I wouldn't take the Soma

On pine needles, Skoki, and staying uncomfortable

The morning after I ran the Skoki Trail with my friends, I woke up at 5:15. I made my way down the stairs of the Air Bnb, and as I passed the laundry room I bore witness to the evidence of effort from the day before: freshly washed running vests hanging off of door knobs, muddy trail shoes haphazardly creating obstacles on the floor, a rogue gel wrapper that escaped on its way to the garbage. I convinced everyone to allow me to bring our nice coffee machine from work on the trip, and after I poured myself a fresh cup, I went to sit on the back patio to watch the sunrise and breathe in the scent of pine needles.

Pine needles. The smell roots me here, in the mountains with my friends, sandwiched between a 50km trail run and an 18 hole golf game later that morning. As I sip my coffee a little chunky tuxedo cat walks by, another sign I’m in the right place. I’ll later learn his name is Sniper, a perfect name for the neighbourhood watch. As I try to coax Sniper over for pets, my only regret is I didn’t bring the book I’m rereading: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

I picked up Brave New World again because lately it feels less like fiction and more like a diagnosis. Huxley’s world is one engineered to eliminate discomfort entirely, where any negative feeling gets immediately resolved with Soma, the regime’s all-purpose antidote: a drug citizens take constantly to dissolve any unwanted feeling, boredom, grief, anxiety, before it has a chance to mean anything. According to Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Huxley didn’t fear too little information. He feared too much, an endless supply of solutions and stimulation that leaves no clear sense of what actually matters.

Running the Skoki trail was anything but comfortable. And yet, if I had access to a drug like Soma, I wouldn’t have taken it. Skoki starts up a fire road, ominous foreshadowing for anyone who has done a long trail run. Finishing on one is its own kind of Chinese water torture: every curve that doesn’t reveal your car is one more innocent drop on your forehead. But at the beginning of the day it was welcome, giving us a chance to chat, warm up our legs, and discuss dinner plans for later that evening.

Once the trail was flat, the group began our run, only stopping periodically so one of our group could take pictures of every wildflower for his wife. It was only after a few kilometers that I began to feel my lower abdomen twist, a warning sign of the tsunami of menstrual cramps I’ve been dealing with lately. As the path got narrower and the roots and rocks became more exposed, my legs continued to usher me forward as my torso bent over with each stabbing pain in my stomach. I felt like I was running at 90 degrees.

Eventually, I fell on my face. If there’s one thing to know about me out in the backcountry, it’s that I will clip my toes on every exposed rock and root until eventually one takes me down. And take me down it did. I was running, in full blown cramping pain, on a single track that had high edges, narrow enough to make each stride feel precarious. I was already smashed into the ground before I had realized I had even clipped a root. My hands and head throbbed, and as I made my way back up to standing I could feel those hormonal tears pooling behind my sunglasses. No one saw the fall, but when everyone tells you “I heard it,” you don’t feel any better about yourself.

All of this occurred before we were half way through the trail. Knowing we would be out there for about eight hours, I kept telling myself that my cramps would subside and I’d find my footing. I was having a hard day, but I wasn’t miserable. It’s hard to be miserable when you climb over a rock to see a crystal alpine lake surrounded by mountains with ten of your friends. I’ve done enough races and consistent training to realize that sometimes it’s just going to be hard, and you don’t have to make it mean more than that.

This is what I mean when I say I wouldn’t have taken Soma. The trail felt unforgiving, but the eight hours spent on that mountain had more depth, more memories, and more nuance that I’d never want to blunt. I had a friend who had a much worse day than me out there, and I’m sure he’d say the same.

We can’t biohack ourselves out of lived experience, and attempting to do so only takes a vibrant, complicated, full, messy life and drops a piano on it. My capacity to feel as much joy as I do is only possible because I allow myself to feel pain. In a lot of ways, we can’t help but want to feel good at all times, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t do our best to take care of ourselves, both physically and mentally. All the same, there is a variant of full expression that endures in tandem and distinct from modernity’s distorted obsession with optimization. A version that surfaces from straightforward consistency; of doing the boring basics every single day so that you can meet hardship knowing its brevity is a given. This kind of healthy living has little to do with eliminating suffering or hardship and everything to do with making the muddled process the end game. Huxley’s engineered society in Brave New World makes clear that the price of utopia is the total loss of true human experience. Removing all the bad also means you remove all the good.

Someone I love was recently diagnosed with something I won’t go into here. It’s not my story to tell, but it’s one that’s rearranged me in ways I haven’t found the words for yet. All I’ll say is that these insights, choosing discomfort over optimization, appreciating beauty because you’ve experienced devastation, are amplified when you’re bearing witness to something so soft yet brutal. So in this season of life, I’m not interested in whatever we’re maxxing these days. Creating a kaleidoscope of a life requires inefficiency and discomfort, and those so-called negative emotions bring about the best parts of life. Running up a mountain gets you to the wildflowers. Loving someone through illness has no metric. Both hard in their own way, both worth it time and time again.