Once I ran a trail race in a forest straddling the peninsular ridge that divides the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean.
It was one of those California days where the morning fog covers the early hours in a holy stillness. As the temperature rose, the marine layer burned off and sunlight trickled down through the redwood branches. To go running on such a morning is to feel like a Whitman poem, your very atoms singing electric in chorus with the cosmos.
A group of us ran from the starting line, switchbacking up the hillside. Trees lined the trail in disordered bunches, their roots hobbling the footpaths in wooden ripples of gnarled burls and fans that sheltered small puddles of moisture dripping off the tree limbs.
The woods smelled ancient and other than human. The ground was sponge-like, a living soil of leaves and compost and bacteria and everything that lets whole biomes arise from underfoot.
Early in the race, I glanced up from my earnest dashing. The world had that cool-hued glow of light passing through chlorophyll—a glimpse of the premodern, like I had traipsed through the sanctum of some pagan god from a long dead world when the woods were worshipped and virgins sacrificed and elders danced in frenzied fits as moonlight cut through the overgrowth in argentine spotlights.
And then I took a wrong turn.
In a moment of pedestrian groupthink, our front pack missed a turnoff and ran a half mile or so off track before we realized our error and doubled back. By the time we got back on course, we were behind the entire field. “Well, shit,” I concluded, as we realized the situation.
In moments like this, one has two choices. You can accept that life is often unfair and sometimes shit happens and you should go along to get along, so just enjoy the ride. Or... You can remember all those Dylan Thomas poems you read when you were 19, get your dander up, and, raging against the dying light, throw yourself into a lactic mania of quarter-life hubris.
And so I put my head down and muttering “death shall have no dominion,” I accelerated past the other runners. Over the next 19 or 20 odd miles, I slashed up and over the forest hillsides. Wheezing dark admonitions to run ‘faster, faster’, I managed to get back into the lead and won the race.
Admittedly, it was not a deeply competitive affair. Everyone who would have beaten me also had also made the same wrong turn. But it took all my focus: my vision set squarely on the four-meter patch of ground before me as if I was racing a track 10K.
Later, the organizers shared photographs taken during the race. They were stunning.
One showed me climbing up a forested ravine, sunlight bending around fallen logs, tree trunks, and my twisting torso, as if someone had scribbled me into a Bierstadt painting. I starred at the digital photo and had absolutely no recollection of the moment. So focused had I been on my effort, energy, and maintaining pace, I had failed to noticed the scenic ravine entirely.
Over the years, I’ve occasionally thought about that race. You’ve probably had similar experiences: focused upon what’s ahead and missing the scenery of the moment as you dash in earnest ambition toward your future goals.
There is, perhaps, no greater instrumental use of time than a race.
By ‘instrumental’ I mean using time as a means to an end. In a race, whether a footrace or bike race or ‘sprint’ at a tech company, time becomes a literal resource to be metered out in measured efficiency. Done well, every moment of a race maximizes forward motion. You maintain optimal position relative to your abilities within the field of participants. Ignore that instrumental imperative and your race, at least as success is traditionally defined, will suffer.
You likely began learning this a child. Don’t be like the hare, Aesop’s fable warns. Do not stop and smell the roses. Do not have a drink with a friend or lay down to enjoy the sunshine on your face before napping under the tree boughs. Be like the tortoise: diligent, head down, steadily sawing forward without pause. Fuck the roses, says Aesop. Go for the win.
To embody that ethos in life, though, seems off kilter. In his book, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman argues that one of the unfortunate side affects of the Industrial Revolution was the hyper-instrumentalization of time—an exclusive focus on the future at the expense of recognizing the now. The cost is that we fail to enrich ourselves in the possibilities of the present moment.
“It turns out to be perilously easy to over invest in this instrumental relationship to time—to focus exclusively on where you’re headed, at the expense of focusing on where you are—with the result that you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating the ‘real’ value of your life at some time that you haven’t yet reached, and never will.”1
I find this both insightful and startling. As someone who has lived their life in a series of training cycles, curriculums, and development plans, such an admonition is a shot across the bow.
To be clear, Burkeman isn’t arguing against the instrumental use of time altogether. Spending time in ways that are unenjoyable to achieve something that provides you greater meaning or value is part of what makes us distinctively human. The phrase “human potential” emphasizes the future, that a person’s value can manifest at a later time under the right conditions.
The risk is that we become like I was in that forest cathedral, so transfixed on our objectives for the future that we ignore the wonder of the present.
What then shall we do? As you can tell, I am not particularly qualified to give advice about a balanced approach toward time.
But I have learned a couple lessons from my cat.
Reggie is a former stray that was picked up from a feral cat colony at the Oakland Coliseum that’s population exploded during the lockdowns of the pandemic. Being both semi-feral and very social, Reggie finds human interactions absolutely thrilling. He likes to be talked to, pet, and held. He spins around in glee when we toss him a toy. Whenever I walk into our bedroom, Reggie sprints from wherever he is off doing cat things and leaps upon our bed. He promptly rolls onto his back to look up earnestly at me. He wants a belly rub.
Let me tell you, dear reader. There is absolutely no way to instrumentally use the time spent giving a belly rub to a cat. There is no monetary value to be gained. Neither you, nor the cat will be improved in any measurable way. No shareholders will profit. The ROI is nil. Your Peleton ranking will not increase.
And yet. To rub the belly of a friendly, furry mammal is one of the greatest experiences a human can have. I defy you to prove otherwise.
Perhaps that is the challenge of our lives. We humans, we deeply flawed and mindful and fragile creatures, who flit across the planet for a few short years, we must orient ourselves forward in time, even as we try to live in it. And so we exist in tension, caught between belly rubs and the work we lay upon our better selves.
My hunch is that we’d likely be better off giving more belly rubs.
Thanks for reading.
Weekly run
Breakfast Club meets every Thursday for an 8-mile run:
When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with a few hundred feet of climbing
Tweets of the week
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Find me on Twitter, Strava, and soon on Substack Notes. Check out the East Bay Strava Runners where I occasionally share events happening in the San Francisco East Bay.
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021), 125-126.
Running in Time
Great pictures and message. A wonderful reminder of the need for mindfulness, and a "while you can" philosophy to life. "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return." Ash Wednesday liturgy
Not only do I recall a similar race, I recall the exact race and all its splendor