The race to be average

The Canadian Outward Bound School hit a metaphorical wall at a rock-climbing site just east of Thunder Bay, 20 years ago.

The top of the climbing route wasn’t different. The difficulty rating of the climb hadn’t changed. But the perception of what it meant to succeed at was drastically altered.

The day before, failure to reach the top would have been considered a botched attempt. It would have been an open invitation to work harder, think differently, and, of course, failure offered an opportunity to learn resilience. But this day was different. It was decreed that wherever the climber could ascend no further, this place would become the summit. From now on, it would be inconsequential whether this moment happened a metre from the ground or a few tantalizing centimetres from the top. A new and powerful metaphor would now re-define success and, in the process of this transformation, nearly destroy a school that had become synonymous with durability and endurance.

In the mid-1990s, Outward Bound was at its peak, with three bases operating throughout Northern Ontario alone, a head office in Toronto and a program that included canoeing dogsledding, kayaking and climbing. By the early days of the millennium, the movement had stalled and was in full retreat.

For serious rock climbers nothing really changed. The sport would see leaps and bounds in popularity as pitons changed to modern protection. But the technical nature of the sport, coupled with the perceived high risk, helped prevent climbing from hitting its version of the running boom, and the defining and Spartan ethos remained.

Running’s essential standard hasn’t changed much either. It’s everything else that has. Most runners appear happy to go on as if the man or woman who won the race is merely incidental.

What has changed, is our apparent unquenchable desire to embrace mediocrity, to venerate and give voice to participants bereft of high-end ability, understanding or even experience within the sport.

It begins with the dilution of language. Oprah isn’t just another runner in a Washington marathon; she is a hero. Many writers and bloggers are celebrated as inspirations not because they try hard and improve, but because they lose commitment and fail. Many Canadians, apparently, would rather be validated in their shortcomings than shaken into achievement.

Seven years ago, physician Atul Gawande put it succinctly in an article that appeared in the December issue of the New Yorker. Most people, he wrote, were going to be average. “There is no shame in being one of them right? Except of course there is. Somehow what troubles people isn’t so much being average as settling for it.”