Obstacle course: Ruckus Boston

Yesterday was Ruckus Boston.



My last-minute run to City Sports outfitted me with full-length nylon tights and some cheap-but-reasonable fitness gloves. I didn't regret either of those -- the pants dried fast and didn't hold a lot of mud, while the guys I was running with wore looser pants that apparently got pretty heavy.

We all wished the obstacles were longer and the rest of the course was shorter. Doing 3.5+ miles with no recent running is quite possible for me, but I'm not going to love it. Really, I should have put that "3.5+ miles" together with "45 minute average finish time" and concluded that the obstacles couldn't be too long and the race was mostly going to be a running race full of regular runners, but I didn't -- I assumed it would be more intervally, with sprints between obstacles and then some bottlenecking/waiting around the obstacles.

Was it fun? Sure, it was fun, and quite memorable since it wasn't the usual Saturday. Getting up nets, over fences, through mounds of tires and across poles and monkey bars was fun. Doing ridiculous things with co-workers was fun. The mud pits were apparently part of the experience; I could have taken them or left them; and then there was all the running, LOTS and LOTS of running for a long time with squelching mud-feet in between the more interesting stuff.

I couldn't get across the gorilla bars during the race:



I was kind of beating myself up about that, but we went back after the race and I did get across them then. Two things made them hard on me: the bars were too big in diameter for me to grip fully, so I couldn't use my thumbs, and most them were twisting freely around their axis. That was clearly a function of being later in the day, because some of them were still fixed firmly including all the ones after -- oops -- after the bar that was missing. In fact, there were quite a few obstacles that were showing wear and tear: broken ropes at the high walls and camo nets pounded into the ground ("uh, is that supposed to be an obstacle?" "maybe it was") attested to the energy of earlier waves. Maybe that's why silentq wanted to go earlier in the day -- very sensible.

I was worn out afterward from the running or the heat, and ignored many pressing work things to spend the rest of the day on the couch reading Room by Emma Donoghue in one sitting. It was a good, quick, just-disturbing-enough read. Today I'll be more productive.

Drive on

Another topic I go around and around on is internal vs external motivation.

The last of my nonfiction binge books last week was Drive: the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Main premise: what people find really fulfilling is not gold medals or money, it's autonomy and mastery and the pursuit of something personally meaning. Main conclusion: it's better to be intrinsically motivated than extrinsically motivated, including at work.

Yeah, yeah. That feels true, and yet nearly everyone does things for external reasons sometimes -- we all want the new toy sometimes. And many people are helped along in achieving their personal, intrinsically motivated goals by finding someone to be (externally) accountable to -- a running partner, a personal trainer, a therapist, a thesis advisor, a gymnastics coach, a boss. So it feels wrong to be judgemental when someone is motivated externally.