Running is not cool

Running is not like surfing. Surfing is a cool, hip blend of nature’s tidal offerings and the human play instinct. No football coach has ever told a fumbling halfback to surf a lap; no basketball coach has ever made a player hit the waves for missing free throws. Surfers are immortalized in outstanding pictures of off-angle poses underneath crystal blue crescents. Runners make ugly faces of pain, and many of them. Surfers talk about wave heights and board tricks, and people react with amazement. They’re impressed. Runners talk about mileage and PR’s, but people feign amazement. What they really feel is fear born out of pity. You run how many miles?! Why would you do that?

Rarely people begin running because they enjoy it. Unless you’ve amassed a certain aerobic capacity, it is definitely not fun. I suspect that most people begin running out of some sort of compelling duty. Maybe a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, or beach season is around the corner and you feel the summer’s seduction to become naked. At my high school, the advanced honors program required that their students joined any sport for at least one season. Chess team filled up quickly, but cross-country always had plenty of room for those who still never learned to catch or throw. It could also be a social status thing. Nowadays everybody is training for the marathon. Aren’t you? Your neighbor is. Your coworker is. Shit, your best friend is doing a triathlon. Maybe one of your parents is a runner and you’re obligated to make the best use of those delightful genes they’ve bestowed. (I’d like to get my hands on some of those.)

Nobody joins the sport because it’s alluring and glamorous—certainly not because it’s cool like surfing.

Eventually, some of those who fulfill their duty’s obligations find that running has more to offer, and it’s not the faux-spiritual, commercial Zen crap perpetuated by the Runner’s World crowd. Siddhartha never logged a seventy-mile week, and Lao Tzu sure as hell never did mile repeats in 90-degree weather. Running can be pensive and peaceful, trotting along scenic trails and observing beautiful sunsets and sunrises. All of which, I would like to point out are enjoyed much more thoroughly standing still than in the middle of a 12-miler.

But running is a violent, abusive sport—against our bodies, against the elements, and against our competitors—and we have a love/hate relationship with it. Ask anyone who has lined up next to 300 of their closest friends for a grueling 10k; ask the twelve runners cutting in at the end of a one-turn stagger; ask the runner watching his race from the stands as he nurses the stress fracture on his inner left tibia, after he stretched, iced, heated, took calcium pills, changed his shoes, took days off, did everything right from the start but for some godforsaken reason he’s fated to sit instead of run. Make no mistake, running is pure carnage.

No, running is far from the blithe, sunburned images of the salty surf scene.

How do you drink?

In a February issue of the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explored the cultural impact on how we drink. He titled his essay, "Drinking Games: How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it." His conclusions about the external influences on alcoholism yield some thought-provoking questions about how we formulate alcohol-related policies.

At the outset, Gladwell describes the experience of anthropologist Dwight Heath in mid-twentieth century Bolivia. Heath, an "old-fashioned" ethnographer, fully immersed himself into the cultural undertakings of the local tribe, the Camba. Each weekend, the Camba gathered as a community and socially drank a natively brewed rum, frequently inviting Heath and his wife along. Upon his return to the New Haven, Connecticut, a colleague of his at Yale's Center of Alcohol Studies persuaded him to write a journal article detailing the drinking habits of Camba. The rum, as it turns out, was an astonishing 180 proof, nearly that of laboratory alcohol.

But Gladwell and Heath note that the Camba had not exhibited any signs of alcoholism and its degenerative effects. In fact, despite binge drinking industrial grade alcohol every weekend, the Camba showed incredible social stability:

A dozen or so people would show up on Saturdaynight, and the party would proceed--often until everyone went back to work on Monday morning... They did not drink alone. They did not drink on work nights. And they only drank within the structure of this elaborate ritual.

Drinking did not invade their productive lives, nor did it result in the violence and depression so frequently associated alcoholism.

So where does drunken rowdiness come from? Gladwell's answer suggests that we take signals from our environment. He highlights two competing theories about how we understand drunkenness. The first is disinhibition, which "suggests that the drinker is increasingly insensitive to his environment--that he is in the grip of an autonomous physiological process."

The alternative theory, and more persuasive I think, is the myopia theory. This concept postulates that "the drinker is, in some respects, increasingly sensitive to his environment: he is at the mercy of whatever is in front of him." In other words, a drinker responds to the immediate signals of his surroundings, or as Gladwell puts it, "by the pulsing music, by the crush of people, by the countless movies and televisions shows and general cultural expectations that say young men in a bar with pulsing music on a Friday night have permission to be loud and rowdy."

If Gladwell is right, then we have glaring holes in our national policies on alcohol. Nobody would or should expect the government to create safe controlled havens for drinkers. Such an idea would be ineffectual and impossible. But the effect of current alcohol policy is one that enables the negative environments in which we drink--primarily the environments that facilitate drinking underage. The prohibition of alcohol for drinkers under the age of 21 has pushed consumption into dangerous, unsupervised locales like the basements of fraternity houses. Here, drinkers follow the example of their surroundings, drinking as much as they can as quickly as they can, in secret. Drinkers trying to not be found.

In the futile attempt to prohibit the consumption of alcohol, our current alcohol policy has ignored the crucial elements needed to treat the current epidemic of alcoholism, education and example. Education is not solely dispensed in the classroom, but also done by cultural example. It is on this point that Gladwell argues best:

There is something about the cultural dimension of social problems that eludes us. When confronted with the rowdy youth in the bar, we are happy to raise his drinking age, to tax his beer, to punish him if he drives under the influence, and to push him into treatment if his habit becomes an addiction. But we are reluctant to provide him with a positive and constructive example of how to drink. The consequences of that failure are considerable, because, in the end, culture is a more powerful tool in dealing with drinking than medicine, economics, or the law... Nowhere in the multitude of of messages and signals sent by popular culture is there any consensus about what drinking is supposed to mean.

Without a positive and affirmative example of how to drink, prohibitions and danger warnings will not succeed. We need less messages concerning how not to drink and more messages concerning how to drink. Our policies only enable and cultivate the bad environments which we try to prevent. That is what needs to change.