All our lives the people around us do nothing but tell us that too much is too much, that the right is in the middle, and that overdoing it is wrong. We grow up with the idea that it is necessary to stay in the middle, not to take sides too much, and that mediocrity is the basis for a healthy life.
We inculcate in children and young people the idea that overdoing it is bad for them, and we end up with a society full of mediocre officials and very few excellences.
This could be one of the reasons, for example, why in Italy we have this absurd and disconnected view in reality about the talent: It is as if there are people predestined to become professionals in sports who, with the same amount of effort, start running a marathon in two hours while you with the same training take five hours. You never think about the fact that that result is the fruit of thousands of hours of work accumulated over the years. Talent, provided it exists, is only an aid in most cases.
Beyond genetics is the great and unexplored world of physical and mental limitations.
An example?
Come on you know my column is not about cross-stitch.
Now imagine the situation. You are in the desert and you are completely bursting. During the day, the thermometer reached 40 degrees and the sun burned your skin; you put ice in your hat, in your water bottle, inside your jersey and on your neck, but you still suffered so much.
Come nighttime you reach an aid station, and next to you is a little boy sitting in a camp chair eating gummy candy.
Which, in the absurdity of the day, may also be normal, because in the States at night you see lots of kids serving runners in aid stations, perhaps with their parents spending the night awake cheering runners on and filling their water bottles.
The little boy has a bib, though.
At her side is an elite athlete, Sabrina Stanley, fresh winner of Hardrock 100.
You think it’s a hallucination, because she has the pacer bib on.
But then you see him again in a couple of subsequent aid stations and realize he is in the race.
You tell him it’s close and to hang in there, that he’s doing a “great job.” He thanks and smiles, gets up and starts again. Upon arrival, after 25 hours and 38 minutes, he does not even look that tired. He proudly shows his buckle to a photographer below the finish line.
Luke Sanchez is 15 years old and the youngest 2019 Javelina Jundred 100-mile finisher.
By the age of 14 he had already tried to run it, failing. After a few months in compensation he had brought home an 80km race in Florida. The next year he tried again, bringing home his buckle, as mentioned, as well as a nice couple of races in the 50K. The following year he tried another 100-mile race, the very tough Ouray 100, a sort of Hardrock 100, where he dropped out, however.
I think, results aside, the focus is not so much Luke per se, but a broader concept.
In Italy kids up to 18 years old are forbidden to compete in ultras by regulation, in the U.S. if you want to race, you sign the waiver (or get your parents to sign it) and go.
Yes, I know, I can hear the voices of parents saying, “100 miles, for a 15-year-old boy, that’s too much! it’s bad for him!”
Granted that I am not a parent, I would like to say one thing. A competition is the tip of the iceberg of what daily training is. Anyone who decides to play sports competitively in some way stresses his or her physique, whether it is by having his or her shoulder blades do millions of rotations as in swimming, or by lifting weights in the gym or by throwing shoes at a ball in movements that are very injurious to tendons and ligaments.
Running 100 miles may not be the best for a 15-year-old physique, but neither is certainly doing soccer contrasts (how many soccer players make it to their 40s without having ligament surgery?) or sitting on a saddle pedaling on the road for three hours a day; yet, it is difficult for a kid to wake up at 18 after a sedentary life and become a professional in cycling.
The normal process for those who aspire to excel in sports, just as in playing an instrument or becoming a painter has one great constant: the countless hours spent in perfecting a movement.
Besides, if the kid has not been forced in the least by his parents, but has just found something he likes to do, that makes him feel good, why should he do anything else like shorter, more classic distances such as track and field? Regardless of whether he is doing it to become a professional in the future or just because he likes it, why should he be prohibited from doing it?
Should he stop running or do something less strenuous because according to others it is too much?
At the end of the race I shook his hand.
“It was hard,” he told me, “but it was so cool. We had fun with Sabrina running the night and it’s great that everyone cheers you on to get to the bottom,” he added, before leaving for a well-deserved shower and sleep.
I still believe that video games and snack foods are more harmful to young people than ultrarunning.