Who's the winner? Who's the winner? Maybe winter. Maybe winter.

Several months ago, GR and I happened upon a documentary on Netflix called The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young. It focuses on the titular ultramarathon trail race, an agonizing 100-mile-over-60-hours course coordinated by a peculiar Tennessean named Gary. It was a thoroughly entertaining movie and you should watch it if you're in the mood for 90 minutes of sheer true-life eccentricity.

The entire hook of the documentary (and the marathon itself) is the quirk factor. The race is neither widely prestigious nor fastidiously organized. For example, the process for signing up is semi-secret. Also, the precise length of the course is unknown; it changes a bit every year. It's roughly 100 miles, but Gary doesn't map a clear path. Runners are given landmarks to find, and they prove their progress by ripping pages out of books that have been strategically placed along the route. Gary commissions a local trumpeter to play taps to honor each marathoner who admits defeat before finishing the race, which a majority do. All marathons are semi-arbitrary endurance tests, but the Barkley Marathons seem both extra unnecessary and unnecessarily extra. By the end of the documentary, you'll likely feel charmed by the weird little community Gary has assembled, but also bewildered by and mildly suspicious of those who choose to participate.

Early in the documentary, Gary talks to the documentarians about the athletes who sign up for the Barkley. Semi-offhandedly, he mentions that a high percentage of the race applicants are graduate students or people with advanced degrees. This makes perfect sense to Gary (who presents as a sort of Duck Dynasty-flavored intellectual): these are people, he says, who are driven by pressure, who set impossibly high bars and dare themselves to clear them. Strain your brain, strain your body.

I would never attempt the Barkley -- my 10K last year is likely to be the apex of my racing ambitions -- but Gary's comment resonated with me nonetheless. The past two years, writing my dissertation, were the most intellectually demanding years of my life. Perhaps not coincidentally, over the past two years I also worked myself into my own personal peak physical fitness. I went from being a casual variety of gym goer -- one of those "less amped-up, routine-minded people who pretty much only use the ellipticals" -- to working out five to six days a week, toggling between four- to five-mile runs and various kinds of barre/yoga/HIIT routines. I shaved four full minutes off my 5K.

At the time (and now, still, mostly), I considered this to be a natural (even obvious?) byproduct of my work situation: while dissertating, I was working entirely from home and was able to dictate my own hours. Whenever I felt a lull coming on -- often when I was wrapping up my part-time job and switching over to my dissertation -- I could pause my workday for a gym break, and then resume work in the afternoon. What luxury! It's the dream! With that kind of freedom, who wouldn't take the opportunity to maximize their fitness goals? (Also, for real, the gym is dead on Tuesdays at 1pm. It's just me and an octogenarian man who walks serenely on the treadmill. Once, he told me I looked like a ballerina, presumably because I had my hair in a bun, which, in the category of "unsolicited comments about your appearance," falls into to the sub-category of "fine.")

My mom and I have been good-naturedly bickering for years about whether or not the label of perfectionist should be applied to me. She maintains that, at the very least, I have "perfectionist tendencies." I reject the label, insisting that I don't strive for perfection, but that I do have high standards for myself, and I tend to remain internally unsatisfied until I meet them. Often, this winds up being a difference in semantics rather than substance, since we're pretty much always on the same page at the end of the conversation.

(By the way, there's been some research and theorizing to suggest that "perfectionism" is a gendered phenomenon. In other words, the particular striving towards perfection -- as opposed to trusting that your efforts are sufficiently good or even excellent -- is frequently a product of women's fraught social and professional conditioning. I'm not sure where this factors into my own feelings about the term, but it probably does, somewhere.)

The most engrossing aspect of The Barkley Marathons, as I said before, is the undeniable arbitrariness of it all. Running a marathon -- let alone a 100-mile ultramarathon -- constitutes a trauma for your body, and it can be difficult to understand why anyone would subject themselves to such physiological abuse when the payoff is so minimal. (The documentary suggests that winning the Barkley will entitle you to personal satisfaction and notoriety within a very niche community, but other than that, you're probably just in for some rhabdo.) But that's just it: the Barkley is an extreme endurance test, and it is pursued by people who feel satisfied somehow by not only challenging themselves, but by setting up obstacles so imposing that success is basically a miracle.

I don't quite identify with that particular profile, just as I don't quite identify with perfectionism. But, still... I kind of get it.