'Challenge Accepted'

Learning from Dylan Thomas + Michelle Khare's 50-kilometer run through Death Valley

Before we get started, I know I haven’t been in your inbox for a little while, so I wanted to say thank you for giving me the grace to take some time off. I spent last week with my family visiting the museums and monuments in Washington, D.C., and will have more to share on it soon!

Getting back in the saddle, by the way, takes a little adjustment — I haven’t written in a couple of weeks, so I feel a little like a newly-born foal that’s trying to figure out how to stand on its legs again… so if I sound a little rusty, please bear with me! 😀

There’s something I’ve noticed about having kids in this particular moment, as I have an 11-year-old who’s smack dab in the middle of a wildly different world of entertainment than the one I grew up in: while they watch a lot of video, they don’t watch much TV.

Or really any at all — nothing that’s regularly scheduled, nothing you have to wait for. No special network premieres, no Thursday night “must-see TV.” And no waiting for Good Luck Charlie or Gravity Falls episodes on Disney Channel either.

Instead, their world is one that’s always on — quite literally, anything you can imagine is just few taps on a remote away. What this means is that we end up rooting around like our dog Twix in a pile of fallen leaves, hunting for things to watch.

The videos we find, of course, are of varying quality — some are made with just an iPhone (and it shows), while others are made with a production level that’s so high-quality you could imagine seeing them on NatGeo or Discovery, easily.

One we stumbled across earlier this week falls most definitely into the latter category, and both little T and I were both impressed by right away: Michelle Khare, a former professional cyclist and journalist for Buzzfeed, who has since become one of the biggest YouTubers around.

She’s had a channel for years (I just learned that this week!) for which she’s done a variety of video shoots and stories, but over the past few years she’s evolved it into a show called “Challenge Accepted,” which chronicles her adventures in finding out what it’s really like to, say, train to become an astronaut, or a firefighter, or an FBI agent, or a flight attendant, or a circus performer, or an air traffic controller, or… well, just about anything you can think of.

As we scanned through the videos she’s released over the past few years, we watched her learn how to become a Secret Service agent, and then when it was over, YouTube rolled us immediately into the next video of hers it chose for us, which happened to be this one:

(As you might imagine, this piqued my interest!)

I’d highly recommend giving it a watch — it’s only a little over 18 minutes long, but to me it captures so perfectly what running is all about, and why we get together as a group (even if only virtually) every week.

In the video, you’ll see Khare prepare to run a 50-kilometer (or 31.1-mile) stretch of the highway used every summer for the Badwater 135, the famously grueling “world’s toughest footrace” that treks 135 miles through California’s Death Valley National Park, where temperatures routinely climb above 125 degrees in July (when, of course, the race is run).

As we watch, she goes through every emotion we’ve all felt when we run really long distances: the excitement and euphoria of starting out, especially your first few training runs, when the distances aren’t so far just yet.

And we see her later, as the distances get longer and she wrestles with whether she can actually do this; at one point, she shares that years earlier, she ran the Los Angeles Marathon. Back then, she was able to routinely run eight-minute miles.

Now, however, eight-minute miles are a thing of the past for her: “Running an eight-minute mile for one mile now, feels like I’m suffocating.”

Why? Because, as she tells us, that time was six years ago — she’s about to turn 30, and is doing this challenge to see if she still has the same physical abilities that have been part of her identity and her career:

“The more I think about it, the more I’m not like, scared of a number. I’m actually just scared about getting old. Getting wrinkled, and all those vanity things that I don’t want to admit that I’m scared of. And I’m really scared that this body I have right now, that can do what it can do, will not always be able to do that. I don’t think I know who I am if I’m not the person who can do these things.”

Now, at first glance you might think this sounds a little silly. She’s only about to turn 30, right? That’s not exactly old.¹

But part of what makes this video so compelling is, I think she’s being open and vulnerable about the very thing all of us worry about — we all want to extend our lives as long as we can, and remain as healthy as we can, and as strong and vibrant as we can, don’t we? None of us wants to lose that vitality and exuberance we feel when our bodies do something amazing, that we didn’t even know it could do.

At some point, of course, we know we will. But until then, I’m reminded of the words from the famous Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who in what’s probably his most famous work — “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” — says in just 168 words what I think we all feel sometimes:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

That’s what calls to us, doesn’t it? To “rage against the dying of the light,” perhaps never more than right now.

I hope you’ve had a great week and have gotten some great runs in — it’s so good to be back with you! As always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

1. Though, “old” is always a matter of perspective, isn’t it? A friend of mine once told me when he was in graduate school in his mid-twenties, one of the undergrads in his class came up to him and introduced himself; when my friend replied that he was in grad school, the undergrad asked sarcastically, “hey buddy, where’s the cane?” My friend was 24 at the time!