When I first started distance running, I was in the middle of a cluster headache episode while teaching my first class at GW. I had stopped working out and was struggling, inefficiently, through teaching my course. I knew something had to change because the quality of my teaching and the quality of my life was suffering. The most obvious thing I could change and see results right away was re-starting my workout habit.
So I chose to train for a 10-miler.
Well, it wasn’t that I just chose to train for a 10-miler out of the blue, but I knew that whatever workout program I chose, it had to be something I could do alone, with minimal equipment, at work or at home or anywhere in the world I happened to be traveling. This ruled out any sort of team sport, weightlifting, and just about all other exercise except walking. I already had a love of running, so I just decided to push beyond what were mental limits. I had never run further than 5 miles, and I only ran that far because when I was in high school I learned that soccer players averaged about 5 miles distance during a 90-minute match.
When I first started distance running, I was intrigued by the unpredictability. For example, since I didn’t have any regular training routes at the time, almost every time I went out for a run I had to make changes to the amount of time I expected to run due to obstructions or things I couldn’t visualize from looking at a map. This unpredictability added between 30%-100% distance to my runs and made me think of my life as a professor. Whenever I started a paper, proposal, or project, I had no idea what roadblocks or obstacles lay around the corner. They added substantial amounts of time to the tasks, if the problems could be solved at all. I loved the parallel unpredictability of running and research, and was amazed by how they paralleled each other.
Now, however, I run to strengthen my will. Not that health doesn’t still motivate me. I get insight from my runs too. God still speaks to me on the run, and every time I lace up my sneakers during daytime hours–especially when leaving and returning to my office–I remember how Daniel Kahneman describes in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow his walks with Amos Tversky being the most important ingredients in their Nobel Prize winning collaborations. Running is still unpredictable, even when the unpredictability deals with much more than physical obstacles on the route. All of these things still motivate me, but I now run primarily to strengthen the will.
I am reading Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, and while slogging through the chapter on “Thinking: Invisibility and Withdrawal,” I came across this quote–The will anticipates what the future may bring but is not yet.
In fact, she adds the following:
The will transforms the desire into an intention.
I find these statements together uniquely compelling. I am at a time in my professional career where the strength of my will is the most important factor. Desire is not enough. At the same time, I’m finding that my workouts are increasingly more difficult to complete without considering modifying or giving up the planned workout. Desire for a certain goal time or lifting target is not enough. I need to develop the will; as Arendt says, the ability to “anticipate what the future may bring but is not yet.”
One may read this and not appreciate the strength of this statement, but I suppose that is because one is not familiar with the context of the statement. At this point in the book, Arendt is discussing the necessity of withdrawal in order to engage in thinking. She notes that
Every mental act rests on the mind’s faculty of having present to itself what is absent from the senses.
To cut a very long discussion short, the will makes real to the subject what has not yet happened [as opposed to memory, which makes real to the subject what has already happened]. In other words, the reality of the future thing that is envisioned enables one to project from the present into that reality. The strength of that reality is what enables me to bring it into existence to others.
When I find myself languishing in the library while trying to refine a research topic, it is my will which enables me to find the clarity I need to press forward.
When I am confused about a model I’m trying to build, it is the will which presents the insight I believe the model will provide.
When I don’t quite believe I’ve got one more set at the specified weight and rep target, the will projects the reality of the accomplished lift.
When I’m not sure I can finish the run, the will projects the reality of the achieved goal time.
The question I need to address is: how strong is my will?