I endorse Gary Johnson's run(ning)

Pictured: Gary Johnson running. Not for president, though.

Poor Gary Johnson. This should have been the year for a third-party presidential candidate. The two major-party presidential candidates are widely disliked, and he's a reasonably-accomplished former Republican governor of a blue state, with a similarly-pedigreed individual, in William Weld, as his Libertarian Party Vice Presidential nominee.

Alas, his campaign has not been anywhere near the success he surely hoped. First, his ticket failed to reach the 15 percent polling threshold required for participating in the presidential debates, despite the other candidates' aforementioned unpopularity (at least he got to serve as a podium). And his ticket now risks falling below the five percent popular vote threshold that would not only serve as a small, if concrete, rebuke to what our democracy has wrought this year, but also give the Libertarian Party an infusion of public funds for the next presidential election (an irony I won't bother to comment on).

A better-funded Libertarian Party could do something about this dilemma.

Why hasn't America, faced with the left nut and the right nut, felt the Johnson? Many reasons. Some conservatives disillusioned by Trump (and Clinton) say he never bothered reaching out to them when they could have formed his core support. Some libertarians claim the Johnson-Weld ticket is not really libertarian (especially the Weld part; it doesn't help that Weld's basically endorsed Hillary Clinton). Others wonder if libertarians can ever overcome their intra-party squabbling and unprofessionalism (e.g., this strip-tease that a corpulent, redheaded podium-crasher at their convention performed) if they couldn't do it this year. All could be factors.

Still others, however, blame Johnson himself. First, he responded to a question about the Syrian city of Aleppo by asking "what is Aleppo?" (from which he tried to recover by saying that not knowing where someplace is on a map makes him less likely to bomb it). Failed presidential candidate and successful Southern humorist Lindsay Graham said Johnson's performance in this interview "set back the cause of legalizing marijuana by 50 years." Then, when asked which foreign leader he admired, he referenced his own prior failure ("I'm having an Aleppo moment") when he could not name a single one. He seems to have taken this failure personally, angrily lashing out in interviews to express his pent-up frustration. And, to make things worse, his underwear is too tight, and his phone is almost out of data.

Pictured: probably not the tongue of our next president

But I said when I started this blog that I wouldn't talk about politics, so you can ignore all of that. For, despite it all, I endorse Gary Johnson's run...
 ...ing habits.

There's been a lot of talk about stamina this election. One candidate say he has it, and has a note from his doctor that is most definitely not one of the most ridiculous documents ever produced to prove it (but a record that awkwardly suggests otherwise). Meanwhile, he accuses the other candidate of lacking this precious stamina (indeed, she should probably consume some chocolate frogs). Yet the candidates from each respective party with the best stamina failed to win their party's nominations. Marco Rubio, now known mostly for sweating and being thirsty, probably picked up those habits from his (short-lived) stint as a college football player. Bernie Sanders was captain of his high school cross country team, and claims to have run a mile in the 4:30s (but everyone ran a 4:30 mile in high school...).

That leaves Gary Johnson. And, contrary to his campaign troubles, Johnson is the real deal in this area. He is a veteran mountain climber, and has even conquered Mt. Everest. Like Sanders, he ran track in high school, but has stuck with endurance athletics ever since. He has completed five Iron Mans, and has competed in the Ironman World Championship at Kona, Hawaii. He has run at least 13 marathons, including the Boston Marathon in 2002 (3:11:11), and claims a lifetime marathon PR of 2:48 (and a lifetime 10k PR of 33:45), and, unlike Paul Ryan, he doesn't seem to be lying about it. He ran the Leadville 100-miler (29:45:09). And, most impressive of all, he shows up to major news interviews and campaign events wearing running shoes. If this presidential race were an actual race, Johnson would win, hands-down (seriously though; all this talk about "running" for president, but where are the candidates' training logs?).

He prefers Nike.

Alas, it is not. But Johnson loves the active lifestyle so much that you almost get the sense he'd rather have spent this time training for and then racing a marathon than campaigning. He told Runners World that “Any day that I am not campaigning, I train an average of two to three hours a day," but “Campaigning 6 a.m. to midnight—[training is] not happening, although I walk as often as is possible.” If Gary Johnson is anything like me, or most runners or otherwise physically active people I know, not being able to workout has made him very unhappy (perhaps this explains his lashing out in the interviews above). He also said somewhere, though I cannot find where, that, to him, this presidential campaign wasn't a huge deal; if he didn't win, he'd go run a marathon or something.

This is the aspect of Johnson I find most compelling and appealing. Sure, if he were just a runner, I, as a runner myself, would still relate to him, much as I relate to John Kasich's massive appetite, or to Hillary's interest in UFOs. But there seems to be more to Johnson's commitment to endurance activities than that. Indeed, I'd argue that his passion suggests he recognizes, at the very least instinctively, and, one would hope for a libertarian, philosophically, that there is more to life than politics. Unfortunately, our age perversely rewards the sick-souled among us who desire power and willingly subordinate the rest of their lives to the political, the better to achieve a position whereby they can order the rest of us around. Something tells me that, at a fundamental level, this never appealed to Gary Johnson. And maybe there's a lesson in that.

And that lesson is we should all be runners.