ARE GREAT PERFORMANCES FOUND OR MADE?

I have vowed to myself to make enduranceanimal more user friendly and not so self indulgent.
But then I ask myself why? and for whom?

along those lines, this week, i feel the need to return to my relative lack of punctuation (to me, a poetic gesture) and to full on self indulgent although not too all serious belly button contemplation.

i like to call it enduro-philosophy...a neologism that speaks for itself...a sign of the i don't give a shit-ness that allows me to write stuff like this and still want to deal with myself in the morning...

lately i have started to play guitar with some energy again. this has been in no small part inspired by finding out that my good friend and swimming partner angelo sartorelli is a professional classical guitarist. as a result of this discovery, while turning in 500 meter repeats in the pool, i decided to try to hack my way through a piece of classical music for the first time in years. i have long inspired to play yamour by andrew york, it is just such a beautiful piece of music and it has been my fantasy to just have it there as something i can play when i pick up the guitar to relax. in recent times, i had fallen prey to mindlessly playing the same few things over and over again during the precious few moments i found to play guitar. this would be refreshing,  so, off i went.

i have come to prefer tablature as opposed to musical notation over the years. this is entirely the result of laziness on my own part and adds another dimension to much of what i am about to say; the medium can truly effect the message, or put another way, how one comes to something, can effect what you see, and how you see it, and therefore what you make of it. this is nowhere more real than in than the difference between learning a piece of music from tablature or learning it from musical notation.

"we take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world" (robert persig: zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance).

learning a piece of classical music on the guitar highlights for me various philosophical dichotomites, which while hard to define precisely, are at the heart of the endurance sports experience and racing in particular. free will vs. determinism, the classical vs. the romantic perspective, empiricism vs. existentialism. i will attempt to delineate all of these as they relate to the question:

IS A GREAT PERFORMANCE DISCOVERED OR MADE?

spinoza posited that we come to believe we have a free will because we experience desire. not enough can be said about this insight. i experienced the desire to eat, so i must have made a decision, based on free will, to eat something? makes sense on the surface, yet upon closer inspection, i am making not so inevitable leaps in logic. i am making the backwards assumption that since A happened, and i experienced a desire for A, then i must have used my free will to obtain A. but what is experientially true may not hold up to closer inspection, not so automatically. desire is not always necessary for action (if we assumed that we would have an animistic view of the universe where inanimate objects move because they want to). so, we connect desire with action because it feels true to do so. but desire could equally be an epiphenomenon, bearing no causal relationship to action. maybe it was put there to make us think we are choosing?

 the programmers of the matrix could have gone to town with this one. we really have no proof that we have free will other than our own experience of making decisions in response to desires. but, aside from the subjective sense of agency which arises from this, there is absolutely no proof that we actually are free agents, or that there is such a thing as free will.

you are in the last 2k of your half ironman, chasing an opponent a few meters ahead;  every part of you hurts, your breathing is laboured, your feet are on fire, your quads feel to give out, and yet you find something to push you further into pain than ever before, and you make that pass. in the process you feel yourself teeter totter on that edge between wanting to stop and wanting to push on. it feels like you are making the choice to go forward. the feeling is compelling. it rises up from deep feelings of desire, and fortitude. you feel proud later on....but at the end of the day, other than your subjective experience of desire, there is no actual evidence that you made any choices at all. it is equally plausible that every choice you made, every choice your opponent made, how your bodies responded, what they did, the outcome, all of it, was pre-determined, not open to the fluid non-equilibrium of what we believe to be our "free will".

perhaps things will just unfold as they will and we go crazy trying to find ways to convince ourselves otherwise.

learning to not trust your own desire can lead to a profound sense of liberation and an increased sense of mindfulness of the process one is actually going through. not trusting your desire as anything other than a signal of some kind allows you to become a surfer on the sands of reality, balanced, aware, poised, but just going along for the ride. this is one of the buddha's four noble truths, spun out in a different way. freedom from desire is the path to enlightenment. enjoy the ride...mindfully.

what does this mean, in performance terms? let me offer up a contrast. in situation one i am tense with desire to make music, to play my new piece well, so that i am often more caught up in what i wish i was doing than what i am actually doing. my tension actually inhibits my attention, and makes it harder for my nervous system to do the fine tuning needed to execute the piece musically. once i relax, let go of my desire, and accept what is happening, i not only enjoy it more, i am actually more effective, my  motions are more fluid, my fingers move in finer harmony. the experience is one of active watching. i am a participant/observer.

by analogy, i can fight the water, i can try to "make things happen" or i can allow myself to flow, to feel the water as i pull. i can be open to what is happening in the water and not only will i enjoy it more, i will be more effective.

now, let's consider the romantic/classical dichotomy; two different ways of knowing, as they relate to performing music and endurance sport. music is a fine example this dichotomy. i can relate to yamour as a sensory gestalt, a set of emotions, evoked images. in this romantic view of the piece, yamour is what it makes me feel, how it presents itself to my senses as a whole thing, like a complex sauce in french cooking, made of different parts, but experienced as a whole, and most importantly, in terms of how it makes me feel and the associations it stimulates. i can also relate to endurance sport in this way. ironman is what i feel watching mark and dave from 1989, it is the sun on my skin, the rush i feel as i move through space, my breathe, where my mind goes when things are running smoothly.

 however, things can often turn sour when one is absorbed in this romantic perspective. the same thing, a piece of music, a race, can turn from thing of beauty to source of irritation or even suffering very quickly depending on how our associative faculties are dealing with it. there is an inherent lability built into the romantic perspective. our experience of qualities can shift as rapidly as the weather.  and, further, it is next to impossible to learn to play something as complex as a piece of classical music, to perform it, if one is only relating to it from the romantic point of view .

to perform a piece of music almost demands that one take a classical position on it, to understand it in terms of its structure, as a series of relationships between parts. to learn a piece of music you need to slow it down and dissect it like it was an anatomy project. then the music reveals itself to you in a different light. there are abstract concepts, harmonies, progressions, forms. and then there are physical demands, technical considerations that must be considered in great detail if you stand any chance of making music out of it. without sitting in this classical point of view, one cannot hope to make music, one can never realize the emotions and flow that probably motivated you to learn the piece in the first place.

the same holds true in ironman. the actual performance, the race, is the end point in a very long process, involving infinitely more practice than performance. the racer may have been motivated at some point by romantic considerations, but this will not get the racer to the start line, or to finish the day. the race must be understood as a structure, a relationship between various parts, and these must be rehearsed until they feel automatic. it is the execution of one part after another, done with full attention to each, that makes the race happen. in fact, too much thought about the finished product can impede performance. the ideal race emanates from perfect execution of each necessary part, not from too much romantic wishing for the end result.

while learning yamour, i was struck by the absolute beauty and order of the notes, how they lay themselves out in patterns on the fretboard, how they offer up fingering formations which are quite natural and just happen to result in beautiful music. it was as though the beauty in order existed before the music itself. like a game of chess, it already existed somehow in the abstract. the piece of music, like a game, is simply one concrete manifestation of the ordered system of which it is an expression. all chess games already exist. they just happen in time when two people come together and make manifest what is already inherent in the order of the chess board.

 i found myself thinking about yamour and its place in the world of ideas.  do ideas exist before we think them? do we create ideas or do we discover them? learning a piece of music is a clear example of discovery, of running your hands through the sand and feeling more about your world. i don't think anyone would question that a  musical score was there before the person learning it. but what about the person who wrote the music? was it a similar process of discovery for them? did michaelangelo make david out of stone, or did he find him in there?

i am not offering an answer to these questions. i am wondering out loud with you about what happens when you stop feeling like you are making something happen and start to see yourself as there to "find the music". i race in texas in a few weeks. i am going to try/not try to view my race as something to discover rather than something to create. i have seen this attitude work wonders while learning music. it has produced a more fluid, joyous and productive experience. i have had glimpses of what this can be like in training. i am optimistically hopeful about what might happen if i can be mindful in this way on race day.

endurance sport is about self-discovery. it is about seeing what you can do. this is interesting because really at the end of the day, genetics, time constraints, physiology and a million other factors we don't know about set the limits on what is possible long before we ever set out to do it. to those absorbed in the anxiety of their own ego, this can seem disheartening.

on a surface level, driving yourself hard at a race feels like a manifestation of desire, and by extension, of free will . if we see ourselves as agents driving through the rocks of existence like dynamite laying down railway paths through a mountain, then we are bumping and grinding our way towards the light, masters of our own existence, true creators. there is a type of egoistic appeal in this image. yet we have no evidence that this is the case. all we really know is that we want something and we want it bad.

 but maybe we are kidding ourselves, or grossly over-estimating our ability to actually make things happen any differently than they will.  it only feels like we are making our own way, creating our own path, because we want it so bad. if we relax, if we learn not to reify our desire but to watch it as we would watch anything else, then maybe, just maybe this is a pathway to discovery of the purest performance possible.