The Fitness Concept

Holly Hayes Wood

"Conceptions without perceptions are empty". That was the nagging idea circulating round my head as I pushed hard during last Sunday’s cross country run (the last of the season) at Holly Hayes Wood near Coalville. It’s funny how the body does that when you run. At your run-all-day pace you can be creative and think up solutions to your problems. But when you’re pushing hard the higher faculties shut down, and your body does the 'thinking', concentrating just on the important stuff like breathing, lifting the knees, and swinging the arms. At this pace you’re mind is left only with the remnants of a thought: a half-remembered phrase that becomes a mental chant to be repeated in time with your stride.

Why that particular phrase at Holly Hayes? Well, Kant says something like it in the Critique of Pure Reason to imply that the rationalist philosophy is unable from its own resources to arrive at knowledge - it needs the content provided by experience to make its concept meaningful. I’m perfectly sure that Kant did not have running in mind when he wrote those words, but for a moment last Sunday I thought they might apply: tackling an incline through the trees whilst listening to the heavy gasps of a fellow runner on my tail I became desperate to inject some perceptions into my conception of fitness.

It seems that we are all increasingly concerned with physical fitness, and the world seems divided sometimes between those who are ‘fit’ and those who are not. But does the concept of fitness neatly divide into an either/or condition like that? Is the concept meaningful at all without a set of circumstances to which it can be applied? In other words, we must ask "Fit for what?" This is where the race comes in. Before Sunday's race I would have replied “Fit enough to run” if asked. But during the race I, like every runner, was given the opportunity to fine tune my pre-race fitness assessment. As I kicked up the incline with the heavy breather ready to take my place at a split second’s notice I knew, at that moment, that I was at least fitter than him, but not quite as fit as the runner just ahead who had already reached the crest.

As my position fluctuated during the remainder of the race so did my assessment. And so did my view of who was doing the assessing (viz. me). I was not simply measuring my fitness, I was playing with the concept. At various points in the race I was deciding that "I don't fit in here, I'd fit better over there, just the other side of the runner in front". And just behind me many others were 'playing with the concept' in the same way (I'm not bloody Superman).

Kant was right: for any concept to apply it needs to be filled with intuitions that we actively provide for ourselves. The race is the perfect place to get them.