everyone is crazy

JON CARROLL / SF CHRONICLE
Friday, August 5, 2005

A few weeks ago I moderated a panel for an event called Books by the Bay. On the panel were an oboist/journalist, a third-grade teacher, an independent bookseller and an ultramarathon runner. I can say with some confidence that it was the first time these people had appeared on the same stage together.

Indeed, any time you get an oboist/journalist on stage, you're dealing with a potentially unique situation. There just aren't that many ... well, there's one. Her name is Blair Tindall and she works for the New York Times off and on, in between oboeing, and her book is "Mozart in the Jungle," which is a tell-most volume about the backstage life of classical musicians (sex! drugs! reeds!) and a fine primer on the ongoing large and petty injustices of that hermetic universe.

Dean Karnazes is the ultramarathoner, and his book is "Ultra Marathon Man." He had on a sleeveless shirt and shorts; he had a chiseled face and white teeth and an engaging smile; he had less than 5 percent body fat. In other words, he gave me every reason to hate him.

But actually I didn't. He was charming, modest and sincere. His book, which I had read, was charming, modest and sincere. It was also harrowing, gruesome, inexplicable and strange. Ultramarathoners are people for whom simple marathons are not enough. Ultramarathoners laugh at triathlons. Ultramarathons have no set length. They are designed merely to be grueling. I mean, really grueling. How about a 135-mile run from the lowest point in Death Valley, Badwater, to the top of Mount Whitney. At some point the body of the runner shuts down. At some point the brain of the reader says, "oh, come on. Is this a sport or a pathology?"

Karnazes does not really have an answer to that question. He says he gets asked "why?" a lot, and he never really has an answer. He often falls back on the Edmund Hillary line, "because it is there," which has always sounded to me less like a profound philosophical statement and more like a thing you'd say to get out of a conversation.

At the end of the book, quite possibly at the prodding of his publisher, Karnazes tries again: "I run to see how far I can go ... I run to breathe the fresh air... I run to escape the ordinary ... I run because walking takes too long." And so forth. His reasons are all perfectly good, but they apply equally well to someone who jogs around Lake Merritt on a cloudless Friday afternoon.

The longest and most vivid of the stories in the book is about the Western States Endurance Run, a little 100-mile jaunt that starts in the valley near Lake Tahoe and finishes at the town of Auburn, on the other side of the Sierra. Expected travel time: 20-25 hours. Likelihood of finishing: Less than 50 percent. Along the way -- mountains to be scaled, rivers to be forded, cliffs to be avoided, hallucinations, injury, pain, more pain, another injury, more pain. Karnazes finished the race -- he did much of the last two miles on his hands and knees.

And he doesn't know why, not really. He probably wouldn't even wonder about it if other people didn't keep asking.

And here's the point: A lot of us don't know why, much of the time. Oh, we have the officially approved answer, the one that shuts therapists up, the one that makes friends nod with understanding. But it isn't the reason. The reason is withheld from us.

Why do you collect stamps? Why do you build birdhouses? Why do you own so many hats? Why do you get up early? Why do you stay up late? Why do you drink so much? Why did you cheat on your husband? Why did you move to North Korea? Yeah, we could all hold press conferences in our heads and say, "oh, my childhood was lonely; oh, I need something to do with my hands; oh, I have a short attention span; oh, I was beaten by monks; oh, I just love the way the morning smells."

Sometimes we even believe those reasons because the idea that we are a mystery to ourselves is a little scary. Sometimes we pretend that the reasons are true. Sometimes we're faced with contradictory evidence, and usually we ignore it. Why mess with a theory that seems plausible? Are we trying to love, or are we trying to explain ourselves?

The older I get, the more I realize that everyone is crazy. Not crazy in showy or clinically significant ways, but crazy nonetheless. You wanna run up mountains until your eyes fall out? Be my guest. I'll even pretend to believe you know why, and I trust that you will return the favor when I tell you about my habit of putting my thumbs in my ears for weeks at a time.