I am always surprised by how often the feeling of accomplishment happens through not being yourself, through getting over or beyond yourself, or even not being at all. The internal reward is there when you melt yourself through effort into the mold of an ever-moving process, for a limited time.

Of course it was painful, and there were times when, emotionally, I just wanted to chuck it all. But pain seems to be a precondition for this kind of sport. If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy? It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive – or at least a partial sense of it. Your quality of experience is based not on standards such as time or ranking, but on finally awakening to an awareness of the fluidity within action itself. If things go well, that is.

The whole book seems to explore that tension between effort and expectation, where one has to find the right spot. In the end, it seems to be about holding a line while not being held by it, a difficult exercise.