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There are, but the ordeal offers as a bonus two very chic commodities. One is survivorship, the highest achievement of the modern self-celebratory ethic, best exemplified by the I-SURVIVED-THE-BLIZZARD-OF-'77 T shirt. Survivorship, however, is capriciously doled out. Not everyone can live in Buffalo or have a Malibu beach house obliterated by a mud slide. For the average Joe, there is no cachet in surviving the 5:22 to White Plains. How, then, to earn the badge of honor that is survivorship? Create an ordeal. Run the Western States 100 (miles, that is) over the Sierra Nevada (they say that horses have died racing the trail), and live to talk about it. Or attend the first modern showing of Napoleon, held in the Colorado Rockies, outdoors, from 10:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m., and feel, in the words of the man who put the film together, "Like survivors of the retreat from Moscow."
The other modern good greatly in demand is the learning experience. Ordeal is a great teacher. A group of adventuresome souls staged an unbelievable race on New York's Randall's Island last year: a six-day run, the winner being the person who could traverse the most ground and survive. The race was run around an oval track, subjecting the runners not only to blisters, dehydration and shin splints, but to the overwhelming ennui of unchanging scenery. When reporters swarmed around the runners to ask why they did it, many replied that they had learned a lot about themselves. They never said exactly what it was they learned, but they seemed satisfied that it was important. "Because it is there" has become "Because I am here."
Like the ancients, moderns believe that one can learn about something by subjecting it to the ultimate test: beat the skull, and find the poet. Only today we insist on beating our own skulls, and not quite for the pleasure of stopping.
Why, then? The prestige of survivorship and the hunger for learning experiences are only partial explanations. The somewhat misanthropic economist Thorstein Veblen described the larger phenomenon. He hypothesized a new kind of good, demand for which, contrary to economic law and common sense, increases with price. In the end, the recreational ordeal is just the latest example of a Veblenesque status good, periodically invented for the amusement and prestige of the leisured classes. Now that everyone can afford status items like designer jeans, conspicuous consumption gives way to conspicuous exertion. Sheer exhilarating length becomes a value in itself. And the triathlon comes to represent, to quote a winner of the Hawaiian Ironman race (2.4-mile ocean swim, 112-mile bike ride, 26.2-mile marathon run), "the ultimate expression of the Southern California life-style."
Which is why, outside a cluster of easeful lands, the recreational ordeal is not wildly popular. In America, people run for fun. In Beirut, they run for their lives. People there listen not for the starter's gun, but for the sniper's. In some parts of the world, when a man runs 26 miles it's because he's come from Marathon and he's strictly on business.
—By Charles Krauthammer