mandatory field

Bruno looked at me with the confidence of a seasoned Zara sales clerk. A quick stare was all it took for him to hand me a size M blue tank top bearing the name of the race I was about to run. I looked back at my friend Miguel with a mix of confusion and amusement, which prompted a quick reaction: “That’s your race shirt, you idiot!” he explained.

I was stoked. I love free stuff, especially free stuff that proves I actually did something.

Once back in my hotel room, I took a mirror selfie wearing the shirt and sent it to my wife, Diana—my biggest supporter in this ultrarunning mid-life crisis. She told me how hot I looked. She would never tell me the truth. The shirt was hideous.

I have always been an easy mark for outdoor influencers, especially the ones who actually do epic stuff. I tried to get back into surfing shortly after Yeti launched their campaigns with the Malloy brothers. I thought I could climb a mountain the first time I watched Meru. I’ve been a willing commercial victim of people performing extraordinary feats. The only drawback is when those feats aren’t compatible with my age, my financial reality, or my geography. Or, plain and simple, reality itself.

There is a carefully crafted approach from outdoor brands like Yeti, Filson, and Patagonia aimed squarely at mid-life dads like me. Our lives mostly revolve around our cars and our jobs: driving the kids to school, driving to work, driving back to school, driving home. Sipping coffee at a red light from an over-engineered metal thermos makes you feel like you aren’t really in the middle of the city. In that split second, you’re out in the country. There are no buildings, just trees and mountains, and your car is carrying a mountain bike, a bow and arrow, or maybe a surfboard.

The reality? I am carrying my camera and tripods to a fine-dining restaurant to shoot food. It’s not that my life isn’t interesting, or that I don’t have a special job—after all, I’m not stuck behind a desk all day. But I’m also not out in nature. I am an urban dad living an urban life.

During the 2020 lockdowns, while confined to my mother-in-law’s country house, reality hit me. Even if life handed me that rustic dream on a silver platter, even if some magic spell transformed me into a rugged homesteader, I wouldn’t deliver. I am not a farmer. Those red-light dreams of sipping coffee in the wilderness quickly vanished, along with any hopes of becoming the next Malloy brother. Not even my beard was helping.

You can start a hobby or an “interest” out of pure passion, or out of a lack of options. If someone takes up photography as a part-time gig, I’d call that a passion. If someone starts going to a global-chain gym to lift the exact same weights and do the exact same drills every single day, I’d call that a lack of options.

Running was my lack of options. I had already proven to myself that I was frankly terrible at it. But approaching my 40s, and right after watching a video of Jeff Johnson going for a 40-mile run for his 40th birthday, I felt inspired (or influenced) to do the same thing.

A phone call with Miguel brought me back down to earth: I could never run that distance, at least not without a minimal athletic background. That’s when he suggested tackling Rocha da Pena instead. It would be my first formal trail race and, subsequently, my first running shirt.

Truth be told, I hated the t-shirt. I don’t like visually broadcasting to people that I did something. I’m perfectly fine talking about it at work (more than fine, actually), but I am not okay with showing off those race tees while jogging an easy 5k around the neighborhood. But maybe I’m just in the minority here.

Every time you go out for a run, you see a sea of those shirts, from the easy local 10k to the Madeira ultra distances. People love to show off their achievements. We could call them the official uniform of the dedicated amateur, and I hated it. I really did. Not because the designs were terrible, and not because the runners were annoying, but simply because people were flaunting something they had achieved. Envy just might be one of the most basic human instincts. Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Comparison is the thief of joy,” and I was out there comparing myself to everyone who passed me. Not purely out of insecurity, but because others weren’t afraid to show that a simple feat is worth celebrating, or maybe just because they weren’t thinking about anything beyond the fact that they scored a free shirt.

This was my first real lesson about running. It is not a comparative exercise. You are not racing the other people by the river, in the city, or while grinding up the trails. You are comparing yourself to yourself. You are racing your ego, and you are judging your own insecure self.

I would love to finish with a cliché like “wear it proud,” but what I should really say is “wear it loud.” You did something for yourself, and it is none of my business. Just keep that mandatory field in mind, and make sure you choose the right size when you sign up for your next race.