There is a question that finds every athlete sooner or later: Who are you when you stop being the thing you were best at? I have been carrying it for about fifteen years, since my own body began renegotiating the deal I thought we had, and most of the answers I have collected in that time fall into two camps. Some people declare the question solved, usually a little too quickly and a little too loudly, and you can hear that unresolved tension in the announcement. Others refuse to look at it at all, and you can hear that too, or rather you hear a loud silence.
Max King gave me a third answer, the most honest one I have heard. “I’ve thought about it, Steve, but I’m putting it off. I don’t have a good answer. I’m still putting it off.”
Putting it off is usually a negative term, something we say about taxes and hard conversations. It took me a few days to understand that Max has turned putting it off into a discipline, one with a structure you can study. I think it is worth studying, because nearly all of us will need some version of it, and the need is rarely limited to sport.
Start with what the discipline has to hold together. The morning we spoke, Max had already won a race, a local ten-miler in Bend, Oregon. He is forty-five. He had been sick all week, the kind of sick that hollows you out, and was two days into a course of antibiotics. Five runners went through halfway together, among them a twenty-six-year-old friend gunning for him and a high school kid gunning for the friend. On a small uphill Max pressed, and the group came apart behind him. “I still got it,” he told me a few hours later. He was laughing, and he meant it. Two weeks earlier he had been at the Barkley Marathons, being taught the opposite lesson. He went out front early, the way a lifetime of racing tells you to, and discovered it was pointless. He would reach one of the hidden books alone, start searching, and watch everyone he had dropped arrive to search beside him. So five of them worked together, because working together was faster. One of the most decorated competitors in American distance running spent his week in the Tennessee woods concluding that the collaborative effort was the advantage.
A man who can hold both of those weeks at once, without feeling any contradiction, knows something about how a racing life continues. Here is what I think he knows, whether or not he would frame it this way.
He knows what the competition was for. He likes beating people, and he said exactly that, without embarrassment, which helped me trust everything else he said. But listen closely and the winning starts to look less like a ladder than a current. Around other runners his body elevates; he reaches something in a race that no solo time trial can touch. He would rather battle head to head the whole way and lose than break the field early and win alone. He loves a start line in foul weather because the chaos unsettles the people around him and he trusts himself to hold fast. Other people, in this account, are how he reaches what is in him. A race at its best is a group of people agreeing to drag one another somewhere none of them could get alone. If that is what the competing was for all along, then losing the winning costs less than we fear. The dragging works at any speed.
The current has a history. Max nearly hammered the joy out of running in high school, coaching himself to run the same five-mile loop as hard as he could go, day after day, and he arrived at college successful, hollowed, and unsure whether he would run at all. What gave the sport back to him was a team: an old-school Cornell coach who dressed in black and carried a stick, an hour of mile-long hill repeats the man called the hour of power, and a group of young men hurting together. In that shared hurt Max found the conviction that seems to sit underneath his whole life. You find out what your body is capable of, and it is capable of more than you thought. Every honest trip to the edge of what you believe you can do moves the edge. For some people that discovery wears off. Thirty years later, the five teammates Max still travels with were forged inside that hour, and the edge, for him, is still moving.
He also knows that the joy predates the talent. Before running was a sport it was a childhood on the Rogue River, whole days outside, forts and games, running through the trees because that is how a kid in the woods gets from one game to the next. Nobody was timing him. He still returns to those woods whenever he can, the way we all circle the first place we remember being fully ourselves. This matters more for the ending question than it first appears. Whatever was there before the race results is what remains after them. If the love arrived ahead of the stopwatch, the stopwatch was not what was loved.
Max has run the identity experiment in both directions. The one stretch he lived as nothing but a runner, all in for the Olympic trials, he remembers with a shudder. “Steve, it sucked. I felt like a drain on society.” An injury nobody could diagnose ate at his trust, the trials went badly, and the following weekend, angry at himself, he jumped into his first 50K and won it. An entire second career began as a tantrum. Four years later, working again and carrying that pressure-relieving mix of jobs and miles, he made two Olympic trials in two disciplines within a few months, better prepared, he says, than he ever was when running was the only thing he did. Sit with that for a moment. The narrowest identity produced his worst racing, and the widest produced his best. Our sports keep telling us that seriousness means narrowing. The evidence of his own career argues the reverse, and I suspect the finding has meaning well beyond racing.
When I lived in Colorado I used to drive to Silverton during Hardrock weekend just to watch, and one year I stood at the finish line long after the winners had come through. The fastest runners had showered, eaten, napped, and come back. They were waiting at the line for the back of the field, standing up to jog the last few hundred yards beside people who had been out there nearly twice as long as they had. Racers understand the real ranking, Max told me: your race matters less than your fellow competitor. He put the covenant even more simply. It is a sport, it is meant to be fun, and it is not the end of the world. From a man who has spent a life caring intensely about outcomes, that sounds less like indifference than like love with its priorities straight. A sport that idolizes its winners and then, an hour later, asks them to fold back into the field is teaching everyone the meaning of dignity.
I needed all of this fifteen years ago. When my body could no longer deliver what I had come to take for granted, that was me, and that me was dissolving. I framed it as a choice between identities, the climber or whatever came after, and felt enormous pressure to pick. What I learned, slowly, is that almost nobody was asking me to choose. I became a father, wrote books, kept climbing at whatever level the years allowed, and people were simply glad I was still there. The either-or had been mine all along. Listening to Max, I kept wondering how much shorter those years might have been if someone had handed me his answer earlier.
Because the answer he says he does not have is sitting in plain view, distributed across the life he has built: the race he directs, the runners he coaches, the summers given to kids, the bucket list of old and strange races (the Dipsea, Mount Marathon, Barkley) that pull him forward now more than podiums do. You do not solve the ending. You widen the middle until the ending loses its power to define you. You keep dropping the hammer on the local uphill for as long as the legs allow, and you build the rest of the life in parallel, so that when the hammer finally stays down, the days still have their shape. Max calls it putting it off. I would call it drawing it out: the long, patient extraction of everything the racing self knows, poured into camps and kids and a start line in Bend, where a forty-five-year-old on antibiotics can still make the young guys hurt.