What's my motivation

Type One Fun: fun to do at the time, and fun to talk about afterwards.
Type Two Fun: fun to talk about afterwards - no fun at all at the time.
 
A year ago this weekend I ran forty miles in the snow, which was as difficult and unpleasant as you might imagine.

It was beautiful, but mostly it was difficult. Every third step your foot plunged through the fickle snow and kept on plunging all the way down to the waist. There you'd wobble on one leg like a shit flamingo, overbalance, and fall flat on your chest. Pushing up to regain your feet, your hands would punch through and now your face is buried too. More than once you wonder whether you'll be stuck here forever, like an increasingly frosty Buster Keaton rehearsing an increasingly unfunny routine.

For forty miles.

It was beautiful though. It wasn’t the Bowland fells, it was Narnia. It was so beautiful, I said so aloud to a fellow runner. Then I immediately fell over and banged my shoulder on a fence.
 
I know intellectually that I was miserable for much of the day. But whenever I remember the day I remember the beauty. The images, the feeling of moving through the images, the intense full-body beauty. It was the purest experience I’ve had of Type Two Fun.
 
I’m running the race again tomorrow..
 
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“What’s my motivation?” asks the actor. “Find your why” says the ultrarunner.
 
Actors are easy to mock for this question. I’ve done it myself, often while being the actor I’m mocking - but the answer is useful. It’s hard for me to plausibly tell Ophelia to get to a nunnery, or to tell Polonius I enjoy walking like a crab, unless I have some notion of what lies beneath it. If the reasons feel incoherent then the production might too.*

The problem with ‘what’s my motivation’ acting is not that answering the question is a problem in itself but that it can lead to a very narrow and simplistic understanding of what motivates anyone. If everything about Hamlet is squeezed through a theory about curdled ambition or Oedipal desire or scholarly fineagling then we end up with an expensively-staged essay on the character, the play viewed through a crack in the library door.
 
“I have that within that passeth show”, he says. The reasons don’t have to be as visible as duelling scars, they throb beneath the surface. We all regularly have little or no idea why we’re doing anything. We all have that within that passeth show. With the benefit of a good therapist we can usually figure out a convincing story, but it's a simplification. The scar is not the wound. It's not even the story of the wound. An answer to 'What's my motivation' might be a necessary condition for drama (I'm not even sure about that) but it's miles from being a sufficient one. 'Why do you run ultras' is the same.

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Here are some of the standard answers:

• - I want to challenge myself
• - Doing something hard shows me that I can push through in difficult times
• - I just love being in the mountains

 
All of these are true. None of them are true. We have that within that passeth show.

Tell someone you’re running a marathon and they’ll often ask what you’re doing it for. Offer one of the answers above and they’ll look blank: they didn’t mean what’s your motivation they meant who are you fundraising for. For most people running twenty-six miles or more computes only as a very noisy way of rattling a charity bucket. 
 
On his attempt to break the Fastest Known Time for running the Pennine Way, Damian Hall wrote FFF in marker pen on his hand. It stood for Family, Friends and Future. After one of her Olympic marathons Paula Radcliffe revealed that she’d spent much of the race simply repeating her daughter Isla’s name to herself. Before my first 100-miler I got my daughter to write me a note (pictured above) to be opened at the halfway point. These sorts of things are conventionally regarded as the endurance athlete’s ‘why’. (Although as Boff has pointed out, you might do better to find a ‘because’.)
 
But if it was really about expressing our love for our families then we might do something other than run away from them for hours or days. The source of one’s strength when the race gets hard should not be confused with the reason for running it in the first place. John Kelly raised a lot of money for flood relief with his attempt to run the Appalachian Trail - but he’d been planning the attempt since before the Storm Helena hit. So committed was he to not disappointing his supporters that he nearly didn't quit even when it could have led to amputations - I'm not saying this stuff isn't motivating - but it's not the reason for starting the run in the first place. That note from my daughter rang in my head for the last fifteen miles but it isn't why I stood at the start line. On my last 100-miler I had no note, no acronym on my hand, and I was miserable but I kept going anyway. 
 
I have that within which passeth show.
 
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My main race for this year is Lakeland 100 at the end of July. In this blog series I’ll tell the story of the buildup. I’ll talk about training, but also about theatre and writing and art and politics and family. The start line of the race is the finish line of this journey, but training is only part of the journey.

Trying to run 100 miles is a creative endeavour. It's a problem-solving task and the problems multiply. It is, as Julie Carter said about something similar, a form of land art. It’s an exploration into human psychology. It’s a reminder of the things and people you love. It’s a reflection on motivation and persistence of the sort you need in life, beyond obviously pointless pursuits like running a big loop of the Lake District in the vain hope of feeling better than last time you did it.

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To end, here's one attempt at explaining why. I'll make more in the coming months. But what is it about type two fun that keeps me coming back?

I remember the snow. I remember the beauty of the snow. I also remember what it cost. I'm prepared to go that deep again, to go deeper again, to create a store of memories of having been really desperately alive. I'm prepared to? I want to.

Pinter once said of (I think) The Birthday Party something like "the play is funny, up to a point. Beyond that point it stops being funny, and it is because of that point that I wrote it."

Running ultras is fun, up to a point, and it's because of that point that we run them. It's to outwardly extend that point, to dance en pointe on that point.

And then to topple gracelessly into the snow.
 
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* We could argue about whether this concept of human psychology has any relevance to early modern plays that predate Freud and Jung by four hundred years. Maybe not. But it has at least some relevance to performances of those plays that are taking place now. We could also get into a debate about the way anglophile theatre is so hung up on psychology as opposed to image or gesture, on theatre as treatise about human nature rather than as performance art. I don’t think these things are necessarily in tension, for what it’s worth. If you watch (say) German actors at work then yes, they’re more physically committed and image-aware than many British and most American actors, but they’re also adept at making whatever they’re doing feel like it’s being done by a person, not by the director’s mannequin – unless that’s the effect the director’s going for, in which case the motivation is “because the director told me to” and that is legible to the audience and that’s fine.

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