The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest ?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is no use’. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. It’s no use. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.
- George Leigh Mallory, 1922
I’m declaring my 13 miler tomorrow the first annual Jack Frost Half Marathon (aka the Freeze Your Cajones Half Marathon). No given date, but it has to be at least 0°F and something better be nippin’ at your nose.
Here’s the weather for tomorrow:
It should be about -3 (before windchill) at noon when I run the kickoff race of this new annual event.
Heck, maybe I’ll organize a race next year…
Continue reading ‘This may be the start of something…’
when are we getting our matching tattoos?
“This obsession with running is really an obsession with the potential for more and more life.”
Sorry, Toots, I’ll take -30° with the wind chill any day over the up and down and craziness you have to deal with. I don’t know if I could deal with not ever needing to own anything with goose down in it. I don’t understand a world that exists in which my nostril hairs don’t freeze when I walk outside. Yeah, I used to live there, but I don’t remember how I coped. My hair was never meant to be that big. Really. (For our kind readers, you should know that in Toot’s passport photo, her hair exceeds the photo borders.) So, today was Tucker’s day, and we ran f*&k-all fast, as usual. Surprisingly…not really…there was NO ONE out except for a man who was about to go skijoiring with his husky on the lake, and a man with about 5 dogs. Yes, they took up the whole path, and yes, getting past them was a mini-fiasco in itself. Had a fantabulous run, and I’m glad to be living in a land that occasionally turns into a frozen, uninhabitable tundra. The air sure does feel clean up here.
