When I describe my endurance career, I’m not talking about a month or a year.

I describe an ambition that is infinite.

It lacks the finite qualities that define a man’s lifetime. For a man’s life is measured in years. It is not evaluated by the diminution in strength or stamina or the delayed onset of fatigue.

When I first began running, I was afraid of people seeing me out there. But I would do it at the most obvious of times. I ran as my senior prom was transpiring. I ran in the dark at my track after dinner. Two miles normally – Sometimes 4 if I felt particularly nutty.

When I look back at the injuries I’ve sustained, the crashes I’ve survived, and the waters I’ve exited, I merely shake my head in condemnation. But what’s frightening is that I can see myself doing the very same act for the very same principle tomorrow.

Webster defines insanity as the act of doing something again and again, while expecting said actions to yield different results.

Let me be clear: I don’t have an answer - That is what leads us to peril. But it also leads us to power.

This maze of measurement and idealism isn’t bound by genetic endowment. It is not sown in the driveways of suburbia. It isn’t experienced from the bleachers. It is truly and only understood in the sinews of the tested.

It means something different to everyone whom toes this line of fortitude.

That is why I go out of my way to flatly deny the idea of a professional and endurance career. The obstacles and dogmas therein are merely outworn slogans. They don’t drive man to his best.

The challenge of pursuit is enough to satiate any man’s soul. It nourishes the most hungry of ambitions, and it quenches the most parched dreams.

Maybe this is why I headed out the door this morning. Because I know that if I’m going to find my passion, it won’t be found in the breaths of Nietzsche, Augustine or Hobbes. It won’t be found in the marble palaces of this republic, or in the stains of the forgotten.

If I can keep this up, this simple pursuit of passion, forever as I may see fit, it will yield progress at the very least. To move forward with such an infinite ideal is a manifestation of an infinite ambition.

Resolved, from now until that ambition is quenched;

And not a day less will do.