Years later, my mother and I still wonder about that moment. I wasn’t there, but I like to imagine it. I ask her more details. What was the song? What did he look like? And I ask her over and over, “What do you think happened?” “What do I think happened?” she repeats, sounding just as puzzled every time. “I don’t know.” I can hear the amazement in her voice as she relives the shock of the moment. “I think the music snapped something in him,” she decides. “For that one moment, he wasn’t afraid.”
The power of music to move us can seem like magic. It makes miracles happen. In testimony to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging in August 1991, neurologist Oliver Sacks told the story of a woman whose leg was completely paralyzed after a complex bone fracture. The doctors could find no evidence of any communication between her leg muscles and spinal cord. Everything suggested that her brain was no longer able to feel or control her leg. And yet her foot would tap spontaneously to the sound of an Irish jig. The doctors were able to exploit this bizarre exception, and through music therapy, she learned to walk and even dance again.
Music can reach inside you, tap into your most primal self. As a young Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal in 1903, “It stirs some barbaric instinct—lulled asleep in our sober lives—you forget centuries of civilization in a second, and yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.” Even if the body cannot comply, the feeling of being moved persists. In a study of women living with chronic debilitating pain, one woman described the therapeutic effects of music. “Even when I’m just listening, doing nothing but lying there on the couch listening to music, there will be some part of my body that’s moving in some way. I can feel my muscles shifting around in my body. . . . it feels like the music comes through my body. . . . like I’m doing what the musicians are doing. I can feel in my body what it feels like to blow that flute to make that sound.”
Music can also help us access memories. We hear a song and remember a time, a place, a feeling. One woman reminisced to me about learning to ski at age sixteen, the year she discovered the Beatles. She remembers swinging downhill, humming tracks from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. To this day, those songs bring her back to that time in her life, to the joy of mastering tight turns on the slope. Josh White, an Elvis impersonator who visits long-term senior care facilities around the United States, has seen people in noncommunicative, even comatose states reanimate when they hear a specific song. Their eyes open and light up. Sometimes they start singing along. “Even if the brain is literally dissolving,” he told me, “they can still hang on to memories of their favorite music.”
When you let yourself be moved by music, you lay down tracks in your nervous system, pathways for joy to traverse when you hear that song again. I know that when I choose to dance today, I am building muscle memories of joy, giving my future self more songs to be moved by. Bernie Salazar, a thirty-nine-year-old dad living in Chicago, told me about the dance parties he has with his daughter. Her favorite songs are “Happy” by Pharrell Williams and “Shake It Off” from the movie Sing. “There’s a light that shines above her and us—we’re in our own little joy force field. No disco ball can outshine what goes on in our living room,” he says. “I’ve run three marathons and four half marathons, but I’ve never felt so high as losing myself in movement with my kid.” His daughter has reached the age when she will bring her play phone to Salazar and say, “More more more,” asking him to play music and dance with her. Most recently, she made that request in Target. “I don’t care if she wants to dance in a grocery store, I’m going to break it down right there,” he told me. Those are the moments he knows he will remember, the memories he wants to collect. “The old Bernie would have been, ‘You can’t do this, what are other people going to think?’ They’re going to forget about it, and that time will be lost if you don’t.”
According to my mother, my grandparents often sang the chorus of “Always,” the song they first danced to in 1946, to each other. It was a ritual, a way of remembering. I never witnessed this. While writing this chapter, I looked up the song, found a Frank Sinatra recording from 1947, and listened to it late at night. As I heard the lyrics for the first time, I thought, No wonder they got married. How could you hold someone in your arms and dance to that song and not fall in love? Irving Berlin wrote it in 1925 as a wedding gift to his wife. In the lyrics, he promises to be there for her, not just for a day or year, but for always. When my grandparents danced for the first time, they had no way of knowing they were listening to the rest of their love story.
I was so moved by the song, I woke my husband up and dragged him out of bed. We danced barefoot, my head on his chest, laying down a new memory and feeling connected to the past.
Chapter 5
OVERCOMING OBSTACLES
Cathy Merrifield stood on the edge of the twelve-foot-high platform, staring into a pit of muddy water. It was her first Tough Mudder obstacle course, and the forty-four-year-old mother of four was waiting for her turn to jump. Her shoes were duct-taped to her feet to make sure they wouldn’t come off. Safety divers were on standby, and friends and strangers who had already taken the plunge were cheering her on. Her boyfriend was standing on the sidelines, camera aimed to capture her jump. She agreed to go with a friend on the count of three, but when three came, her feet stayed firmly planted. As she looked down, the platform seemed much higher than it had from the ground. Her stomach was in knots, and she realized she was holding her breath. This was the obstacle she had been dreading the most, and she didn’t know if she could do it.
When Merrifield was eight years old, her mother sent her to swim lessons at the local YMCA. One day the kids lined up to practice jumping off the high dive. When it was Merrifield’s turn, she froze on the diving board, too scared to jump. She turned to climb back down, but as she remembers it, the swim instructor came up the ladder, blocked her exit, and threatened to push her off the diving board. With no other option, she jumped, and as she plunged under the surface, water rushed into her airway. Although that swim lesson was almost forty years ago, Merrifield easily recalls her terror. “I remember the feeling of I have to do this, there’s not going to be a choice. I can’t go back down the ladder. That dread of I’m going to have to do this even though I don’t want to.” Now, standing on the Tough Mudder platform, she had an opportunity to rewrite the ending. This time, the decision of whether to jump or not would be hers alone. She held her nose, closed her eyes, and leapt.
* * *
—
So much of the language we use to describe courage relies on metaphors of the body. We overcome obstacles, break through barriers, and walk through fire. We carry burdens, reach out for help, and lift one another up. This is how we as humans talk about bravery and resilience. When we are faced with adversity or doubting our own strength, it can help to feel these actions in our bodies. Sometimes we need to climb an actual hill, pull ourselves up, or work together to shoulder a heavy load to know that these traits are a part of us. The mind instinctively makes sense out of physical actions. When you embrace the metaphorical meaning of movements, you can literally sense the strength that is in you and the support that is available to you.
Human beings are also storytellers, and the stories we choose to tell shape how we think about ourselves and the world. One of the most powerful ways that movement can affect us is through its ability to change our most deeply held stories. Whether it’s by plunging into a pool of muddy water, learning how to hold a headstand, or lifting more weight than you ever thought possible, physical accomplishments can change how you think about yourself and what you are capable of. Do not underestimate how significant such a breakthrough can be. When Araliya Ming Senerat was in her early twenties, she was depressed, living in a city far away from her family and friends, and unhappy at work. She made a plan to take her own life. The day she intended to go through with it, she went to the gym for one last workout. She dead
lifted 185 pounds, a personal best. When she put the bar down, she realized that she didn’t want to die. Instead, she remembers, “I wanted to see how strong I could become.” Five years later, she can now deadlift 300 pounds.
* * *
•••
The first time I heard of Tough Mudder—a ten-mile obstacle course described as the “toughest event on the planet”—was from a psychology student who raved about how fun it was. He offered me a discount code if I wanted to try it myself. I looked the event up online, saw photos of obstacles like Boa Constrictor, Trench Warfare, and Ladder to Hell, and thought, No thanks, no way, not in a million years. My first impression of Tough Mudder, with its simulated tear gas tunnels and slides set on fire, was that it was a jungle gym for masochists looking to prove their toughness. This is not an uncommon take on the event; journalist Lizzie Widdicombe likened it to a rite of passage in which boys “are initiated into manhood if they can keep their hands in a glove filled with stinging ants for several minutes without screaming.” But as I read accounts and talked to people who had completed the course, I heard stories of discovery, empowerment, and even redemption. People were overcoming obstacles in ways that became self-defining moments.
To better understand what was happening on the course, I reached out to Nolan Kombol, the company’s lead obstacle designer. Kombol grew up on a farm near Enumclaw, Washington, where he was routinely shocked by cattle fences—an experience that helped Kombol contribute to the design of the Tough Mudder’s most infamous obstacle, Electroshock Therapy, using electrified cattle fence wires. Kombol explained that when the design team sits down to dream up new obstacles, they don’t ask, “How can we hurt people?” Their goal is to create a story people will want to tell afterward. The surface story may be “I ran through electricity,” but the deeper story is “I did something I never thought I could do.”
Obstacle designers target common phobias, like confined spaces, contamination, heights, or the dark. The idea is to provoke just enough fear that the obstacle requires courage to complete. One of the most useful distinctions the team learned early on is the difference between terror and horror. Terror is anticipatory fear, or expecting something to be awful. Horror is the actual experience being awful. Tough Mudder aims for obstacles that are high terror, low horror. One obstacle, piloted at a race in Pennsylvania in 2011, was a spectacular failure in this regard. The challenge was to eat a habanero pepper. It seemed like it would make a good story, and the team could imagine people including the obstacle in their highlights recap: I ate a hot pepper! In reality, people didn’t spend much time thinking about it, and they underestimated how much it would hurt. Most participants just picked the habanero up, popped it in their mouth, and kept running. “The terror was very low and the horror was extremely high,” Kombol recalls. The lesson was learned, and now the team looks for ways to widen the terror/horror gap in the opposite direction. (They also try out any new obstacle with employees first.) When testing new challenges, the design team has people rate their fear going in and their fear coming out. They’re looking for experiences that transform terror into triumph. That’s how you end up feeling like a hero.
* * *
—
When Cathy Merrifield stood on the twelve-foot-high platform debating whether to jump, she was facing one of the most important aspects of a Tough Mudder obstacle: the decision point. Kombol’s team tries to create what he calls the “Holy shit, I’m about to do this!” moment for every obstacle. They want participants to pause and think about what they’re about to do. When Victor Rivera, a personal trainer in Los Angeles, faced the Arctic Enema—a dumpster filled with eight thousand pounds of ice—in his first Tough Mudder, he said to himself, “You know, you can walk around this. They don’t force you to do the obstacles.” As he considered skipping the ice bath, he realized it was a metaphor. “Life is filled with crossroads, where you decide to continue on the path toward your goals or give up in the face of adversity.” He decided he would rather test himself than regret passing it up. “Even though I was an ice cube for the next twenty minutes, I was glad I stepped up to the plate. It’s carried over into my weight lifting, academics, and even parenting,” he told me. “Whenever I feel that I’ve reached my limit, I know that there’s more in there.”
The single obstacle that gives Mudders the most pause is Electroshock Therapy, a twenty-by-forty-foot maze made out of curtains of electrified wires. A 10,000-volt bolt of electricity zaps through the wires thirty times per minute. The obstacle is out in the open, with no walls, so participants can see people running through and getting shocked. Most stand outside for a while, watching, before they enter. “You see last-minute hesitations, absolute fear and dread,” Kombol told me. “That hill that you have to get over with yourself is the big one.” For most participants, it’s this psychological barrier more than any physical one that defines the Tough Mudder experience. And again, that’s by design. “It’s not ‘I went to Tough Mudder and I was on a conveyor belt, and they put me through a series of electrified wires,’ which could be one way to do it,” Kombol says. “It’s ‘I went up to this obstacle, I thought about whether I wanted to do it or not.’ You get a choice to say I do or I don’t.”
For years, Electroshock Therapy was the final obstacle on the course, the event designed to leave the lasting impression. It differs from many of the most feared obstacles in that it delivers on the dread. The shocks are real, and Mudders who make it through will tell you, Yes, it really hurts. Why make this the last part of the hero’s journey? As I thought about the psychology of this obstacle, I became fascinated by its similarities to a specific series of laboratory experiments conducted on rats. In these studies, experimenters deliver electric shocks to rats by attaching an electrode to their tails or through an electrified grid on their cage floor. If you shock rats in an unpredictable and unavoidable manner, you can trigger behaviors that look like depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. The rats become less interested in eating or socializing with other rats. They freeze at any unknown noise or sign of threat. And having learned that there is nothing they can do to prevent the shocks, they stop trying to improve their situation in other stressful contexts—a phenomenon known as learned helplessness. Throw the rats in a bucket of water and they won’t even try to swim, sinking to the bottom in what psychologists call a defeat response.
But sometimes shocking rats doesn’t make them helpless; instead, it makes them confident, even courageous. The key to reversing the psychological effect of shocks is to give the rats some element of control. Any element of control. For example, in one setup, a rat is placed in a running wheel with an electrode attached to its tail. The experimenter delivers shocks until the rat turns the wheel. The rat can’t prevent new shocks, but it can shorten their duration. This rat doesn’t become depressed or traumatized; it becomes braver in new environments and more resilient to future stress.
Some researchers believe that what gets learned through controllable shocks is a different relationship to fear. What the rat learns isn’t “Shocks are okay.” It’s not even “Wheels are good.” What the rat learns is “I can do something.” Fear means act, not freeze. When Tough Mudders run through Electroshock Therapy, what they learn isn’t “I love being shocked” or even “I can survive pain.” It’s “I am brave.” This is something Cathy Merrifield took away from her Tough Mudder experience, after she found the courage to jump off the twelve-foot platform into the water below. “Any kind of physical practice where you push yourself, when you make it past that, you build a confidence in yourself. If you allow it, it lasts, and you can call on that in the next difficult situation in your life. How much can you push yourself? Where’s the end? You realize, I don’t know that there is.”
* * *
—
Many Tough Mudder obstacles require teamwork. To get through the Block Ness Monster, eight people in a pool must coordinate their efforts to rotate, then flin
g their bodies over, massive blocks in water. In Hold Your Wood, teams carry a giant log over and under a series of obstructions, recalling the cooperative log races performed by indigenous tribes in Brazil. Everest is a curved ramp coated with vegetable oil or dish soap. When you run up the ramp, participants who have already made it to the top reach out to catch you and keep you from slipping back down.
Early Tough Mudder events didn’t have a lot of teamwork built in; that element evolved from seeing how participants came together to deal with unexpected challenges. The first time lead obstacle designer Nolan Kombol witnessed spontaneous collaboration was at an event in New Jersey, as participants tried to run up a ten-foot-high mud hill. It had rained that morning, and the mud was as slick as a sheet of ice. No one could make it up the hill. The participants started working together, taking off their shirts and tying them together to create rope ladders. Afterward, everyone was hugging and high-fiving one another. “It was fantastic, better than anything I could have thought of,” Kombol remembers. The impromptu teamwork that day led to the creation of Pyramid Scheme, in which people form human ladders to pull other Mudders up and over a slanted wall.
The Joy of Movement Page 12
