The Logic of Long Distance

Andy Anderson has been kind enough to share his account of breaking the Mt. Whitney FKT (Fastest Known Time.) Andy is also the owner of the Long's Peak FKT and the Grand Teton FKT  (see those links for his accounts of those records.) Nice work, Andy! The words below are his: *  *  * “Those look like old man shoes,” joked my friend Ann as she printed out my day permit for Mt. Whitney.   “Well, I'm almost 40, my forehead keeps getting bigger, and my beard is turning grey. I am an old man,” I replied. This was my third trip to Mt. Whitney this summer. When I ran up it for the first time in July, I spent a little more than five hours exploring the Mountaineer's Route looking for the fastest variations. On my second trip, on August 6th, I tried to go fast and ended up at the summit in  1:50  and back at the car in  3:13 . While I managed to get the ascent record, my downhill time remained too slow for the overall record. This time I hoped I could actuall

Looking back upon the time that I was running hard, the thing that strikes me most was how little satisfaction I took in my fitness. The drive to train can be cast in a positive light as a sort of drive to athletic perfection, a noble quest to be better today than we were yesterday. Each run a testament to the high-school coach's simple minded but effective euphemisms about work, practice, effort, will. Yes, we take pride in our discipline, and the lean and honed body of the runner reflects it and displays it. But -- but, every runner who has really given himself over to the sport knows that the intensity and effort of training is also fed by darker and wilder motives and impulses. Driving through a set of quarters in the dripping August humidity, rolling steadily on tired legs through yet-another 10 miler -- this is not the stuff of cheery euphemism. If I remember correctly, it was hardly ever the thought of improvement that got me out the door. Dissatisfaction, though -- that