Shortly after sunrise, on June 14, 2015, a Finnish man named Ashprihanal Aalto stood on Eighty-fourth Avenue, in Queens. At 6 A.M., he began running around the block. He passed a playground, some houses, and a technical high school. After half a mile, he returned to his starting point. Then he kept going—until, forty days later, he’d run five thousand six hundred and forty-nine laps, for a total of thirty-one hundred miles. Aalto was one of twelve runners attempting the world’s longest certified footrace, the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race. Eight of the runners finished the race within the fifty-two-day time limit. Aalto finished fastest and broke the world record by almost a full day.
The obvious question is why Aalto, or anyone else, would choose to run three thousand miles around a single city block. Even compared to other ultramarathons, the Sri Chinmoy is particularly**—**perhaps deliberately—unpleasant. The route isn’t picturesque or awe-inspiring; Aalto pounded the same stretch of pavement for eighteen hours a day, from 6 A.M. to midnight. Since 2000, he has run the Sri Chinmoy thirteen times, so the novelty of finishing the world’s longest race has surely worn off. All the same, some runners seem to find the experience deeply rewarding. What, exactly, is the nature of that reward?
Psychologists, when they think about motivation, often distinguish between two kinds of motive. There are extrinsic motives, such as money and accolades, and intrinsic motives, such as spiritual well-being. Plenty of experiences combine the two. But the runners and organizers of the Sri Chinmoy race are deeply committed to intrinsic motives. In fact, if you want to run, you have to explain your motivations in an application. (You also have to be an experienced multi-day runner.) Last year, the race organizers fielded twenty-one applications and accepted fourteen—the maximum number of runners they can currently handle. “We make sure runners who apply aren’t self-involved,” Sahishnu Szczesiul, one of the race directors, said. “We need to make sure they can get along with other people, and that they aren’t just driven by personal glory. We’re looking for runners who want to test themselves, and who are seeking to run the race for a sense of harmony and balance.”
As it happens, Aalto and all but two or three of the athletes who run the thirty-one-hundred-mile race most years are disciples of the late Sri Chinmoy, a charismatic Indian spiritualist who taught meditation in the West until his death, at age seventy-six, in 2007. Chinmoy attracted thousands of followers through his athletic feats, but he was also controversial: in fact, some of his former disciples accused him of sexual abuse. Chinmoy lifted weights and ran long distances, and he argued that athleticism was an aspect of the road to enlightenment. He had many rock-star devotees, including the guitarist John McLaughlin, who called his band the Mahavishnu Orchestra because “Mahavishnu” was the spiritual name Sri Chinmoy suggested for him. Chinmoy was a consummate showman. In 1988, for example, he started promoting a program called “Lifting up the World with a Oneness Heart,” through which he invited celebrities and high achievers to let him lift them up above his head, one at a time and in groups, on a specially designed platform. “I lift them up to show my appreciation for their achievements,” Chinmoy said. At the time, he was in his fifties. He lifted, among other people, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Muhammad Ali, Sting, Eddie Murphy, Susan Sarandon, and Helen Hunt.
Both because of and despite his outlandish stunts—at one point, he appeared to “lift” an elephant—Chinmoy had a real influence on the world of amateur athletics. He sponsored sporting events around the world, and taught his disciples to believe that they, too, could achieve spiritual growth through extreme athletic accomplishment. Beginning in 1980, he promoted a series of ultramarathons, each longer than the last; what began as a group of twenty-four-hour races became a five-day race, and then a series of races that lasted nearly three weeks. “Sri Chinmoy told us, a number of times, that we didn’t understand what he was trying to do with his races,” Szczesiul said. “He wasn’t just interested in athletic endurance; he preferred super-long events because they demand recovery powers beyond what’s normal.” Chinmoy emphasized the mind’s role in helping the body recover—in pushing athletes to show up at the starting line day after day, and to return year after year. (In a 2007 piece about the 3,100 Mile Race for Harper’s, Sam Shaw describes how Chinmoy visited the race: “gold-complected, resplendently bald,” and “dressed as if for a day at the public pool, in shorts and a cotton shirt,” he hands out strawberries to encourage the runners.)
Aalto has said that he runs to train his mind, and, in general, spirituality seems to drive many ultramarathon runners. Trishul Cherns has run the thirty-one-hundred-mile race three times, and he holds a number of Canadian ultramarathon records. “In my experience, the spiritual side of ultramarathon running is pretty much universal,” Cherns told me. “Even the world’s best multi-day runners have a strong spiritual side. And, for me, it’s a spiritual journey. I start out listening to music, and then I’ll zone out. It becomes an extended form of meditation.” Cherns is also a Sri Chinmoy disciple, but even non-disciples describe ultrarunning as a spiritual experience. Michael Bielik completed the so-called Grand Slam of Ultrarunning this year, finishing four prestigious hundred-mile races during 2015; in contrast to the thirty-one-hundred-race, which pauses from midnight to 6 A.M., hundred-milers continue without a break. I asked Bielik what he thinks about when he’s running, particularly during quieter moments in the middle of the night. “A lot of the time I think about being lucky,” he said. “Even as I’m suffering, I recognize that I’m lucky to be putting this on myself voluntarily.”
Unlike Bielik, whose spirituality is grounded in a feeling of gratitude, Chinmoy believed that running was the shortest path to “self-transcendence”—the capacity to overcome physical limitations with meditation and mental focus. I run four or five times a week, and, to me, that experience sounds a lot like the endorphin-fueled runner’s high that some people enjoy on longer runs. My runner’s high arrives, like clockwork, forty minutes after I begin running (a pity, since I rarely run for longer than forty-five minutes). In 2010, I signed up to run the New York City Marathon, in part because the longer training runs gave me an excuse to spend more time feeling that runner’s high. A couple of months before race day, I tackled a twenty-two-mile training run in the Blue Mountains, ninety minutes from Sydney, Australia. The route was hillier and the air thinner and foggier than I’d anticipated, and my runner’s high arrived far later than it usually did, around the two-hour mark. I felt strong, and, after pushing through exhaustion for more than an hour, suddenly elated. For the first time that day, I stopped paying attention to my ragged breathing; instead, I enjoyed the view of distant blue peaks across deep, green ravines with names like Govetts Leap, Megalong Valley, and Narrow Neck. I’m not a religious person, but that was, without doubt, a spiritual moment in my running career. It’s the only time I can remember feeling guided by something larger than myself.
I’ve yet to meet an ultrarunner who doesn’t find the experience to be, in some sense, spiritual. Still, billions of people have spiritual feelings without courting great physical hardship—and there are ways of understanding ultrarunning that don’t depend on spirituality.
Psychologists don’t just distinguish between two kinds of motivation. They also identify two kinds of well-being: happiness, which is a positive, momentary emotional tone, and meaningfulness, the sense that one’s life has broad value and purpose. In 2013, the psychologists Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker, and Emily Garbinsky interviewed nearly four hundred adults about the distinction between happiness and meaningfulness. They found that the two don’t always overlap. In fact, people report that negative events and personal struggles, while they make life less happy, make it more meaningful. A key difference is that, while happiness is present-focussed, meaningfulness looks forward; it drives people to persevere through unpleasantness in the hope of grander rewards in the distant future. So it may be that, in a broad sense, Bielik and other ultramarathoners are driven by something more secular than spirituality—they could be hungry for meaning, in general.
It’s also possible that the people who run the thirty-one-hundred-mile race are trapped in a kind of feedback loop. In 1999, George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote a classic paper about why mountaineers choose to climb mountains. They do it, he argued, because people are fundamentally driven to set and achieve goals—even arbitrary ones. (Why climb Everest? “Because it’s there.”) The problem with arbitrary goals, however, is that completing one is both rewarding and anticlimactic; the death of one goal often signals the birth of another. Bielik’s first ultramarathon was a thirty-seven-mile run in Central Park. “I felt terrible for so much of that race,” Bielik said, “but when it ended I signed up to run another race. I’d gone out much too fast and I couldn’t rest till I’d done it better the second time.” Bielik’s experience is typical. “A friend of mine calls this PUDS, which stands for post-ultramarathon depression syndrome,” Bielik said. “You feel good after you’ve done something amazing, but then, maybe a month later, you’re in a weird, depressed fog. What do you do now? How do you top it?”
A lot of ultrarunners fall into this escalation trap. Aalto, Cherns, and Szczesiul—like Bielik—started out running shorter road races. “There’s definitely a degree of escalation,” Cherns said. “You go from a five-miler to a marathon, a fifty-miler, and ultimately a multi-day event.” I asked Bielik if he’d consider running the thirty-one-hundred-mile race. “Not yet,” he told me, “but I don’t like to say never.” In six years, Bielik had graduated from marathons to the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning, so he’d learned to hedge. “I’m now thinking about the Grand Slam of two-hundred-milers,” Bielik continued, reluctantly, as though he had no choice. “I hope not, because it’s a huge time sink. But it’s something I’m thinking about.” Talking to Bielik, I wondered if, like an addict, he had developed a tolerance to running, and now required an ever-greater dose to reach the same runner’s high. I e-mailed to ask him about my theory. The main reward for distance running, he wrote, is “a sense of accomplishment”—and “we’re more likely to feel proud of something new that scares us.” Perhaps it’s to that sense of achievement that one builds a tolerance.
Finally, it’s possible that ultra-long-distance runners just have different dispositions from the rest of us. In the late nineteen-seventies, a psychologist named Marvin Zuckerman noticed that some people prefer extreme emotional highs and lows where others prefer emotional stability. Zuckerman labeled this personality dimension “sensation seeking,” and he found that extreme sports enthusiasts tended to “have a higher optimal level of stimulation.” According to Zuckerman’s theory, people like Ashprihanal Aalto and Michael Bielik are willing to endure the protracted discomfort of an ultramarathon in exchange for the scattered moments of extreme joy that arrive during and after the race. There’s a sense in which Zuckerman’s sensation-seekers are like extraverts: while introverts are sensitive to social stimulation, and prefer brief encounters with close friends, the same dose of social stimulation won’t satisfy extraverts, who prefer regular, larger doses of social contact. Maybe ultrarunners are like extraverts with respect to sensation. They long for, and are energized by, extremes of elation, exhaustion, suffering, and joy. (Other people tend to prefer consistency over emotional extremes—particularly older adults.)
Last year, one in every six hundred and twenty Americans finished a marathon; by contrast, even though ultramarathoning is a growing sport, only one in five thousand will become an ultrarunner. But that tiny minority expresses a psychological tendency that many of us find familiar. In the developed world, many of us spend the vast majority of our lives in a comfortable equilibrium. We’re rarely famished, or freezing, or physically exhausted. That comfort allows us to focus on issues that might seem trivial to people who struggle to survive. We wonder when to upgrade our smartphones, contemplate a second helping of dessert, and ask ourselves if we should run four or five miles tomorrow morning.
Faced with a string of these superficial decisions, many people become introspective. They begin to question whether their lives are meaningful. At the same time, they sense that meaningfulness comes from the margins of human experience—that it flowers during times of great joy, pain, frustration, or hardship. For this reason, even those who are privileged feel compelled to court new challenges. Some of us decide on a month without alcohol, or undertake an act of charity, or set out on a ten-kilometer run. Ashprihanal Aalto, Trishul Cherns, and Michael Bielik pursue meaningfulness in a different way: by running, running, and running some more.
