As the title of this blog says, I'm very interested in the connections between our endurance as individual humans and the long-run sustainability of the civilization we live in. Those two things are rarely connected in our media or public policy. For example (and I apologize if this seems rude), if the people of a populous eastern state elect a very fat man to be their governor, it apparently did not occur to them that their chosen leader may have a very weak sense of what constitutes a healthy society, since he evidently doesn't pursue it in his own life.
In my younger years, I didn't pay much attention to those connections either. When I became an avid long-distance runner as a teenager, it wasn't because I had the slightest interest in whether America would survive the 21st century. In those days, although I found the writing of dystopian visionaries like George Orwell quite fascinating, those visions seemed more imaginary than real (the year 1984 was far in the future), and those of us who grew up in the heady 1950s didn't worry about the future. We basked in the promise of the American Dream. My big goal in those days was to run the Boston Marathon--which I did several times in the 1960s. I finished 26th the first time, and it was one of the great thrills of my life.
As I grew older, though, I began to notice interesting connections between the capabilities I needed to practice a competitive runner, and those I needed in order to make a living, raise a family, and deal with the stresses of life in a fast-changing society. When I started Running Times magazine in the 1970s with fellow runners Phil Stewart, Rick Platt, and my younger brother Glenn (who later changed his name to Alex), I soon found that getting each issue of the magazine out took enormous physical and mental endurance. To meet our printer's deadline each month, we typically had to work 30 straight hours or more through the last two days and nights, sustained by bad coffee (long before Starbucks existed) and our experience in pushing past "the wall." We didn't have computers and digital tech to ease the workload (every typo had to be fixed by retyping the bad line on a word-processing machine, running the print-out through a waxing machine, and cutting out the corrected line with a razor blade by hand). Check out those 1977-79 issues, and you'll find an occasional crooked line, where the waxed correction got jiggled somewhere in transit to the printer, or perhaps where my overcaffeinated hand did the jiggling.) We also didn't have Shark Tank or crowd-funding to help pay the costs. It was "sweat equity," and the end of every month felt like running a 2:20 marathon against the wind, in sleet, on no sleep. And no, we weren't Kenyans.
It was years later, when I moved on from Running Times to edit the work of environmental scientists, that I first heard the term "sustainability" and learned that many of the world's leading scientists were finding evidence that modern civilization cannot continue current rates of population growth, pollution, climate disruption, and destruction of the planet's biodiversity (on which all human life depends totally), much longer. The long-run capacity of our civilization was beginning to fail. In 1992, more than a thousand of the world's top scientists issued a warning that "Humanity and the natural world are on a collision course." This wasn't a group of whackos-for-hire, like the handful of shameless PhDs who were being paid by oil and coal companies to claim that climate change isn't being caused by burning fossil fuels (or, as the Oklahoma Senator Inhofe claimed, that "global warming is a liberal hoax"). The men and women who issued the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity included every living Nobel Prize winner in the sciences (more than 100 of them). And since then, their numbers have grown to tens of thousands. But the general media largely ignored that warning (the New York Times, which depends heavily on the advertising of the fossil-fueled consumer economy, commented later that the Scientists' Warning wasn't "newsworthy"!)
In the quarter-century since that Warning, all of the trends those scientists warned about have worsened. There are now at least five major scenarios of how civilization may come to an end within the next century or sooner--like an unfit runner collapsing mid-race--and none of those five is highly improbable. You have to wonder what the collective probability is. I discuss these five scenarios in a forthcoming book, which I'll tell you more about in a later post. In the meantime, though, there's a sixth scenario, the probability of which scientists can't really can't quantify at all, because it's too overwhelmingly complex. But you may well be familiar with it: It's the growing extent to which the corruptions or failures of large institutions (governments, religious organizaations, and large corporations) are overwhelming us, distracting us from the things we really need to be paying attention to if we want our grandchildren--and theirs--to have life.
For just a few examples of such institutional faltering, recall the hacker attacks at Target, Home Depot, and a growing list of other companies, stealing data from nearly half of America's credit cards. Think of the mortgage-fraud crimes of companies like Bank of America and half of Wall Street; the sex-crime scandals of the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts; the air-bag failures and recalls of millions of cars; and on and on, In my last post, I described a life-sapping struggle I've had with the predatory company Quicken Loans. [Oh yes, in a followup to that, the Request for Correction I sent to the Court brought me a one-word reply: "Rejected."] Sometimes, now, it seems to me that if I hadn't been a competitive runner for the past half-century, and learned to endure a whole range of stresses--from injury and fatigue to dehydration, heat exhaustion, mental bonking, and staggering discouragement (like the time I went off course and got lost at around the 45-mile mark of a 50-miler in the Arizona desert)--if I hadn't trained well for those things I'd probably be in an insane asylum by now, or worse. I can't run as fast now as I once did, but I'm glad I have learned to endure.
Next post: How specific physiological effects of endurance training can prepare us for the non-sporting stresses of a failing civilization.
Josh about to pass his grandpa
Here, at age three, Josh regularly runs a mile or two with me--and I have to work hard to keep up!
Tuesday, December 30, 2014
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
The Real Nature of Endurance
I've been caught up in something that has given me a whole new perspective on the nature of human endurance. Although I have run 50-mile and 100-mile races with some success, what I've encountered now is a thing that has tested my endurance as nothing before. The challenge here has not been a physical one (though there's been plenty of adrenaline and fatigue), but mainly a mental and psychological one. And suddenly, I realize that with this, I have far more company than I have ever had in long distance running. There are at most a few hundred thousand Americans who have completed events like the Ironman Triathlon, or Western States 100, or Tour de California. There may be tens of millions who've been beaten down by incompetent bureaucracies or corrupt corporations. And for many of the victims, there's no finish line. If you ever get pulled into a nightmare of the kind I'm about to describe, it can be life-saving to have spent years building your endurance on mountains or trails.
My current struggle is with Quicken Loans, a mortgage company I approached for a refinance of my home as innocently as a fish swimming into the mouth of an alligator. When the mouth closed, my wife and I discovered our entire net life savings had been wiped out--and our mortgage debt had been suddenly increased by $28,000 more than the refinance contract had specified. I should note, since it's critical, that my wife and I are in our 70s, living on a very small fixed income (we can't afford to go out to movies, or even have lunch at Chipotle), and what Quicken did to us has caused us over a year (so far) of stress that is wearing me down in a way I never experienced in 100-mile races or even in the 135-mile Badwater race across Death Valley (photo above). And my wife is now so traumatized that I'm afraid she may not survive this.
But please understand, I'm not writing this to solicit sympathy. I know other people are in far worse straits than we are--millions of others who've been snared by predatory organizations. And the disturbing thing is, these are not what we'd normally call "criminal" organizations, like organized crime syndicates, or drug cartels, or the shadow groups that steal IDs and empty out bank accounts. The outfit my wife and I are dealing with just happens to be Quicken Loans. We could quite as easily have been screwed by Bank of America, or Enron, or Duke Energy. Hundreds of American corporations have been convicted of crimes in recent years, and few have been prosecuted. As for corruption in government, don't even ask.
In Quicken's case, was the means by which it has taken our money a crime? My first thought was that it was a bait-and-switch. But I may never know, because I have no way of untangling the web of obfuscation and intimidation it has put up to block me. More recently, I've concluded that it may not have been actual bait-and-switch, but simply a case of such amazing negligence or incompetence that it would be a huge embarrassment to Quicken if it became widely known. Either way, it looks very much like a crime,, as I'll explain.
When my wife and I originally purchased our property, it consisted of six adjoining lots--one big enough for a house, but landlocked in a forest adjoining the Pacific Crest Trail (where I could go for fantastic runs), and five very small ones to provide road access to the house. In order to get a building permit, we were required by our county to have the lots legally joined as a single indivisible parcel. Once that was done, we got a construction loan from Wells Fargo Bank, and when the house was built the construction loan was converted to a mortgage. A few years later, with interest rates falling, we got a refinance from--yes--Quicken Loans. Later, the loan was acquired by Chase Bank. None of these giant banks had any problem with our mortgage. In the case of Quicken, which handled it smoothly, I later found myself reminded of the fundamental technique of a con-game: to first gain the mark's confidence.
So, a few years later when I went for a second refinance, I had confidence in Quicken. They had already financed this same property once before. What could go wrong? And indeed, all seemed to go well. The contract looked flawless.
Eight months later, my wife and I received two letters from Quicken informing us that the refinanced mortgage was for only one of the six lots that form our property. There had been a mistake, they told us, and now they'd be increasing our tax escrow by an amount that would add about $28,000 to our debt over the term of the loan. When I objected, a man in their Legal department told me curtly, "You signed the Compliance Agreement!" We had indeed, and it wasn't until nearly a year later that we realized what a sleight-of-hand comment that had been. He'd said it with such self-righteous assurance that I assumed it looked bad for us. I knew it said something about the lender having a right to collect money that had inadvertently not been collected at closing. But I regarded that Agreement as a technicality, far outweighed by the fact that the mortgage they'd refinanced wasn't even the one we'd brought to them. How could a mortgage company that advertises its competence make such a stupid blunder on what should have been a very simple transaction? How could it have divided up a parcel that was by law indivisible? (The "mistake" appeared only in the Deed of Trust, on a page that was missing from the closing documents, so we never saw it. On all the other documents signed at closing, our property was simply identified by the correct street address, which has never changed and for which the 6-lot legal description had never changed.)
Having suddenly seen our life savings wiped out, we asked Quicken for a make-good. In a letter, we said we were aware that elderly people who dare to challenge the wrongdoing of large corporations often end up in protracted litigation that is never resolved in their lifetimes. We didn't want that kind of stress, and suggested that in exchange for having a quick resolution and peace of mind for our remaining years, we would accept a reimbursement of one-third of the amount they had added to our mortgage debt with their little "mistake." Boy, was I suckered. Not only did they refuse, but when I sued for the one-third in Small Claims court, they counter-sued us. By California court rules, they had to give us a five-day advance notice, but instead they waited until 4:30 p.m. the afternoon before our case was to be heard, and the next morning the judge said he'd have to send the combined cases to Civil Court, where we'd have to have a lawyer. Quicken had evidently deduced from our letter that our wish not to get entangled in litigation was our weakness, and that by immediately taking us into litigation, they could scare us into backing off.
Maybe this was where my lifetime of endurance training helped. Instead of backing off, I wrote a letter to the Civil Court judge who had been assigned to the escalated case, saying that the Quicken suit was a sham (my wife and I had already met its demands that we sign off on a corrected Deed of Trust), and the judge apparently agreed. He dismissed Quicken's case and sent our case against them back to Small Claims.
In preparing for the Small Claims trial, which by now had been kicked down the road eight more months, I suddenly discovered the sleight-of-hand that the Quicken lawyer had suckered me with, in his righteous "You signed the Compliance Agreement!" Now, looking at that agreement once again, I saw that while it does allow the lender to collect money that was due but inadvertently not collected at closing, it also states:
Lender agrees that any request for such money will not.change the previously agreed
upon points, closing costs, or escrow payments [except due to changes in insurance or
tax assessments] that you were approved for as set forth in the Loan Pricing Disclosure,
Good Faith Estimate . . . and/or mortgage.
But what Quicken was claiming in additional escrow (and not just "requesting" it but taking it from our bank account) changed the terms of all those documents hugely. In short, the Agreement was that if a mistake at closing resulted in their not getting money that if paid then would have resulted in the correct bottom line indicated by the Good Faith Estimate and Mortgage, it could be collect later. But not if it changed the bottom-line terms of the contract!
At this point, I figured I had a slam-dunk. I say "slam dunk" with ironic awareness that the owner of Quicken Loans, a guy named Dan Gilbert, is also the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball franchise, employer of the NBA slam-dunk king LeBron James.
At the Small Claims trial, the judge heard several cases before mine, and I noticed that he seemed repeatedly impatient and condescending to the litigants. When my turn came, he allowed me three minutes to make my case. When he heard that Quicken had made a mistake, he said scornfully, "It's just a mistake!" A moment later, when I got to the key argument about the Compliance Agreement, he glanced at the part that said a lender can collect for money inadvertently not collected at closing, and apparently without reading further, said loudly, "Rule for Defendant!"
I was devastated, but I'm not a guy who quits a 100-mile race at mile 90 (well, except once at the Vermont 100 when I foolishly ran with bronchitis). I filed a Request for Correction or Cancellation." I do not know why the judge suddenly ruled against me just as I was about to make the slam-dunk argument. I admit that I went home that afternoon wondering, Was he paid off? Or did he just have to pee so badly that he couldn't let the trial go on one more minute? Or was he one of those millions of boob-tube watchers who (evidently) think a company big enough to advertise on national TV can't possibly be that bad?
Court rules allowed Quicken to make its own response to my Request for Correction, and the response was a doozy: 400 words of obfuscation and assertion that "Mr. Ayres is just rehashing arguments already properly ruled on." And then, in the next-to-last paragraph of the second page, a quotation of the very text I'd been about to bring to the judge's attention--an audacious repeat of the same sleight-of-hand, this time addressed to the Court. (He signed the Compliance Agreement! He owes!) It was clearly a calculated bet (Dan Gilbert also owns a casino) that the Court would be duly persuaded by the con long before reading that paragraph and would react just as the impatient judge had.
As I said, one of the hardest things about "real-life" tests of endurance, as distinguished from athletic events, is that you may never get the relief of having crossed a finish line. This story has not yet ended, and I don't know whether it will be in my lifetime. But I can look back at what I've done in the past (top-ten finishes in the New York Marathon, JFK 50-mile, and Badwater 135, among others), and I can tell myself with confidence, I'm too far down this road to quit now. If Dan Gilbert can pay a guy $20.6 million to throw a ball through a hoop, he can damn well pay one 20th of 1-percent of that amount to make good on a wrong his company has done to an elderly couple. We may have a country where flash and glitz and big money rule for now, but in the long run it is perseverance that will prevail.
My current struggle is with Quicken Loans, a mortgage company I approached for a refinance of my home as innocently as a fish swimming into the mouth of an alligator. When the mouth closed, my wife and I discovered our entire net life savings had been wiped out--and our mortgage debt had been suddenly increased by $28,000 more than the refinance contract had specified. I should note, since it's critical, that my wife and I are in our 70s, living on a very small fixed income (we can't afford to go out to movies, or even have lunch at Chipotle), and what Quicken did to us has caused us over a year (so far) of stress that is wearing me down in a way I never experienced in 100-mile races or even in the 135-mile Badwater race across Death Valley (photo above). And my wife is now so traumatized that I'm afraid she may not survive this.
But please understand, I'm not writing this to solicit sympathy. I know other people are in far worse straits than we are--millions of others who've been snared by predatory organizations. And the disturbing thing is, these are not what we'd normally call "criminal" organizations, like organized crime syndicates, or drug cartels, or the shadow groups that steal IDs and empty out bank accounts. The outfit my wife and I are dealing with just happens to be Quicken Loans. We could quite as easily have been screwed by Bank of America, or Enron, or Duke Energy. Hundreds of American corporations have been convicted of crimes in recent years, and few have been prosecuted. As for corruption in government, don't even ask.
In Quicken's case, was the means by which it has taken our money a crime? My first thought was that it was a bait-and-switch. But I may never know, because I have no way of untangling the web of obfuscation and intimidation it has put up to block me. More recently, I've concluded that it may not have been actual bait-and-switch, but simply a case of such amazing negligence or incompetence that it would be a huge embarrassment to Quicken if it became widely known. Either way, it looks very much like a crime,, as I'll explain.
When my wife and I originally purchased our property, it consisted of six adjoining lots--one big enough for a house, but landlocked in a forest adjoining the Pacific Crest Trail (where I could go for fantastic runs), and five very small ones to provide road access to the house. In order to get a building permit, we were required by our county to have the lots legally joined as a single indivisible parcel. Once that was done, we got a construction loan from Wells Fargo Bank, and when the house was built the construction loan was converted to a mortgage. A few years later, with interest rates falling, we got a refinance from--yes--Quicken Loans. Later, the loan was acquired by Chase Bank. None of these giant banks had any problem with our mortgage. In the case of Quicken, which handled it smoothly, I later found myself reminded of the fundamental technique of a con-game: to first gain the mark's confidence.
So, a few years later when I went for a second refinance, I had confidence in Quicken. They had already financed this same property once before. What could go wrong? And indeed, all seemed to go well. The contract looked flawless.
Eight months later, my wife and I received two letters from Quicken informing us that the refinanced mortgage was for only one of the six lots that form our property. There had been a mistake, they told us, and now they'd be increasing our tax escrow by an amount that would add about $28,000 to our debt over the term of the loan. When I objected, a man in their Legal department told me curtly, "You signed the Compliance Agreement!" We had indeed, and it wasn't until nearly a year later that we realized what a sleight-of-hand comment that had been. He'd said it with such self-righteous assurance that I assumed it looked bad for us. I knew it said something about the lender having a right to collect money that had inadvertently not been collected at closing. But I regarded that Agreement as a technicality, far outweighed by the fact that the mortgage they'd refinanced wasn't even the one we'd brought to them. How could a mortgage company that advertises its competence make such a stupid blunder on what should have been a very simple transaction? How could it have divided up a parcel that was by law indivisible? (The "mistake" appeared only in the Deed of Trust, on a page that was missing from the closing documents, so we never saw it. On all the other documents signed at closing, our property was simply identified by the correct street address, which has never changed and for which the 6-lot legal description had never changed.)
Having suddenly seen our life savings wiped out, we asked Quicken for a make-good. In a letter, we said we were aware that elderly people who dare to challenge the wrongdoing of large corporations often end up in protracted litigation that is never resolved in their lifetimes. We didn't want that kind of stress, and suggested that in exchange for having a quick resolution and peace of mind for our remaining years, we would accept a reimbursement of one-third of the amount they had added to our mortgage debt with their little "mistake." Boy, was I suckered. Not only did they refuse, but when I sued for the one-third in Small Claims court, they counter-sued us. By California court rules, they had to give us a five-day advance notice, but instead they waited until 4:30 p.m. the afternoon before our case was to be heard, and the next morning the judge said he'd have to send the combined cases to Civil Court, where we'd have to have a lawyer. Quicken had evidently deduced from our letter that our wish not to get entangled in litigation was our weakness, and that by immediately taking us into litigation, they could scare us into backing off.
Maybe this was where my lifetime of endurance training helped. Instead of backing off, I wrote a letter to the Civil Court judge who had been assigned to the escalated case, saying that the Quicken suit was a sham (my wife and I had already met its demands that we sign off on a corrected Deed of Trust), and the judge apparently agreed. He dismissed Quicken's case and sent our case against them back to Small Claims.
In preparing for the Small Claims trial, which by now had been kicked down the road eight more months, I suddenly discovered the sleight-of-hand that the Quicken lawyer had suckered me with, in his righteous "You signed the Compliance Agreement!" Now, looking at that agreement once again, I saw that while it does allow the lender to collect money that was due but inadvertently not collected at closing, it also states:
Lender agrees that any request for such money will not.change the previously agreed
upon points, closing costs, or escrow payments [except due to changes in insurance or
tax assessments] that you were approved for as set forth in the Loan Pricing Disclosure,
Good Faith Estimate . . . and/or mortgage.
But what Quicken was claiming in additional escrow (and not just "requesting" it but taking it from our bank account) changed the terms of all those documents hugely. In short, the Agreement was that if a mistake at closing resulted in their not getting money that if paid then would have resulted in the correct bottom line indicated by the Good Faith Estimate and Mortgage, it could be collect later. But not if it changed the bottom-line terms of the contract!
At this point, I figured I had a slam-dunk. I say "slam dunk" with ironic awareness that the owner of Quicken Loans, a guy named Dan Gilbert, is also the majority owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball franchise, employer of the NBA slam-dunk king LeBron James.
At the Small Claims trial, the judge heard several cases before mine, and I noticed that he seemed repeatedly impatient and condescending to the litigants. When my turn came, he allowed me three minutes to make my case. When he heard that Quicken had made a mistake, he said scornfully, "It's just a mistake!" A moment later, when I got to the key argument about the Compliance Agreement, he glanced at the part that said a lender can collect for money inadvertently not collected at closing, and apparently without reading further, said loudly, "Rule for Defendant!"
I was devastated, but I'm not a guy who quits a 100-mile race at mile 90 (well, except once at the Vermont 100 when I foolishly ran with bronchitis). I filed a Request for Correction or Cancellation." I do not know why the judge suddenly ruled against me just as I was about to make the slam-dunk argument. I admit that I went home that afternoon wondering, Was he paid off? Or did he just have to pee so badly that he couldn't let the trial go on one more minute? Or was he one of those millions of boob-tube watchers who (evidently) think a company big enough to advertise on national TV can't possibly be that bad?
Court rules allowed Quicken to make its own response to my Request for Correction, and the response was a doozy: 400 words of obfuscation and assertion that "Mr. Ayres is just rehashing arguments already properly ruled on." And then, in the next-to-last paragraph of the second page, a quotation of the very text I'd been about to bring to the judge's attention--an audacious repeat of the same sleight-of-hand, this time addressed to the Court. (He signed the Compliance Agreement! He owes!) It was clearly a calculated bet (Dan Gilbert also owns a casino) that the Court would be duly persuaded by the con long before reading that paragraph and would react just as the impatient judge had.
As I said, one of the hardest things about "real-life" tests of endurance, as distinguished from athletic events, is that you may never get the relief of having crossed a finish line. This story has not yet ended, and I don't know whether it will be in my lifetime. But I can look back at what I've done in the past (top-ten finishes in the New York Marathon, JFK 50-mile, and Badwater 135, among others), and I can tell myself with confidence, I'm too far down this road to quit now. If Dan Gilbert can pay a guy $20.6 million to throw a ball through a hoop, he can damn well pay one 20th of 1-percent of that amount to make good on a wrong his company has done to an elderly couple. We may have a country where flash and glitz and big money rule for now, but in the long run it is perseverance that will prevail.
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