Neil and Lance and lessons from both

I started putting this post together about halfway through today's long run, which took in the first part of the marathon course and a meander around Auckland's north shore. A fantastic weekend had been marred by the news that the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong, had passed away at the age of 82, and I was feeling contemplative as I slowly negotiated the streets of Milford.

If one is feeling reductionist about things, an 82 year old man has died. This sort of thing happens all the time. He lived a good life by all accounts, was a well-respected academic and administrator in the post-Apollo years, a father and a husband. But for the 29th of July 1969, his death would be sad but not unsurprising, he would be mourned by those who loved him and that would be that.

But he was not just an 82 year old man. He was much, much more than that. With his passing we have lost a man who did one of the truly great Firsts of earth's history. We may not know who the first creature to use fire was, or who rode a horse for the first time, or used language. But until today we shared a world with the very first human, the very first creature of our world's billions of years of evolution and change, to set foot on a celestial body that was not this one. And that is a loss that is immeasurable. There may be others who are the first to step on Mars, or Europa, or further afield, but he was the Very First. And now he is gone.

As is so often the case in our culture, there's already a backlash (to a man dying. Christ on a trampoline).

"Oh, he was just the one that landed, thousands of people got him there"

"They never landed anyway"

"Macho white imperialist bullshit. They could have spent that money on famine/ending war/me"

Is it weird of me to find this thinking actually upsetting on some level? I'm sad that people are so closed-minded, so lost to something larger, that they can't grasp what this stood for. Not just the first American. Not just the first white guy. Not just the first man. Not just the first human. But the first anything from this entire planet. From all the things that are, or ever were. The first to step off this tiny little marble to somewhere else.

Yes, he didn't get there alone. But his name will be one that carried their, and our, collective accomplishment into the future. A humble man who loved flying, who never cashed in on the incredible thing he had done. His is the name that will be remembered in a thousand years from our time. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson said on twitter today:

Would the money spent on getting him there have been spent on famine? Or ending war? No. Would it have ended either? Also no. The US spends more on pet food every year than they do on NASA. It's comforting to think that, regardless of the motives of the top brass, money was thrown into something that changed everything in a positive way for once. 

And if you don't think we actually went to the moon then get the hell off my blog. 

What has this got to do with running? Nothing, on the surface. The man himself infamously quipped that

"We all have a finite number of heartbeats, and I don't intend on wasting any running up and down the street"

However, wasting heartbeats or not, I felt extra motivation today. I felt that by striving to move myself forward, to do something more with myself than just what is easy, to do something positive, I was trying to emulate one of my few real heroes. Will this endeavour that I'm putting myself through change anyone but me? I highly doubt it. But it is a desire to be something more than I am which is, I feel, something that all of us should be aiming for in some way. Something that was until today embodied by Neil Armstrong. 

For all mankind.

However, epochal as this news was, it was not the only thing that had my attention as I considered the relative merits of a jambag at 12k or holding off to 14. Another Armstrong had been in the news for a more insignificant though still interesting reason. Lance Armstrong, seven time Tour de France winner and all-round cycling Titan, had decided not to contest charges of blood-doping brought against him by the US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA).  In doing so, he has all but admitted to taking performance enhancing drugs and cycling's governing body (the UCI) agrees with USADA, he will be handed a lifetime ban from the sport and stripped of his titles. The reaction to this news in the sporting world has been huge. Most pundits have condemned Armstrong and his actions, with support being seen as a patriotic duty by some rather than a considered stance. 

I've always held a rather ambivalent view about drug use in sport. It always seemed like an interesting thing to single out when athletes do so many weird and wonderful things to their bodies in order to excel. Hyperbaric chambers, creatine, branch chain amino acids, all fine. But a drug that boosts the amount of red blood cells (effectively a pharmaceutical oxygen tent or high-altitude training camp)? Worth a ban and losing your titles. I don't want to talk about this ad infinitum but I can highly recommend the attached documentary Bigger Stronger Faster which mainly focuses on steroid use but has a few interesting points to make, even if I don't agree with all of them. 

What got me about this story (and what it has to do with my marathon) is what people will do in the pursuit of their goals. If Neil was the embodiment of the positive trait of striving to be more than we are, what does that make Lance?

It's a relevant story to me as I have been grappling recently with the desire to shed some weight to make running easier on myself versus the need to not obsess over what I eat and potentially lapse into some disordered eating patterns that have plagued my adult life. Since losing weight I have become very twitchy about food (I have talked about this elsewhere on here) and to be in a situation where everything I read talks about the importance of a 100% balanced, weighed, portioned-out diet 100% of the time has made it very difficult to relax about what I eat. The guilt has made training this week especially very difficult and I've found myself becoming resentful, even petulant, at the self-imposed demands made on my life by this race.

How much of yourself can you sacrifice for the goals you set yourself?

Lance's story brought me up short. Here's a man who, one imagines, could have won all those titles regardless of EPO or steroids or whatever. Anyone driven enough to recover from metastatic cancer to be able to compete again would, one imagines, be able to win clean. But in a sport where 86% of the TdF winners have been accused of drug use, how do you fight that temptation? Everyone has their limits on what they are willing to do to reach their goals. Some people give up their favourite foods. Some sleep in oxygen tents. Some people take drugs. What was I willing to do for my goals? Was I willing to sacrifice my mental well-being, my health, for this goal I have set myself? Was a self-imposed time limit on finishing the marathon worth months of denial, of guilt when I caved in to temptations that others thought nothing of? What was I willing to do?

And so, as I made my final descent back into Devonport, face contorted from exhaustion and tiredness (I've never come so close to crying on a run as I did today) I decided something. No final time is worth making sacrifices that I'm not comfortable making, that don't sit well with me as a person. I'll strive and I'll keep going and it'll hurt but I'm drawing the line right here on what I will and won't do for this. That I'll finish the marathon is a given. Everything else is an extra. Striving for the best in me without unleashing the worst.

I like to think Neil would approve.