watts on the trainer with the above tune playing on the Ipod. I felt immense pain but that started to vanish.  I felt my whole self feel grateful and present, and then things started to almost move on their own, and the pain disappeared, replaced by a feeling of joy. It was like I was dancing on the pedals, doing my own version of a dervish whirl as my feet went round and round.  I was filled in that moment, with not a drop of rage, but Love for the whole experience and everything that was part of it. I felt light.  I was almost ecstatic. The further I embraced the experience, the more I seemed to disappear and this was not the least bit frightening. I had become witness and participant of the same moment. It was quite wonderful. I would love to feel that way in a race this year.

As a pragmatist, I have to say that I find rage a bit more reliable and easy to access. But I have equally had some great race experiences and the bulk of my training take place while in a kind of non-judgmental, almost empty space that simply allows things to happen and is not particularly associated with any of the emotional extremes I have discussed above.

Perhaps this will lead to a separate blog on the relevance of Zen to endurance, or perhaps not...