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miles or more — are springing up everywhere. Possibly the hardest is Badwater . This is a 135-mile foot race that incorporates a significant chunk of California: beginning in Death Valley, at 282 feet below sea level, and finishing 8642 feet higher, at Whitney Portal — the trailhead of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the state. In the early parts of the run, temperatures can reach 130 o F. If you take bread into the open air at that temperature, it begins to toast. The tarmac is so hot your shoes will start to melt, and so you have to run on the white line at the side of the road — cooler because it reflects heat. Then there is the Marathon des Sables , a six-day 151-mile foot race across the Sahara Desert. Runners have to carry anti-venom syringes with them, because of the numerous snakes that litter the route. Or, if you are tired of the heat, there’s the Hardrock — 100 miles run at altitudes of over 14,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies — a slow and difficult race that involves scrambling up and down improbably steep hills, and where the principal medical problems include high-altitude cerebral oedema. Many of the finishers take over forty-eight hours to complete this race, which means — given that the start is just before dawn — thatthey will see the sun rise three times during their time spent running. Then there is Leadville — another Colorado Rockies 14,000-feet, 100-mile offering, centred on the USA’s highest city — where the completion rate is lower than the Hardrock .
    I must admit: I have been bitten by the bug. Those races are monsters that may always be beyond me. But if I can get my calf right, I do have my beady little eye on some softer fifty-milers for later in the year. Are we endurance freaks all suffering from our own midlife crises? Did it use to be — as caricature would suggest, at least for men — inappropriately young women and sports cars, whereas now it’s the Badwater or Marathon des Sables?
    I suppose, if this interpretation is correct, we would have to expand the idea of a midlife crisis, make it more inclusive and gender-neutral. This ‘crisis’ is far from an exclusively male thing. As many women as men have been bitten by the endurance bug. And in their resulting avocation, they can compete with men on a more or less equal footing. Apparently, no woman is going to give Usain Bolt a run for his money. But the longer the distance of the race, the more the gap between men and women narrows. Ann Trason wins 100-mile ultras outright, at least she used to. It is true, I expect, that women have midlife crises too. But the main problem is supposing that the label ‘midlife crisis’ explains anything at all.
    Labelling something is often done to stop thinking about it, just when the hard thinking should be starting. We need to dig deeper. What is a midlife crisis? What is its essence? In particular, does the Hardrock or Marathon des Sables type of midlife crisis have anything in common with the classic but clichéd younger-woman/fast-car midlife crisis? Perhaps there is something that the two alleged crises have in common.But until I can identify precisely what that is, the label ‘midlife crisis’ means nothing.
    There is a way of thinking about a midlife crisis that ties it closely to the idea of achievement. A midlife crisis is the result of the realization that your abilities are on the wane, and consequently that your reach is henceforth condemned to exceed your grasp by an ever-increasing, and perhaps ultimately embarrassing, margin. The younger-woman/fast-car response is an attempt to reassert youth’s authority of grasp over reach. Is this what it is all about?
    Of course, I can only speak for myself. But the reassertion of grasp over reach hypothesis — the idea that running is all about achievement — just doesn’t convince me. I think one of the things I quickly learned from running