To the Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance
By Kirk Johnson (New York: Warner, 287 pp, $23.95).

Reviewed by Michael Bauman

The human mind is both dazzling and befuddled. It sends forth both insight and error. When it does its work well, it unlocks the doors of knowledge to things within us and without. When it does its work less well, however, it not only emits egregious error, it also flatters itself by dressing its mistakes up as mysteries, granting them a dignity and aura they do not deserve. Not surprisingly, ultramarathon athletes make their fair share of such mistakes. They search for what Johnson calls "the mystery of endurance," and it does not exist. Successful endurance competition isn't "about limits and boundaries at all . . . but rather about going on and never giving up" (286).

It really is as simple as that. But do not mistake "simple" for "easy." To go on when you wish intently, even madly, to stop is a simple concept, though it is exceedingly difficult to accomplish. Johnson's book is about accomplishing it, at least how he did it. He did it the way people normally do it - with lots of help, mostly from his family. "I learned," he said, "that the greatest moments of bliss arise from the simplest of things, and that the list of what we really need in life is astonishingly short: we need each other" (283).

This is not to say that there are no mysteries. There are. But they are the mysteries of human existence in a fallen world, and not mere challenges concerning how to perform well in this or that particular sport. If you are spiritual enough to seek them and to find them, the mysteries of life can be reached, sometimes even decoded, by sport. Johnson is just such an athlete. "I was enough of a believer, or a seeker at least, to think there might be a way . . . to reach through the veil and touch something beyond me and my life. A place where misery and transcendence were so deeply intertwined could not be without meaning" (7).

The farther he ran, the more he learned (or unlearned): "I'd glimpsed, for the first time, the dark edge of the sport I'd stumbled into, the bleak and desolate places of the soul that it can reveal, and the loneliness that was at its heart" (9). That loneliness showed him that his chosen task entailed not just running longer but "running deeper into places in yourself that had to be found and conquered. For most of us, sport is defined by what we see on television or in the newspaper - a big business of spectators and fans and money. The ultramarathon turns the mirror inside out and backward. It lives at the margin, coming alive while most of us are blinking or sleeping or looking away" (12). The ultramarathon is "doing the extraordinary simply for the sake of doing it: no money, no glory, no recognition" (26).

The payoff is found elsewhere, Johnson learned, "in the interplay of the mind and the heart and maybe the soul . . . those places beyond the modern world where . . . the real fuel for endurance was found" (53), in a region he called "the interior spaces" (57).

If all this sounds too mystical, too unreal, too esoteric, then perhaps it is. But not if the major religions of the world (or even just one of them) are true, for if they are, nothing, not even sport, is properly secular. In a world with God at its core or at its source, all things are charged with religious significance, as Johnson was sometimes discovering. But that fact would be no authentic mystery, just a fact about the world as it is and about us, a fact we ought well to consider. But considering it well means realizing that riding and running are not redemption, though they might possibly be loosely tied to it. Recreation, after all, is at least part of re-creation, part of making all things new. Even an old man like me, riding on an old bike over roads I've covered hundreds of times, can get off the bike a new man, or at least a rejuvenated one.

It's a grace. Most things are - or can be.

Reprinted from www.Ultracycling.com

date modified:
5 July 2006