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| Jeffrey Boucher |
The runner aims at a contradiction. It's hard to imagine, in other words, the rewards of daily devotion to strenuous exercise as anything but a sort of life for an ideal that makes the years of ceaseless striving its only means. It's done though the price is so exhaustedly (and painfully) taxing. And growing old into it doesn't make it easier either. But, of course, the run is itself its own enticing end. The elites, of whatever sport, know (as all devotees to something bigger than themselves do) that to excel is to die to self. I won't apologize for the religious connotations for the parallels are here necessary. I'll call the elation of daily exertion--as Jeffrey Boucher must have certainly known it--a transcendental to which every self-sacrificing activity is always directed as towards its end and reward.
So what do we make of this death of the runner? Is not death some horrible affront, after all, to the spirit of the run that's to be passed off here as one of life's aimless ironies? Perhaps the most horrible type imaginable? Is it even conceivable the runner can take his own life, tired of the repetitiveness? What do we make of this running unto death (if indeed the end was a final type of self-annulment that is perhaps every run's true telos)?
I'm prompted really by sadness --as everything that exactly resembles my own life and then tragically ends must--and proper sense of horror, too. at the spectacle of a self-discipline reduced to water and so much sand. I'm reminded that awards don't necessarily await even the disinterested devotees of morning air, sunshine and the circular miracle of life itself. It may be, after all, just a matter of treacherous piers and horizons. The runner most certainly aims at a contradiction.
