50K and The Price of Admission

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Most teenagers think they understand what college is like. Consider, as one example, the recent film The Social Network. College is well coiffed frat boys throwing licentious and exclusive parties. It is geeks sitting around late at night hacking servers with their laptops. It is brick buildings and ill-gotten beers in cacophonous pubs. Once in a while there is the occasional class where students sit lethargically in stadium lecture hall seating and listen to a professor drone on about—whatever. All this is not to claim that these portrayals of college are not without truth or merit. However, the reality is skewed.

The power of college is not that it matches what we expect but redefines our expectations.

Saturday, the plan was a 50 kilometer training run. This was to be my first real ultra-marathon distance; it was a foray into the big leagues. In the same way that a high school student entering college for the first time expects a shift in paradigms—away from hall passes to passing out in dorm hallways—I too anticipated something like this as well. However, the results came in a highly unexpected fashion. I was expecting to pass the 26.2 mile mark and experience a euphoric change, liberated from sub-marathon distances. I thought pushing into the realm of the ultra-marathon would result in a transcendent elation. As I stepped through the metaphorical doors, I was met only by five more miles of icy gravel, sore knees, and a sick desire to just lie down on the road.

And somehow, my former runner self slipped into this rarified world as well. I was not transformed, just transplanted—the same person in a different place.

This was one of several mistakes that I had made that day. Earlier on I had water bottle nozzles freeze solid due to temperatures in the twenties. At eighteen miles I refilled my carbohydrate drinks but forgot my solid food. A sodium deficit led to painful cramping in my hips that can best be described as wearing a diaper vise. However the biggest mistake I made was assuming that the paradigm shift would happen to me, that I would be transformed by this experience.

I was not transformed. Instead I was left battered and more than a little bit afraid of the task that I had taken on.

When I first arrived at college, I remember thinking that I had finally made it. At last I was a college man. Having been extremely well prepared in high school, I felt confident and secure; having spent four years at a boarding school, I knew that I could manage the daily tasks of living independently in a dorm. What I quickly learned, though, was that being enrolled in college does not make you a college man. Doing well as a student in high school does little for you in college, just as running 26.2 in 3:15 means little at mile 31.

Registering for the race and paying the entrance fee does not make the participant into an ultra-marathoner. It only allows admission to the experience.

The lesson I learned Saturday was nearly the same I learned sitting in my first freshman literature class: the rules had changed. I could not run my ultra like I had my previous marathons. Discussing women’s literature in a room full of twenty year old English majors was a far cry from the class conversations we had about The Great Gatsby in high school English. I couldn’t just read the text; I had to study it.

I would not change until I effected the change for myself.

On the car ride home from my 50K run, I can freely admit that for a moment—as I reflected on my accomplishment—I was genuinely choked up and was emotionally moved by the task I had just completed. It was a weird mixture of pride in the achievement and trepidation about the long road ahead—not an uncommon response for high school seniors taking their first steps across the threshold of a college campus as incoming freshmen.

Perhaps the extraordinary nature of events like these is that they allow us to become more human—when we let them do so. Such is the price of admission.