Note: I will be on the starting line of the 2026 Tor des Géants in September. The decision to enter a race like the Tor prompted this essay. The same philosophy is also the foundation of a novel I am working on. Future Sunday posts here will continue the thread. I hope to finish the novel one day.
I have been running ultras for almost twenty-five years. I have not had a language for what they are or why I keep returning to them. This essay is my attempt at the language. It was prompted by an email, and it became more than I expected. The uncomfortable question I came to through running turned out to be a question I think more readers will recognize than is comfortable.
How are we supposed to live well in the decade that is coming?
I went to literature and philosophy seeking answers. This essay begins the inquiry by following the philosophical thread through the lens of endurance sports and a 330-kilometer foot race through the Italian Alps. Whether to run it is a decision my family and I have been grappling with for months. But what looks like a private choice about a hobby is actually a nexus of virtues, traditions, relationships, and the sublime.
This essay is for anyone quietly working out how to be a person in an AI-accelerated decade — whether or not you have ever thought about why someone would voluntarily run that far.
The runner’s manual ends here. You now know roughly what you are in for. The race begins on the next page.
It Started with an Email (How Modern)
On the morning of February 25, I had a 7:30 AM meeting with the community teaching assistants who support my course. Normally, I check my email in the morning with coffee before getting ready for the day, but 7:30 was an early meeting, and I was slow to get up, so I got ready and jumped on Zoom before coffee (never a good idea). I also normally have dates like race lotteries tattooed in my mental calendar. “Fantastical” is not needed for those. The tattoo for the Tor des Géants was February 28, so on February 25, there were still a few days before that notification would dominate my mental space. After finishing the meeting, I closed Zoom, filled the coffee cup, opened my email, and saw this:
The curious thing about this picture is that it sparked a strong cocktail of relief, elation, and dread. For those who participate in sports with entry lotteries, those lotteries can be a source of frustration if your mind is set on a specific event. The probability of getting selected in the Western States 100 lottery, for example, is 0.4% for first-timers.1 This is where the relief comes from. I got my ticket in the lottery. I have yet to get a ticket to Western, but I have been lucky over the course of my ultrarunning career and have been selected for several other amazing events, including UTMB in France, the HURT 100 in Hawaii, and the Moab 240.
Somehow, I was selected again. And this one felt grander. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. The Tor des Géants (translating to “Tour of Giants”) is a 330-kilometer foot race through the Italian Alps, with roughly 24,000 meters of vertical gain. The route loops out from Courmayeur in the Aosta Valley, crosses twenty-five mountain passes, and must be completed within 150 hours. The Aosta Valley is ringed by Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa, Gran Paradiso, and the Matterhorn.
This is the stuff of dreams. I have put in years of training, building toward this race. And now I get the opportunity to be there.
That feeling of elation was fleeting, though. Reflect on some of those stats. 330 kilometers. 24,000 meters of vertical gain. That vertical is like summiting Everest (8,849m) three times. 25 mountain passes over 2000 meters.
The way my mind works, I try to visualize a race route. Sort of like an internal Google Earth flyover. Tor des Géants is different. I can see the route in a more two-dimensional form, but it’s hard, if not impossible, to imagine crossing 25 (twenty-five!) mountain passes along a 330-kilometer route in the Alps.
This was only part of the dread.
The other part is probably more relatable than twenty-five mountain passes. My family is an integral part of these adventures, from deciding on the plan through the months of training and the finish line. There was no way I was going to Italy without them. That means 5 x plane tickets to Italy plus 2+ weeks of Airbnbs or hotel rooms plus 2+ weeks of eating amazing (and probably not cheap) Italian food plus… you get the picture.
That was the bigger part of the dread.
But this was the opportunity of a lifetime.
My wife and I grappled with this decision for several weeks and submitted my entry only a few days before the deadline. The whole time, we both knew we were going to do it, but this decision has weighed more heavily on us than any prior race.
Endurance running can be justified in psychological terms — the runner is processing something, and the trail is therapy. It can also be justified in physical terms — the body is being trained even as modern society gives it every reason not to. Those things are true for me. But neither answers the questions that were actually weighing on us: why we had just signed up for this — why anyone would — and how do we endure.
The polite deflections — “type 2 fun” or “because it’s there” — are the answers we give other people. We tell ourselves it is because the honest answers would take too long to explain. The truth is closer to this: we do not have the honest answers. It took me almost twenty-five years to acknowledge that. And, it turns out, the answers are deeper and more convergent than we think.
Sisyphus on the Trail
In The Myth of Sisyphus,2 Albert Camus took this question seriously, and his answer provides a foundation for this inquiry. He argued that life offers no meaning intrinsic to itself. He called this condition the absurd: the encounter between the human demand for meaning and the universe’s silence. The solution he offers is to embrace the struggle. To imagine Sisyphus happy.
In ancient Greek mythology, Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, then repeat, for eternity. This is the human condition. Repeatedly pushing up a rock, only to have it roll back down. And it’s absurd. But we can revolt. We can choose conscious, defiant engagement with life despite its absence of given meaning.
The Tor is a rock and a hill, and the runner is Sisyphus. Sisyphus’s rock was assigned to him. The Tor is a rock you sign up for, and the mountain rolls it back across every col. The race is absurd in Camus’ sense, and the only purpose is the game. The happy runner is the runner who consciously engages with the game. And as with Sisyphus, and life in general, happiness can incorporate pain and suffering. To reject that is to be defeated by the absurd. Embracing it consciously is to revolt. One must imagine the Tor runner happy.
Camus helps us understand that when we sign up for something like the Tor, we are embracing the struggle of the human condition. And we are doing it in the context of a game where we have the control to opt in. Sisyphus didn’t have such a luxury. But what makes an arbitrary set of rules — finish in 150 hours, cross twenty-five passes, sleep when you can — capable of carrying the weight of a revolt? And why would we choose a game as difficult as the Tor? Certainly, there are easier ways to embrace the struggle.
The Game
The Tor’s rules are arbitrary in the technical sense. The route was drawn by someone (or some committee). The 150-hour cut-off is a convention for safety and logistics. The vertical figure is the consequence of which cols the route happens to traverse. Nothing about the race is necessary. And yet over 1,000 people will line up in Courmayeur each September and try to satisfy these specifications precisely. To be a finisher. So what kind of structure is this? What does it mean to voluntarily adopt arbitrary constraints, and why does it work?
The philosopher Bernard Suits, in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia,3 proposed that this is the structure of all games: the voluntary acceptance of unnecessary obstacles in order to make an activity possible at all. Golf could be more efficiently accomplished by walking the ball to the hole; the rules forbid that, and in forbidding it, create the activity called golf. I will start the Tor des Géants in Courmayeur, and (if all goes to plan) finish in Courmayeur. I will travel 330 kilometers on foot as fast as I can, climbing 24,000 meters over 25 (twenty-five!) mountain passes, and arrive back where I started. Suits called the player’s commitment to the voluntary restrictions of games like this the lusory attitude.
The contemporary philosopher C. Thi Nguyen4 builds on Suits’ work with the distinction between achievement play and striving play. In achievement play, the goal is what you actually want — you play poker for the money. In striving play, the goal is adopted temporarily, to have the experience of pursuing it — you play poker to have fun with your friends (and, of course, to win a little money from them). The cut-off times in the Tor have no meaning outside of the race, and I’m sure there have been many backpackers who have traversed the route at a much more leisurely pace. You adopt the goal in order to play the game.
Nguyen calls this the motivational inversion. In striving play, the player must act as if the goal (e.g., winning) matters in order to unlock the experience of trying — “the struggle.”5 The goal is in service of the play, not the other way around.
Games, then, are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around. And we possess a special ability; we can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies designed by another. In other words, we can use games to communicate forms of agency.6
The Tor, in this sense, is a vessel for agency. The route, the cut-off times, and the cols are all part of the game design. The purpose of the design is to produce a particular mode of attention and effort. A runner agrees to be an agent in their game. When we play, we are not one self; we are two selves. There is the outer agent, the person who lives the rest of the life, and the inner agent, a temporary self the game asks us to become. When the race ends, that inner agency dissolves. What you take away from it is the experience of the struggle. (Oh, will I struggle in the Tor.)
Striving, Struggling, and Suffering
There is an important distinction to be made regarding Nguyen’s framework in the context of ultra-distance endurance sports. Nguyen’s conception of “striving” often carries a positive affect. It is fun, absorbing, satisfying, and in the neighborhood of flow. He also uses the term “struggle” or “delicious struggle” to describe the experience. Endurance sports often do not feel that way. The motivational inversion still operates, but the experience may not be striving or even struggling in Nguyen’s sense. There can be low patches — at three in the morning on a boring straight road in the Utah desert after only a few hours of sleep over 2 days, when the centerline of the road looks like a snake — that do not resemble flow. In these long races and similar crazy games, there are phases that can only be called “suffering.”
This does not mean this form of play is incompatible with Nguyen’s framework. To understand why, we need to distinguish the source of friction in the gap between striving and suffering with what Emily Ryall called grinding.7 With “grinding in games… we find ourselves stuck doing something tedious because of the inner agent’s desire to win, and unable to cancel the inner agent’s grip on our motivations, even when the outer agent wishes to end.”8 Nguyen experienced this with addictive video games, where he found it hard to stop even when he knew he should from a perspective outside of the game (e.g., he needed to be working rather than playing).
This concept of grinding gets us closer to the lows we experience in ultrarunning, but the point of friction is different. Continuing to grind in a video game when you know you should be doing something else is friction with a responsibility outside of the game. The outer agent wishes it to end for reasons outside of the game. The point of friction during the low points of an ultrarun, in contrast, is inside the game. Your body and mind are suffering in that moment. That suffering is temporary, but the outer agent wishes to end it. The inner agent knows it needs to keep going in order to finish.
There is an important caveat to recognize here. Sometimes we can push our body and mind to a point in ultrarunning where the suffering is not temporary. We can push ourselves to the point of lasting damage (e.g., injury). At this point, the outer agent is justified in wishing it to stop. One of the rules in the ultrarunning game is to play below this limit. And most races are very strict about this rule. They will pull you from the race if they believe you are risking bodily harm.
This leaves a question open. Nguyen provides a framework that helps us understand how an arbitrary set of rules, like a race, gives us temporary agency to play, to experience the delightful struggle. In ultrarunning, however, we pass through many lows where the experience is far from “fun.” Achievement play may work for some professional ultrarunners who compete for prize money and other rewards, but for most people on the starting line (myself included), their outer agent knows they have no chance at the podium. For us, it is striving play. We train and pay to play a game in which we may suffer. Even if that suffering is only part of the game and temporary, why would we do this?
To extend Nguyen’s framework from games like chess to the Tor des Géants, we need to go to deeper philosophical roots.
The Sublime
Toeing the starting line in an ultra-run is like stepping into the void. Even “short” 50-kilometer races mean running for hours. You can study the map, you can plan what equipment you need, and you can check the weather forecast, but you don’t really know what awaits. At the scale of a race that covers 300 kilometers, our bodies are like a grain of sand. (The International Space Station orbits roughly 400 kilometers above Earth.)
Recently, I finished the Moab 240 Mile (386-kilometer) Endurance Run. The race started and finished in Moab, Utah. Another big adventure taking me right back to where I started. Over the course of 100 hours, I crossed multiple desert basins and two mountain ranges. I saw multiple sunrises and sunsets. And I endured through two storm systems with pouring rain — in the desert — and vicious mud. None of that was comprehensible at the starting line, but I understood the race. I knew I had to cover 240 miles in less than 112 hours. I had studied the map and the runner manual. The experience of the race was incomprehensible, but my intellect understood the game.
This is what Immanuel Kant calls the sublime:
That is sublime which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.9
Kant identified two forms of the sublime: the mathematically sublime, in which an object exceeds the imagination’s capacity to grasp it as a whole — the starry sky, an ocean, an ultra-run — and the dynamically sublime, in which the object exceeds the imagination’s capacity in raw power — a storm, an avalanche, an ultra-run.
In Kant’s account of the sublime, it is the failure of imagination, in the experience of the sublime, that produces the aesthetic effect. Our senses cannot contain the object. In that inadequacy, Kant argued, we discover the power of our mind — its “supersensible” vocation. With the mathematically sublime, we discover the capacity to think about the infinite without picturing it, and with the dynamically sublime, we discover that the violent storm “can certainly destroy us as a sensory being but not as a moral person.”10
The Tor is the sublime. Moab 240 is the sublime. The experience does not fit in the imagination. And this is why we toe the starting line.
According to Nguyen, we play a game for fun, for the delightful struggle. Kant’s notion of the sublime extends this to endurance sports. We want to play the game, even knowing we will suffer, because we discover the power of our mind and experience the infinite.
This tells us why the start line feels the way it does. Why we choose to play the game. But it doesn’t help us understand what carries a runner forward through the second night in the middle of a desert with a road snake, because the answer is not in any single mind.
The Practice
Sisyphus is alone on his mountain. The ultrarunner is not.
That is the difference, and it is the start of the answer to the question Kant’s sublime could not reach. What carries a runner through the second night is not the power of the individual mind. It is something older and more communal. This might be surprising to an ultrarunner reading this, because we often hear that the sport is 90% mental and 10% physical. That distribution misses half of the story, though.
To name what is not solitary about the practice, we need a different vocabulary. Endurance sports are a “practice” in the way Alasdair MacIntyre defines this concept in After Virtue:
…any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized…”11
Two things to notice with this concept. First, a practice is socially established. It is held by a community across time, not invented fresh by each new participant. Second, a practice has internal goods. These are values that are only available through the practice on its own terms.
The internal/external distinction is important for endurance sports. External goods are targets such as money, status, sponsorships, finisher buckles, and social media likes. They can be acquired through the practice, and they can be acquired in other ways. According to MacIntyre, they tend to corrupt the practice when they become the target. Internal goods are different. They are only available to someone engaged in the practice on its own terms. In ultrarunning, it is the patience required to run the first half of the race at a measured pace rather than getting swept up by excitement and competitiveness. It is the attention required to ensure you are drinking enough fluids and fueling when you are mentally fatigued. It is building the courage to run alone in the woods at night (beware of the Blair Witch).
MacIntyre’s word for an acquired human quality that enables the achievement of internal goods is virtue. The Tor will require and partially teach virtues that have direct utility within the practice — such as patience, attention, and courage — and that are useful outside it. This is what makes some games like ultrarunning different from games like Twister (no offense to enthusiasts). Ultrarunning is an activity to build virtues.
This is where Nguyen’s striving play and MacIntyre’s internal goods connect. Both name a value that is intrinsic to the activity rather than external to it. The difference is the time horizon. Nguyen’s striving play is bounded — the inner agent dissolves when the game ends. MacIntyre’s practice persists across games. I am not just a person who will run the Tor in September. I am a participant in a practice: ultrarunning, mountain running, and the lineage of human runners going back to the African plains. This practice exists across many races and many runners. And the internal goods accrue over many years of practice. I can trace the patience I needed in Moab to the decision I made at UTMB to sleep at Champex-Lac, the first time in over twenty-five years of racing, and the experiences before it when I probably should have.
Through the lens of MacIntyre’s practice, we discover personal growth and community in ultrarunning. The continuity of experiences builds virtue, and those experiences are a part of a communal lineage. The ultrarunner alone in the woods is able to continue forward because they have acquired courage through prior experiences. And they know there is an aid station a few miles ahead where family, friends, volunteers, medics — a whole community — will help them prepare for the next col.
The Hearth
We can trace the lineage of the running practice from the 2026 Tor des Géants through Pheidippides to the origins of humankind. This lineage shapes us as individual runners and as a community of runners. But we are missing how the present moment shapes us. Albert Borgmann’s work, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, introduces a concept that names the contemporary stakes: the device paradigm.12
A device, according to Borgmann’s account, is a technology that delivers a commodity (we might sometimes think of this as a function) while concealing the machinery and disengaging the user from the activity that previously produced it. Central heating delivers warmth while concealing the wood stove. Streaming delivers music while concealing the instrument. The device is not bad. It can relieve us of past burdens. A tradeoff, though, is that it removes the user from a practice.
…a stove used to furnish more than mere warmth. It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house a center. Its coldness marked the morning, and the spreading warmth the beginning of the day. It assigned to the different family members tasks that defined their place in the household.13
The tradeoffs we make with devices change the texture of our lives. Something as simple as central heating invites us to go our separate ways rather than gathering us in the center of the home. Apply the same lens to social media or to AI, and the tradeoffs are not small. Many others have written about this, and it’s something we experience in our daily lives.
Borgmann’s solution to challenging the device paradigm is to develop focal things and practices:
To found a practice is to guard a focal concern, to shelter it against the vicissitudes of fate and our frailty.14
Similar to Alasdair MacIntyre, Borgmann’s focal practices require skilled engagement, embed the practitioner in a tradition, and gather people around them. The Latin focus means hearth. The hearth was the literal center of the household.
As we saw earlier, ultrarunning is a practice that brings personal growth and community. Ultrarunning brings more than community, though. It forms a focal point, a center of the household. Training takes shape over months and years. It also brings a daily rhythm. Races are the product of a lineage that we can trace back to Pheidippides. They are also a hearth around which family, friends, and complete strangers gather.
There is a discordance with the image of the solo runner out clearing their mind, but through the lens of the focal practice, the community shapes the run. I run to clear my mind so that I am more present with my family when I return. My presence on the roads and trails changes the character of the space and those I share with — sometimes other runners, more often deer and birds. And those roads and trails were created by the community around me, spanning many generations. The community makes running possible.
Sisyphus is alone on his mountain. The runner has a hearth. In my early years, I was a novice, and my parents provided unwavering support. They would travel hundreds of miles to fill my water bottles at aid stations. My wife has been there from the beginning as well. She has always been my hearth, and in those early years she also volunteered to be my pacer. That arrangement changed when I left her in the woods at night, with a weak headlamp. Some virtues take time to acquire.
The focal practice gathers the people it gathers. The work of the practice belongs to all of them. My wife and kids may not be running the Tor in September, but they are part of the practice in every way except in my shoes.
The Body
Moab is in the high desert of Utah. Going into the race, I was prepared for hot days and cold nights. A few days before the race, the organizers notified us that rain was in the forecast and provided safety tips for flash flooding. This is a serious risk in the desert. It was raining on the day of the start, so I decided to tape my feet. One of the most tenacious and effective tapes for feet is Leukotape. It rained the first day and poured the first night. I spent extra time at each aid station drying my feet and adding more tape. A second storm struck again on the third night, but there was no skin left visible on my feet by this point. Just Leukotape.
I saw many other runners nursing ugly blisters on their feet at aid stations, but my Leuko-cocoon worked, and my feet survived 240 miles in pouring rain and that mud. (I have never experienced mud as vicious as that.) What I didn’t realize, though, was how hard it would be to get my feet out of their cocoons. After the race, I went to a drug store and bought 2 liters of baby oil, medical-grade tweezers and scissors, and a plastic bucket. It took two hours with my feet soaking in baby oil, tweezing and snipping, to remove that Leukotape.
Astronomy is also a focal practice. It requires skilled engagement by the astronomer within a community. It has a lineage that traces back through Copernicus to the first humans to gaze up at the sky. It also connects directly with Kant’s sublime. The night sky, when all the stars are visible, is the “noblest spectacle that the human senses present to us...”15
In the context of focal practice, what is the difference between ultrarunning and astronomy? And for those drawn to ultrarunning, why would we choose the version that needs Leukotape?
The answer is the body.
Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman,16 argues that skill begins in the body and the skilled craftsman is the person who has learned, over years, the specific way a particular material refuses to be made compliant. Matthew Crawford17 comes to a similar conclusion in which agency is developed through skilled engagement with a world that answers back. A person is what they have become through long engagement with a world that resists.
The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world.18
Boasting won’t push a runner forward in the middle of the night. It is the skills, the virtues, shaped by engaging in an embodied focal practice. Suffering is part of that practice. Leukotape is, too. The runner who has met the body’s refusal many times has built something the astronomer has not: a working relationship with their own body, so they endure.
This is the constitutive feature of endurance as a focal practice. It is an embodied experience. An encounter with a body and a world that is not compliant.
Astronomers can look at the night sky and calculate orbital dynamics. They work in a community of scientists, astronauts, and pretty much anyone else who has gazed at the heavens. They have Copernicus and Newton. But they don’t need Leukotape.
Ultrarunning is unique because of the body and all of its limitations. It’s also not the only embodied focal practice. Cooking is another. My kids love watching ‘Nailed It,’ where amateur chefs try to recreate cakes made by true chefs. Their giggles at a collapsing cake are a parent’s delight — and reason they should keep making episodes — but the real chefs making the demonstration cake, and the countless other chefs in restaurants and home kitchens everywhere, are a true example of embodied focal practice.
Chefs could have Leukotape experiences, in theory, though their physical craft is more elegant than an ultrarunner’s. To understand the difference between the astronomer, the chef, and the ultrarunner, we need the full vocabulary we have developed.
Astronomy and the culinary arts split the category between them. Astronomers reach for the sublime in a vocabulary the ultrarunner shares — Kant’s starry sky is also the runner’s col at four in the morning — but the practice is not embodied. Chefs spend years honing an elegant physical craft that does not, dare I say, often reach for the sublime. The Tor occupies both at once.
We now have the language to understand something like the Tor des Géants. It is part of a distinct category of embodied focal practices. And ultrarunning is not alone. Alpine climbing, stage-race road biking, and many others are part of this club. The common thread through all is endurance. They build virtues that help us endure the physical and mental human condition. They connect with a lineage that traces back to the origin of our species. And they center us in a community that cultivates the body and the mind.
This — the Tor, the Leukotape, the col at four in the morning, the Sisyphean rock chosen freely, the hearth gathered at the next life base — is what I have come to call a philosophy of endurance.
The AI Paradigm
A philosophy of endurance gives us the language we need to understand why someone might toe the line at the Tor des Géants and offers insight into how they endure the twenty-five mountain passes. But there’s still a gap in the question.
According to Borgmann, focal practices are a strategy to “challenge the rule of technology.”19 The device paradigm is a diagnosis of how technology affects embodied practice. Central heating removes the stove as a focal point. The hearth is no longer the center of the home. Artificial intelligence is the same paradigm extended into cognitive labor.
Streaming concealed the instrument. AI conceals the writing, the analysis, the summary, the draft, and the “brainstorming.” The work that used to be the daily texture of a knowledge worker’s life is now available on demand. This does not mean AI is bad. Its effect — echoing Borgmann — is to remove the user from the practice that once surrounded the thing it delivers.
In Technology and the Virtues,20 Shannon Vallor names a set of technomoral virtues that are cultivated through sustained practices of moral self-development, and that may be undermined by aspects of contemporary device-mediated life. These virtues include self-control, courage, perspective, humility, and technomoral wisdom. Her central claim is that such virtues are not acquired merely by learning rules but through ongoing habituation and practice. They are not chosen. They accrue. The AI and device paradigms slowly hollow out the conditions we need to cultivate these virtues. They remove the practices. Unless we revolt.
The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa21 elevates the same concern with a different lens. He calls the drive to make the world verfügbar (accessible, predictable, and controllable) the structural premise of modern life. Paradoxically, this drive undermines the conditions for what he calls resonance: a responsive relationship in which the world genuinely “answers back.” But the trail makes nothing controllable. The mountain answers to no one.
As artificial intelligence extends the device paradigm into the cognitive labor that once defined skilled effort, embodied focal practices become structurally more important. The practices that we choose to engage in will define a life worth living. Sisyphus’s struggle was physical and mental. If we don’t engage the body in a world that resists, the rock will roll right over us.
Toeing the Line
I have been running in events like this for over twenty-five years, and I did not have the language to understand it. I sought out answers in literature and philosophy. This essay begins the inquiry, tracing a philosophical thread through the lens of the Tor des Géants and its antecedents. What I found is that the question I kept coming back to was not the race. It was something more uncomfortable and, I think, relatable.
How are we supposed to live well in the decade that is coming?
Endurance sports are an embodied focal practice. They are a game we choose, a rock we adopt, a sublime we step into, a practice with internal goods, and an encounter with a resisting world. They connect us with human pre-history and center us in a community. The device and AI paradigms are making this kind of practice newly important for the kind of life it makes possible.
This is not the claim that endurance sports are the only path. Martha Nussbaum22 argues that flourishing is defined by what people are actually able to do and to be. And humans have many capabilities. For this argument, the specific practice is not important. The category — embodied focal practice — is. For those of us who are drawn to ultras, the language developed above makes the practice intelligible. Not as therapy, not as training, not as a midlife indulgence, but as one specific instance of the kind of practice we need for the decade ahead.
In a few months, if all goes to plan, my family and I will board a plane to Italy. We will have the opportunity of a lifetime to experience a country rich in history, culture, arts, and cuisine. My kids are excited to taste the pizza. There are also twenty-five mountain passes to surmount. When my shoes cross the starting line in Courmayeur, we will embark on a 330-kilometer journey through the Italian Alps past Mont Blanc, Gran Paradiso, and the Matterhorn. We will experience the sublime and the suffering. And the work will already have been done. The virtues will have been built (no pressure), and we will gather around the hearth. My shoes will end up back where they started, but we will have gone very far.
Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (J. O’Brien, Trans., 1991). New York: Vintage.
Suits, B. (1978). The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Games: Agency as Art. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nguyen, C. T. (2026). The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. New York: Penguin Press.
Nguyen, C. T. (2019). Games and the Art of Agency. Philosophical Review, 128(4), 423–462. Available at: https://philpapers.org/rec/NGUGAA/1000
Nguyen, C. T. (2020). Games: Agency as Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Page 1.
Ryall, E. (2021). Agential layering, the absurd and the grind in game-playing. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 48(3), 425–435. https://doi.org/10.1080/00948705.2021.1948339
Nguyen, C. T. (2021). The opacity of play: a reply to commentators. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 48(3), 448–475. https://doi.org/10.1080/00948705.2021.1993870
Kant, I. (1790). Critique of the Power of Judgment (P. Guyer & E. Matthews, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2000). Page 134. A version of the book (different translation) is available on Project Gutenberg at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48433
Willaschek, M. (2025). Kant: A Revolution in Thinking. (P. Lewis, Trans.) Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Page 199.
MacIntyre, A. (2007). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (3rd ed.). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (1st ed. in 1981.) Page 187.
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This brought me so much joy to read. Thank you
You will make some orthopaedic surgeon very wealthy too if you overdo these activities......as the ancient Greeks and Stoics said: moderation in all things.......then again, passionate embraces for what one loves can exceed moderation.....at times.....