Endurance, Jean Paul Belmondo

Never drive anything you couldn't picture Jean Paul Belmondo driving

The Italians translate endurance as "resistenza" or "pazienza," a fun linguistic fact which, though Italy has a solid tradition of distance running, wouldn't be interesting unless it suggested something about the way we think about racing and training.  It gets at a very complicated set of questions: Is endurance active or passive?  What role does "endurance" play in racing?  What do we mean when we talk about "endurance" sports?  Is endurance a means or an end?

Endurance, patience, resistence:  All three have different shades of meaning, all three come from different Latin roots.  Endurance: shares a root with durable, means a quality of hardness.  Resistence: means holding back.  Patience comes from pati, which means to suffer.  It's the root of "passivity" and "passion," and it is a foundation conception of Christianity.  Hardening oneself, holding back from quitting, suffering: these all have to do, in a way, with making yourself into an object, with mastering yourself, keeping yourself within bounds.

Basically, all these things mean not yielding.  Yielding, then, to what?  To pain, to the desire to quit--we all know the feeling.  But a race is a different story--it's not about testing your limits to see how much you can take but about beating the other person.  Or, as my uncle once said, when you're head to head with someone it's really about who can take more pain.  That's a description that combines the active and passive aspects of racing: going forward, not yielding to yourself or to your competitors. 

So what do people think?  What does it mean to talk about "endurance sports"?   They are called endurance sports because endurance is the physiological characterstic most needed, as opposed to speed or strength.  But the connotations of endurance, and the reasons why people participate in endurance sports, far exceed mere physiology.

One thing I've learned about racing, though, is it never helps to think of yourself as merely trying not to quit, or merely trying to take the pain and get through the race.  You need to conceive of the race as a task and move actively through it, focusing on your place, on tactics, on moving up on the singlets ahead of you and not getting passed.



"Jean Paul Belmondo, how very becoming is your bicycle.  You wear no helmet and you smoke, but in Europe that is sophisticated, not reckless and white trash.  Your scarf is of the softest merino wool."



An example of artigliane food: locally grown ingredients, crafted according to ancient practices rooted in the land