I have a birthday ending in a zero in a few months and it’s no longer possible to pretend I’m not middle-aged. Things could be a lot worse. I can look back on a half-century and not find too many things I regret doing or not doing. Nevertheless, aging gives you Thoughts and I have a lot of topics on my mind. Who am I? Where am I going? Who do I want to be?

My identity as defined by my passions has always been pretty fluid and laissez faire. In more direct words, I dabble in a lot of different things without being particularly good at any of them. I’ve spent a few years at a time obsessing about various forms of cycling, climbing, skiing, backpacking, kayaking, caving, woodworking, mountaineering, photography, beer brewing…. Sometimes these obsessions come around for a second or even third round! It means my garage is full of lots of specialized gear which I don’t use very often.
However, the one constant over my 30s and 40s has been running. I started trail running on a whim in my early 30s as something to keep me in shape for mountaineering and it has lasted me far longer than anything else. Even amongst my other fascinations, running has been my #1 hobby and everything else has been secondary. Much as it seems weird to my vestigial teenage self, I now absolutely define myself as a trail runner. In particular, I identify as the ultra-marathoner sub-species typified as someone with more endurance than speed and a 3-sigma tolerance for voluntary pain and extended outdoor suffering. “Type-II fun”, we call it, proudly: i.e., only fun when reminiscing about how much it sucked at the time.
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