Just (Un)Believable Enough: Part Ⅱ

Fictionalizing parts of adulthood

Photo by Krivec Ales.

Hello. In Part Ⅰ, I told you about three of my favorite lies I tell myself on race day (and the psychological phenomena that underlie them). Below, completing my top-five list: the lie that’s the funniest and the one that’s the most fun.

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2. “never again.”

(& recency bias/the availability heuristic)

I don’t always quit ultrarunning right after a race, but when I do, it’s for the umpteenth time.

Here I am, about to cross yet another finish line. It may be one of my hardest-earned yet. I’m hanging for dear life to the last bits of the endurance I have so patiently built, and it feels like I’m losing an adversary-less yet bloody battle. My strength is gone, my determination has long devolved into animalistic self-preservation, and my desires are reduced to the most basic of needs. Namely, French toast and sleep.

Now watch what happens when it’s finally over.

I shuffle across the line and freeze awkwardly as a beaming volunteer places a medal around my neck. I don’t smile back because I don’t feel like smiling. Exhausted beyond any kind of resistance, my body yields to the weight of the medal and I slump to the ground, ungracefully, amid the detritus of pride and pretense, incapable of faking anything or fooling anybody. I am my most honest self.

My most honest self then promptly proceeds to lie her ass off.

“I’m never doing this again,” I swear to whatever gods are still listening. If any are, they certainly know “this” is something I’ve repeatedly vowed never to do again, only to do it again. “This time I mean it,” I insist to the giant eye roll unfurling in the sky.

And I do mean it, I mean it like I’ve never meant anything in my life, and I believe it as fervently as I believe in the healing powers of French toast. My decision feels right, is right, and it’s final.

How final, you ask? Well, let me tell you, I didn’t even go near a race website those four and a half days.

To amend the words of E.T. Bell: Time makes fools of us all—unless we already were, in which case it… takes a vacation or something. My blisters hadn’t even healed before I was back to training for the next “this” on my calendar. Some of my friends call this having a short memory, or bring up that tiresome chestnut about the definition of insanity. Others show their support by asking the tough questions, such as “Why?” and “Didn’t you say you were done with this?” and “Can we please talk about anything else?”

Wait, I just remembered: I wanted to share with you one of the most valuable realizations to ever dawn on me while stuffing my face with pan-fried bread.

‡ + †

We are monumentally unaware of the mechanisms behind a staggering portion of what we perceive, believe, or do.

+ † ‡

Okay, back to my “never again.” Given my adamancy on the matter, one would think I would have considered all available information, analyzed historical data, accounted for my current state, and arrived at my decision triumphantly on the wings of a cogent argument.

Nope. Conscious deliberation is never the brain’s first response to anything. The brain is a cognitive miser—it seeks to conserve resources by favoring shortcuts and rules of thumb (called heuristics) over rigorous analysis (called a gray-matter toaster oven), aiming for reasonable accuracy in forming its judgments.

We neither will this process nor have any control over it. There’s no dedicated sense for it, either—we don’t feel heuristic-y when our brain decides to spare us some overwhelming task (wouldn’t that be something).

So, without lifting a finger, or even being aware of having a finger to lift, we get to enjoy abilities such as intuiting the proximity of an object by the sharpness of its edges, or inferring that a bird is probably a duck if it walks, swims, and quacks like one. That’s called abDUCKtive reasoning, by the way (*slaps thigh, busts gut laughing*).

And at that finish line, when my brain concluded that 1) this race sucked, ergo 2) sucking is what races do, therefore 3) subsequent races are likely to share this characteristic, it was merely employing a heuristic—taking the most recent and easily accessible example as the most probable to occur in the future.

The process didn’t feel like anything except that I was making the right decision. That’s how “never again” happens: A rapid, subconscious judgment shades into conscious belief. It’s one of the fun uncertainties in life that, at any given time, what we think of as real or true could well be merely a result of what our brain judges to be plausible—be it about the proximity of an object, the duckness of a bird, or the suckiness of ultras.

Fortunately, most decisions can be reversed, such as when challenged by some of them fancy intentional mental processes: 1) Yes, this race sucked, but 2) most don’t, and 3) what was I even doing making decisions while hungry and hurting and sleep-deprived?

So I get to be hungry and hurting and sleep-deprived again. And again. I honestly don’t know which decision—the subconscious or the conscious one—makes me more the fool, I only know one takes a hell of a lot more effort.

• Effectiveness: 🐒🐒🐒🐒

• Repeatability: I’ve quit ultrarunning more times than Mark Twain has quit smoking.

• Manifestation: I throw away my running shoes and purchase a book on fishing. Later manifestation: I fish my shoes out of the trash using the knowledge from the book.

• Spoon-airplane factor: The world is my oyster!

• Comedic potential: My friends laugh at me, then with me.

† ‡ +

Before I give you my absolute favorite race-day lie:

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A Reading Recommendation in a Single Quotation with No Further Explanation

❝We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose It—an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis—it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes.

—Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

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1. “this is a battle of survival.”

(& willing suspension of disbelief)

Gee. This entire post (Part Ⅰ here) makes it seem as if I can’t handle this extremely demanding sport without constantly fudging the reality of it in my head.

It is true that my favorite race-day lies so far describe coping mechanisms of one form or another. It might even be that inherent to ultrarunning is a certain amount of, um, productive self-deception, with the occasional complete disconnect from reality (see race-day lie number four).

You might be thinking that you don’t engage in such make-believe yourself, and that you’re not so easily fooled by obvious hogwash.

You do, and are, and have been. Willingly. Have you ever read fiction? Watched a movie, gone to the theater? Played a game, been to a magic show, engaged in role-playing? Sometimes, we abandon critical thinking and logic not as a coping mechanism but by choice. I’m not talking about the stupid things we do—I’m talking about the fun things we do. Entertainment.

“Suspension of disbelief” is the concept of agreeing to go along with a fictional story for the duration of our engagement with it, including ignoring the limitations of the medium, empathizing with the characters, and accepting any events within the narrative as plausible. The term was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria (yes, the same Samuel Taylor Coleridge of “Water, water, everywhere” fame).

So, yes, we all engage in make-believe every now and then, and can too be “fooled” into feeling excited, or sad, or frightened, or happy by very obvious hogwash indeed, if the hogwash is compelling enough. A well-told story can make us set aside our habitual preoccupation with the truth of everything (although plot holes or inaccuracies make that more challenging—I’m looking at you, dust storm from The Martian¹).

What if we wanted the story to be about us?

‡ + †

An ultramarathon is, admittedly, quite a departure from the typical day-to-day. But it’s still real. I’m still me, if a lot more unshowered than I usually am, and the world is still this world, if roomier than it appears from my window in the city. Good old, shopworn reality.

And/but part of the reality of an ultra is: “choice.” It’s a willingly accepted adversity. It’s escapable. And it’s this contrived discomfort of it that makes its tie to reality oh-so thin and easy to sever. When I’m rationing my water, being pelted by hail, or bleeding from a fall, it’s not difficult to fantasize the “choice” part away; to pretend I’m fighting for my survival in the wilderness (actual wilderness provided, given the races I like to do)—my own two feet for my transport and what few provisions I’ve brought for my sustenance.

That, of course, is the aforementioned obvious hogwash. Most ultras are relatively safe affairs, organized by people with experience and a safety-first mindset. My actual survival, which I’m technically sabotaging by coming to the race, depends on a job back home.

The thing is, my “back home” lacks an adventurous element. Most of the time, I like that about it. But it can’t sustain stories of gritty struggles, lonely determination, and sobering insignificance. I’m bigger back home. Long distances are a trivial matter there, both travel- and communication-wise. The air in my room changes its temperature on my command. My food is in a cooled box, the door of which I like to close with my foot, just casually and top-of-the-food-chain-like.²

Out there, doing my pretend survival, it—I—can be different. Some primal part of me feels at home doing primal things. It’s not comfort that makes her happy but a deep-rooted connection to its absence. And, like a character in a movie, she shows up fully formed, lives out her made-up story on the real-life race course, and, when it’s over, retires to some unimaginable void until I’m ready to believe the story again.

And that’s as close as I can get to the magical illusions of childhood with which this post began and by which the writing of it was prompted. A deliberate self-deception, I realize, but still a worthy contender for the place of the spoon airplane on the (ultrarunning) adult’s table.

• Effectiveness: 🐒🐒🐒🐒🐒

• Repeatability: Being a hero never gets old, even if it’s in my own made-up story.

• Manifestation: See “Comedic potential.”

• Spoon-airplane factor: Off the charts.

• Comedic potential: Once during a 100k, I ran into some hikers while singing very loudly and very off-key the theme song to my “movie,” making up the lyrics as I went, and butchering the melody of Tracy Chapman’s Give Me One Reason. After an awkward moment of them looking at one another and me weighing my options, I broke the fourth wall and took a bow, and one of them laughed so hard he had to sit on the ground.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed your time here, please share “Just (Un)Believable Enough: Part Ⅱ” or this newsletter with a friend. Then go find a smell you don’t recognize.

1. Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, himself admits that a dust storm on Mars—where the atmosphere is less than one percent of Earth’s—is unlikely to cause the damage it did in the book. That said, I read those 300-something pages in two sittings and then went to buy more Andy Weir.

2. In reality, we’re nowhere near the top. We’re not even in the middle. On a scale of 1 (plants) to 5.5 (polar bears), we’re a 2.21.