Gorgeous, well-muscled bodies rotate, glistening in slow-motion like roasted chickens on spits. Exultant trumpets sound, heralding another day of this portentous international event. The NBC sports anchor Bob Costas unpacks his (oh, so very American) adjectives, straining to capture the deeply felt emotions, the global camaraderie, the shared desire for greatness unfolding before our eyes.
And as the 2012 Olympic Games unfurl across our TV screens, it occurs to me that I’m four years older than I was the last time I watched these beautiful young masochists in action. These athletes spent the past four years enduring torturous training schedules: they woke up early to swim in chilly pools, ran up sandy hillsides, ate 12-egg omelets and stacks of chocolate-chip pancakes, taped up their swollen ankles or blistered feet, met with sports psychologists to quell meet-day jitters and slept the dreamless sleep of gladiators (sometimes, but not always, in high-altitude-simulation chambers).
Meanwhile, I spent those same four years growing older, less nimble, less quick. I woke up late and grumbled through my warm shower, went for the occasional run instead of meeting impending deadlines, put in 40 somewhat inspired minutes at the pool and slept the plagued sleep of the oldish, doomed to never warrant exultant trumpets or Costas’s linguistic acrobatics.
Yet this summer, I’ll once again gladly listen to how arduously these elite athletes have trained, day after day, in their quest for perfection. As I hear how doggedly they’ve resisted the urge to quit, I’ll feel just like Ferdinand the Bull from Munro Leaf’s classic children’s book, who preferred to sit quietly under his favorite cork tree and smell the flowers as he watched his peers snort and clash horns and dream of the bullfights in Madrid. Sure, these Olympic athletes could have sat quietly like the Ferdinand the Bulls of the world. But they refused to be comfortable, to relax, to be ordinary. They wanted to run and jump and butt their heads together, and we want to watch them do it.
If the ’70s and ’80s were marked by a heightened appreciation for hedonism, then the ’00s and ’10s have cultivated our fascination with masochism. Most of the activities that are considered pure and noble today have a hint of self-abnegation to them, if not an outright embrace of pain and agony. There’s a religiosity to the ways that elite athletes are celebrated that echoes our embrace of natural childbirth or fasting, revealing a shared belief that pushing your body to extremes bestows a higher consciousness that’s impossible to achieve through other means.
The seeds of the current moment were planted in 1980, when ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” first broadcast coverage of the Ironman Triathlon World Championship from Hawaii, and, covering the same race years later, memorably captured the women’s leader, Julie Moss, collapsing and crawling across the finish line in second place. By the late 1980s, everyday fitness enthusiasts had traded in their pink leg warmers and leotards for high-tech spandex, abandoning Jane Fonda’s upbeat aerobics to worship at the Michael Jordan church of extraordinary physical exertion. With its “Just Do It” slogan, Nike (and its ad agency, Wieden & Kennedy) recast exercise not as a casual activity but something at once grittier and more spiritually uplifting, a fundamental prerequisite for living the good life. Lance Armstrong took Nike’s religion to the next level, achieving prophet status in part by proclaiming his belief in the catharsis of suffering. In his book “It’s Not About the Bike,” Armstrong writes that he’s “into pain” because it’s “self-revelatory.” “In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most curious, and I wonder each and every time how I will respond.” To “Livestrong” (as the bracelet saying goes) means not just to push through adversity but also to relish it.
From Armstrong, the pain-torch has been passed to extreme athletes like Dean Karnazes, who, in his book “Ultramarathon Man,” describes a 199-mile race in California from Calistoga to Santa Cruz that required him to run through the night, eating a large pizza and an entire cheesecake for sustenance as he ran. Dashing hundreds of miles over snow-covered mountains and through blazing deserts brings about intense, otherworldly highs, according to Karnazes. Yet he seems to savor the lows even more: the debilitating cramps, the temporary blindness, the blisters that had to be treated with Krazy Glue and covered with duct tape midrace, or that time, after a race, that he vomited across the dashboard of his new Lexus.
Instead of concluding that Karnazes is suffering from some unclassified personality disorder, many greet him with the kind of awe and reverence typically reserved for minor deities. This admiration becomes more pronounced when you swap out the high-tech shoes and the new Lexus for bare feet and a mystical tribe living in the Mexican desert. The ultrarunner and purist Micah True, celebrated in Christopher McDougall’s “superathlete” bible, “Born to Run,” was encapsulated by Barry Bearak of The New York Times after True’s death in March: “To many, he represented the road not taken, a purer path, away from career, away from capitalism, away from the clock.”
Rejecting mainstream society isn’t what it used to be, in other words. Turning your back on the rat race is no longer the purview of layabouts like Ferdinand, but has become the target of his more aggressive brothers, who find inner peace from clashing horns all day. While finding some “purer path” once harked back to Timothy Leary (“Turn on, tune in, drop out”), Karnazes and True don’t promise drug-enhanced catharsis in a groovy back room so much as a hippie version of Navy SEAL training, slogging up and down hills until you’re forced to question the meaning of your existence.
In some ways “Born to Run” and “Ultramarathon Man” and “It’s Not About the Bike” are the modern versions of “The Psychedelic Experience,” with tripping on hallucinogens replaced by (enlightening) leg cramps and (illuminating) heat stroke. Hard-core masochists serve as our John the Baptists, preaching the glory of self-denial. Given the backdrop of fast food, megaplexes, giant TVs and triple Frappucinos, it makes sense that we glorify the selfless, barefoot, bean-eating runner. But does this fixation on suffering mark an advance from our indulgent days? Or would Timothy Leary say that after years of exposure to “the carnival of televised athletic and political spectacles,” our culture has transformed the spiritual path into a (literal) treadmill?
Televised Olympic coverage tends to gloss over the inherent masochism of elite athletes, infusing talk of self-sacrifice with nostalgic, frothy prose that hints at a borderline sexual fixation on youth, strength and beauty. While Olympic commentators might inquire about the details of Usain Bolt’s diet or Michael Phelps’s workout regimen, they do so with a casual levity that attempts to lighten up the somewhat depressing realities of Olympic training, as if eating hundreds of grams of protein and then swimming for five hours a day is just the sort of wacky shenanigans that whippersnappers get up to these days in pursuit of gold. But viewers don’t experience such details as depressing. Rather than suspecting that Olympic athletes are victims of some top-secret Pentagon experiment testing the effects of extreme boredom and exhaustion on young patriots, viewers savor each detail (Usain Bolt eats dozens of chicken nuggets and does weighted lunges with dumbbells), workout magazines reprint every line (Phelps swims 50 miles a week, does lots of “explosive lifting” and listens to Notorious B.I.G.’s “Sky’s the Limit” on his headphones to get pumped up), and each item is analyzed in exercise forums across the globe.
It’s common, in fact, to find the merciless tedium of elite athletes’ workouts exalted as if they were direct routes to enlightenment. We’ve always been fixated on individuals who exemplify extreme, borderline masochistic virtue, but these days, instead of marveling at the self-control and resolve of Catholic nuns reciting hours of Hail Marys or Buddhist monks meditating in caves for months, we rave about the guy who conquered K2 without oxygen or the woman who completed the Marathon des Sables, a six-day, 150-mile race through the Moroccan desert. These athletes now belong to a new kind of holy order, reminding mere mortals that, through absolute faith and belief in your abilities (and, oh, yeah, nonstop arduous workouts), you can rise to unimaginable heights of physical mastery.
If we experience such athletes almost as holy men (and women), then it’s no wonder that their autobiographies often read like prayer books. Michael Phelps’s “No Limits: The Will to Succeed,” which captures his drive to win eight medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, echoes the reverent tones of a Catholic congregation reciting the Apostles’ Creed. Declarations of faith (“Nothing is impossible,” “I know I can still swim faster”) upstage every plot point. Eventually, specific victories seem to melt into a haze of Phelps, climbing in and out of the pool, reminding himself that he can achieve anything, anything, anything.
But even as we relish the religiosity of Phelps’s belief in himself and savor Costas’s carefully selected superlatives for the victors, even as we lean into the brutality of the Olympic spectacle as a means of heightening the stakes and building suspense, we ultimately recognize these athletes as almost a different life-form. While elite athletes once may have represented some ideal embodiment of dedication and tenacity, after decades of higher and higher standards, they now seem more like creatures from a distant galaxy. Of course we can’t relate to human beings who have essentially dropped out of life to train around the clock since they were little kids, or to run hundreds of miles straight through the night while eating entire cheesecakes. But that still sounds better than sitting on the couch, growing steadily older until the 2016 Olympics.
In this way, the Olympic Games — like the details of Armstrong’s or Phelp’s grueling regimens — are an aspirational spectacle. We enjoy the notion that we could one day become something bigger, better and brighter than we are now, through sheer force of will. It’s a flight of fancy that pairs nicely with cold beer and salty snacks, the way the sound of distant butting and snorting pairs nicely with the smell of wildflowers.
When asked a few years ago what he would be if he weren’t a swimmer (and the world’s most heralded Olympic athlete), Phelps answered, “Probably a couch potato.” And if anyone ever asks me what I would be if I weren’t a couch potato, next time I think I’ll say, “Oh, probably an Olympic athlete.” An equally unlikely answer. But isn’t it nice to imagine so, like Ferdinand the Bull, from such a comfortable spot under the cork tree?
**And, how about yesterday's Men's 10,000M - holy mother of god, that last lap!! Mo Farah, GOLD, Galen Rupp, Silver...simply chilling finish! Love the sheer joy and disbelief etched on their faces as they cross the line - and realize what they have done.
run fast
Johnny Boy
