"Why do you do these things?” my father asked the other day. It wasn’t a facetious question. I’d been telling him that, despite an iffy ankle, I had decided to have a go at the U.S. National Snowshoe Championship early in March at Snowbasin Resort in Utah. It’s an event for which I had taken the effort to jump through the hoops required to qualify.

Me, I'd been wondering about the ankle, which could be problematic under the wrong snow conditions, and the airfare, which had risen distressingly as I waited to see if my ankle would let me go. But my father wasn't challenging me; he was simply curious.

For the next 10 minutes, I was nearly incoherent. I reminded him of Sir Edmund Hillary and Everest. ("Because it is there.") But that wasn't right. Hillary climbed Everest once, then went home. Maybe that's why we run our first races or push to longer distances, but it's not why we do it again and again. And it's definitely not why I raced rather than just jogged at the nationals. It wasn't as though I had never pondered the question before. In any serious race, there comes a point when (if I let myself think beyond the next lamppost) I wonder why I insist on doing this to myself every few weeks.

And I'm clearly not alone. Two days afterward, I told a fellow coach about the snowshoe nationals, in which difficult snow conditions, hills, and a 6,500-foot elevation combined to drop my best pace to what, on the roads, would be a painfully slow jog.

"So," he asked, "when did it quit being fun?"

Again, I was nearly incoherent. Or, more precisely, inconsistent. One answer was, "In the first 500 meters." That was when I began to realize just how long it was going to take to run 10K on snowshoes, and how hard each kilometer was going to be.

And yet, again and again I called the event "fun."

Where did that word come from? All through the race, I hadn't been thinking "fun." What I'd been thinking was that the whole last kilometer was uphill, some of it steep. There was a good side to that and a bad one. The good was that uphills are my forte. If I wanted to suffer enough, I knew I could catch people on that big, final hill.

The "if" was the part my father wanted to understand. Nobody was holding a gun to my head, but there was never any true "if" about me and suffering and that uphill finish. I was going to finish as strongly as I could.

But why? I wound up fifth in my division, which technically makes me the fifth-rated snowshoe racer of my age group in the United States - a less impressive achievement than it sounds, since it's not a big sport. The bronze medal was uncatchably far ahead... and sixth place was far, far behind. I could have cruised. I could have jogged.

So my father's question remains unanswered.

What I do know is that next year, I'll seriously consider going back. Just as, if I stay healthy, I'll do other types of races.

During the race, even if I ask the unanswerable question, it's irrelevant. I'm too far into the "zone," where you don't know why you're doing something but you're so committed to doing it that you refuse to stop and take time to think about the why. And afterward? Well, for some reason, that's when I find the word "fun" resonating in memory.

So maybe - and this is the only answer I can give to my father at this moment - the why involves finding that state when you don't know anything except getting from here to the next tree (or lamppost) and discovering that somehow, in the process, life has simplified to nothing more than a series of livings-in-the-moment.

It's as good an answer as any. In racing, nothing matters but the next step... and the one after, and the one after that. And that not-mattering somehow, really, truly matters to who and what I am.

That state of being, like Everest is "there."

Unlike Everest, it's there for ordinary folks like me.