AP English Language — Mixed Skills — Drill 1

The following text is adapted from a modern personal essay on optimization culture in amateur athletics. I ran my first marathon in four hours and fifty-two minutes. This is not a fast time. By the standards of competitive running, it is unremarkable, and by the standards of the optimization culture that now surrounds amateur athletics, it may even be a kind of failure — evidence that I did not train correctly, eat correctly, sleep correctly, or equip myself with the right combination of GPS data and carbon-plated footwear. I crossed the finish line feeling that I had done something important. The feeling lasted about forty-eight hours before the internet found me. Within two days of posting a modest account of the race, I had received unsolicited advice about my training regimen, my nutrition strategy, my choice of shoe, my heart rate zones, and my finish time, which one commenter described as 'a solid base to build from.' I was not asking to build from anything. I was trying to say that I had run twenty-six miles and that it had been hard and meaningful and that I was glad I had done it. The response I received was a masterclass in the colonization of experience by optimization. The word optimization deserves examination. In engineering, it means finding the best solution within a defined set of constraints. In the culture of amateur athletics — and, increasingly, in the broader culture of self-improvement — it has come to mean something more totalizing: the conversion of every experience into a data point to be analyzed, a performance to be improved, a baseline from which future gains can be measured. The optimized self is never finished. It is always a work in progress, which means it is always, in some sense, inadequate. What this framework cannot accommodate is the experience I was trying to describe: the experience of doing something difficult for its own sake, without reference to a comparison point, a personal record, or an improvement trajectory. I ran because running is hard and the hardness was the point. The four hours and fifty-two minutes was not a baseline. It was the thing itself. Amateur athletics once had room for this kind of experience. The word amateur comes from the Latin for love — the amateur does something for the love of it, without the professional's obligation to perform. What the optimization culture has done is import the professional's logic — performance metrics, efficiency maximization, continuous improvement — into a domain that did not need it and that is diminished by it. You cannot love a process you are continuously trying to optimize away.