The Freedom Paradox

Wall-E Humans

I've been noticing a perplexing paradox off and on for the past couple of years, the "off" and "on" of which correlate with the "on" and "off" of my lackluster, halting attempts to get trained back into something like ultrarunning shape.

Prior to my peak year of 2016 I had an unbroken, seven-year period of consistent, persistent training to run ultras. Then some life happened, and since that time I've had nothing but cycles of starting over from what feels like scratch, spending a month or two struggling to reach the point where I'm beginning to feel optimistic that I'm back on track - and then getting taken down by something else again for months. It's depressing.

A well-known ultrarunning quote from David Blaikie begins, "Perhaps the genius of ultrarunning is its supreme lack of utility. It makes no sense in a world of space ships and supercomputers to run vast distances on foot." With due respect to Blaikie, for most of us space ships and supercomputers are not part of our everyday lives - so let me add something that is: cars.

The automobile is the real reason that ultrarunning is so nonsensical. In the age before the invention of the automobile, the majority of healthy people could walk significant distances on foot, and regularly did. Horses and wagons didn't make that physical ability unnecessary the way that cars do. My understanding, for example, is that the pioneers on the Oregon Trail mostly walked across the continent beside their wagons - because the horses had enough to do just hauling all of the stuff and didn't need the added strain of carrying able-bodied people too - so get your hind quarters out of there, Martha, and walk!

Today? I can get into my car any time I want to and be hundreds of miles away in a matter of hours - with no personal physical effort whatsoever. What freedom! How the average person's world has expanded! Except... ultrarunning has ruined my appreciation for that.

Back when I was at peak fitness and I drove my car, I would often find myself looking at the scenery going by - perhaps at some high mountain ridge across a valley from the highway - and I would think to myself, "I'd like to run that." Or I would look at the very road I was driving on and think, "This would make a great long run. I should run here sometime." Now, I still see those things as I drive, and I still have those desires, but I can only think to myself, sadly, "I couldn't run that right now."

Therein lies the paradox. I'm flying along at seventy miles per hour, who knows how many miles from wherever I started, and yet in reality I'm just sitting there, inert, and feeling - really feeling - like the world is completely closed in on me. I mean it feels genuinely claustrophobic! The automobile gives us the freedom to go almost anywhere - mechanically - but it takes away so many peoples' true ability to go much of anywhere. My body knows the difference.

Before ultrarunning I was blissfully ignorant of this. Like most everyone else, I would drive here and there, feeling like I was the master of my world. Only occasionally I might wonder, "What would I do if the car broke down several miles from anywhere?" - but I would push that thought away, kind of the same way we push away thoughts of death or anything else too terrifying to contemplate.

Now... though I still have the 'freedom' to zoom around at high rates of speed, I feel trapped and helpless even as I'm doing it - because I know I can't just step out my front door tomorrow morning and run twenty miles. Having run up a mountain or two, I can no longer buy into the illusion that "I" am mastering anything when all I do to summit another is plantar-flex my right ankle for a few minutes.

How I laughed at the out-of-shape humans whisked everywhere in their high-tech lounge chairs in Pixar's 2008 film "Wall-E" - while the point sailed right over my head! Like most good science fiction (even cartoonish, comedic science fiction) it wasn't so much a cautionary vision of the future as it was an insightful commentary on the present - a metaphor for where we are as human beings today.

That perfectly capable person who's sitting behind the wheel waiting for your parking spot while you unload your entire cart of groceries into your trunk? That's a Wall-E human. That guy who always stops at the end of his twenty-foot-long driveway to awkwardly fetch his mail through the driver's side window rather than parking the car in the garage and walking back out for it? Wall-E human. The world would sell us 'freedom' while making Wall-E humans of us all.

Now I'm not about to give up the great convenience of driving my car. I have family it would take me days to get to without it. But I am no longer willing to give up my real freedom to it either by letting it fool me into thinking I am already free. Time to get my hind quarters out of there and walk!