Digital widgets and virtual credits can address motivation about as well as a smiley face sticker can address depression.
Every weekend I run a up a mountain somewhere in the Bay Area.
Why?
When I was young I would take trips out to Colorado in the summer to visit my Grandmother. We would drive into the Rocky Mountains and she and I would take long hikes, sometimes in the forests, but also on the high tundra. I would race ahead and double back and she would point out wildflowers she had found during my absence.
When I got older there was no longer anyone there to double back to. So I just kept running.
And since then I have run with foxes, hawks, dolphins, and owls. I've nearly run into wolves and wild hogs and turkeys. I've navigated around horses, cows, and tarantulas on the trail and hunted down old growth redwoods off the trail. I've lept over snakes (always still as stone), helped lost and weary hikers find their way back to their cars (I hope). I've watched storms move across the ocean while running across high ridges. I've put my daughter in a stroller and run her through poppy fields and up foggy mountain slopes. I've dodged falling trees (definitely they make noise -- lots of logs in the woods, not so many flattened squirrels). I've run in valleys filled with the eerie, booming echoes of rounds fired from nearby shooting ranges.
“The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I had just rounded a corner when his incouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
This is why. I want to get out there and take in as much as I can, to relive those sublime summer days in the high woods with my Grandma*. So that I am able to do those 10-25** km runs up one or two thousand feet (or more) I of course have to crosstrain the rest of the week. But with that reward in mind, training is easy.
I think there are parallels. When I was young I drove long distances to school across Atlanta and witnessed gruesome accidents; hideous, rageful screaming matches between drivers that sometimes came to blows; and at best I not-so-patiently suffered through seemingly endless, boring traffic. So now I live close to work and often bike or walk.
And I don't know how you can have a child and not be fiscally responsible.
Motivations run deep. The best an app can do is to lead you to the edge of the mine.
* I do occassionally run in races, though I am not sure why -- perhaps just for the sake of variety. I never stay for the award ceremony.
** I am no ultramarathoner. For me the negatives of running overwhelm the positives at about 25km (on mountain trails anyway).
