Caught in an ocean of vinyl and CDs inside Tower Records in the late 90s, my fingers paddled through the Pacific-sized body of Neil Young’s music that I thought I knew in its entirety, and an unfamiliar album grabbed my attention. Back in my truck, I giddily slipped the CD into the dash player, anticipating the thrill of getting sonically barreled by a newly discovered set of soul-stirrers.
Track after track had me contemplating the “skip” button. Was this the same musician who wrote “Heart of Gold”?
Young was once laughably sued by his record company for “making music that wasn’t representative of Neil Young music.” After barely getting through one listen of an album that sounded like a claustrophobic closet full of synthesizers on depressants backed by drums on uppers, I could – ridiculous as the notion was – sort of understand the label’s litigation.
To be a viable lifelong athlete, or musician, one must be willing to experiment – and potentially fail spectacularly – in order to maintain the passion for the journey.
It wasn’t until many years later, as someone with a greater understanding of the often turbulent – and always individualized – rides of both the athletic and creative processes, did my appreciation surface for Young’s risk-it-all willingness to experiment wildly to keep the passion from corroding.
In Deena Kastor’s 2018 memoir, Let Your Mind Run, she tells the story of a gifted young runner who nearly ran herself into a premature disappearance from the sport while relying exclusively on the notion that the only relevant components to her success were a fixed amount of talent and a run all-out, all-the-time, mentality. Had she not broken out of that behavioral rut as a burned out and constantly injured collegiate runner to take a chance on Joe Vigil’s philosophy of patience and positive thinking, we might not know her today as a multiple American record-setter, and the first US female to medal in the Olympic marathon (bronze in Athens, Greece, in 2004) since Joan Benoit’s legendary gold in Los Angeles in 1984.
Would we live our lives differently – more freely and uninhibited – if we didn’t keep track of birthdates and were thus unencumbered by the undertone of normalized expectations surrounding the aging process? As it stands now, even within the can-do community of ultrarunning, the prevailing assumption is that indefatigable athletes are the exception to the rule that aging dramatically erodes the sands of psyche and performance.
To be sure, there is more than a whiff of pasteurized manure in the saying, “Age is just a number.” I verified that via the anaerobic method, when, at age 45, I put myself through a high school track-style training cycle in an attempt to run a sub-5-minute mile, something I hadn’t done since my college days. The intervening decades brought me up 17 seconds short. Far from considering it an abject failure, the real value rested in the act of trying. Instead of dismissing the goal with an “I’m too old for that” shrug, I embraced the experiment and, in the process, rekindled a joy for running in general, and ultrarunning in particular, that felt as though it was futilely fighting the riptide of time head-on.
As with the rip current that is most successfully navigated laterally in order to eventually continue forward, longevity – impassioned longevity – is assisted by being willing to, at least occasionally, take the tangents instead of doggedly following the same path into eternity. Restructure your training if you’ve plateaued. Unstructure your training if it has become a chore. Prioritize psychology as much as physiology and quality over quantity. Reduce running volume and increase non-impact cross-training when your body balks at the training loads of yore. Commit to a new distance, a new style of racing or an adventure run of your own design. Flip the script and volunteer more than you race.
“Repetitio mater studiorum est.” Vigil quoted this Latin phrase repeatedly to Kastor in her formative professional years. Repetition is the mother of learning. Although this is undeniably true, so is the fact that variety is the spice of psyche. If Groundhogs Day syndrome takes hold for too long, rust forming on the undercarriage of your passion is not far behind.
Had Neil Young not initially surfed to the shoreline of success on a wave of country rock, would the expectation still have been a monotonously rolling tide of similarly styled songs?
To be a viable lifelong athlete, or musician, one must be willing to experiment – and potentially fail spectacularly – in order to maintain the passion for the journey. After the rush of success of 1972’s “Heart of Gold,” Young commented, “This song put me in the middle of the road. Travelling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but more interesting.”
It is an inevitability to find ourselves in the middle of some roads from time to time as we move through our athletic, professional and personal lives. The middle feels familiar, safe and predictable, but ultimately, stifling. Remain there too long, the rust of restiveness takes hold and a long sleepwalk into forever awaits.
Is it better to burn out or fade away? A more useful question might be: what actions do I need to take to remain enthusiastically engaged for the long haul?
Answer and re-answer that as needed, and you’ll #StayOutThere in your chosen pursuits with passion, hopefully as long as “The Godfather of Grunge.”