What Is Wrought From Failure

I have been thinking about Julie Moss quite a bit recently. Even if you don’t know her name, it is reasonable to assume that you have seen her mesmerizing finish to the 1982 Hawaii Ironman where she stumbled, staggered, and then crawled across the finish line—only to be passed in the final yards by the woman who had reeled her in slowly and ultimately won. As easy as it is to be moved deeply by her profound will to finish, I believe that there is more to her finish than drama.

Most of us will never come in first or second or even third in any competitive event of real substance. The majority of us live decidedly mediocre lives in the sense that our accomplishments are rarely noteworthy on a grand scale. Last year I placed 14^th in the Capital Peak Ultra, more than an hour and a half behind the top three finishers and 14^th out of 82 who finished. When I was in high school, our rowing team placed seventh in the New England Interscholastic Rowing Association Championships. Both finishes are respectable but generally average athletic highlights.

I am proud of my 14^th place finish not because of the actual position or the time but because I did relatively well as a “non-runner”. It is true that I trained for and had several marathons under my hydration belt by the time I laced up to train for Capital Peak. However running is not something that I identify as being my primary pursuit. Looking back through my training log from last year, I found that I was only running, at most, three times a week with a maximum weekly mileage of just over 40 miles. I don’t read running magazines, weigh the merits of one shoe versus the next, or surf the running forums on the web. The same is true for placing 7^th in the NEIRA championships. At the time we were an emerging club team, only a few years in existence, competing against schools with varsity programs that were decades older.

This is the rub with Julie Moss. She was, for all intents and purposes, a walk-on. With minimal experience and nominal training, she found herself in true competition with the best in the world, out of her league, literally. Often we want to take on competitors who are below us because it means that victory is nearly assured; we are at liberty to think smugly about how soundly we will beat our competition. Julie Moss’s strength was not in crawling across the finish line but in thinking until the very end that she could and would win despite the odds. It seems to me that her strength of character is not in that she willed her legs to walk but in believing that making them do so was actually meaningful. Otherwise she might have just lain there in the street and given up.

Along this same line of thought, the course for the Capital Peak Ultra includes an out and back section which is an 11 mile round trip. As a result the slower runners are passed by the quicker ones who have already turned the aid station at mile 30. I remember last year counting the men who passed me going the other way. One. Two. Three. Then five and six as a tiny pod. Nine and ten, then eleven. That was all. It shocked me that I was so close to the top ten. Starting the race, I clearly understood that I was “J.V.” and all around me were runners of substantially greater speed, endurance, and experience. Yet there I was genuinely competitive in the field. In that moment I understood Julie Moss’s motivation in a way that I had not before. She got up because of what she had already accomplished as much as what was still possible. I wrestled out the final 20 miles in much the same spirit.

Yet in the final miles I was arrested by severe pain in my foot. The rain was coming down in violent sheets as I pulled my shoe off to inspect the damage. Finishers eleven, twelve, and thirteen who I had been battling with for the last few hours passed me as I sat in the middle of the gravel road. What else was there to do but lace back up and keep going? And so I did. Yet I lost my battle and so did she. Even still, I like to think that we both illustrated the same point. Our endurance was not physical but psychological in origin, because it brushed against the insane to ignore the clear futility of action and keep moving forward and then be proud of what was so bravely wrought of failure.