Midlife? I'm 19 and my most common response to depression is biking 15km in any direction. On the bright side, I've seen pretty much every small town in a 10km radius*, and I found this awesome little trail where a group of nature enthusiasts put up signs with information about local wildlife every 2-3 km. They've been there since the mid-90s, with no website, no roadside marker, just take the trail up behind the Autobahn and suddenly there's 4 paragraphs about Passer domesticus. Not to mention all the breathtaking Danube trails I found in rural Austria, when we spent a week in the Wachau. * I'm a cyclist, not a mathematician
Everybody has their own definition of what distance is impactful.
And buying a nice car doesn’t always mean you’re having a midlife crisis, I don’t think the industry would survive on that alone. The article isn’t talking about depression, it’s talking about a midlife crisis. You didn’t discredit the opinion of the article by pointing out you like to bike when you’re depressed, but your comment did come across as dismissing it and making it about yourself juuuuust saying. I bought a nice truck, I’m not going to dismiss that this is a common thing people do during a midlife crisis because I’m not at midlife.
"Extreme" is in the title. If you're explicitly stating that you're responding to "midlife" I can't be expected to presume you're opting out of "extreme." I agree with that. I also dispute there's anything new about it. Average age of NY marathon runners in 1980 was 37. In 2011 it was 41.My point had nothing to do with the distance, I was just saying that resorting to athleticism in the face of depression has little to do with how old you are.
I love this so much. Saturday I had my first Did Not Start, but I went and watched the start of the race. Waved at two people I know from run club. I'm a fairly reliable two hour half marathoner. I feel like that's a good time, even if not great, and I'm a little disappointed when I come in over two hours. I watched the 2:15 pace group run by Saturday morning at about mile two, and they looked good. Strong, capable runners at a good, healthy pace. I watched the winner finish (90 seconds ahead of second place), and I don't know that he looked "better" than those finishing in double his time. Everybody just looked so amazing. I shouldn't be disappointed by my slower times.Everyone has a story and there’s an importance to everyone who’s out there, whether they’re finishing a course in record time or the last one finishing.
It's hard for me to tell if the author is using the phrase midlife crisis pejoratively/self-deprecatingly in connection to those who take up extreme athleticism. He seems very sympathetic to those experiencing a similar plight in middle age, but he doesn't take much pain to strip the term of its baggage. It seems he comes down on the side of this can be a good thing. But what does he mean that "Extreme Athleticism Is the New Midlife Crisis"?But increasingly, people are responding to the anxieties of middle age not by clinging to the last vestiges of expiring youth but to taking on challenges that seem to belong to the young alone: by pushing the limits of what they’re physically capable of through endurance athletics and extreme fitness.