Every winter sport is — in addition to being an inspiring triumph of elegant majesty — also a total hassle. It is not easy to convert your soft, frail, squishy, warm human body into something that can survive in the hard world of frozen water. It requires all kinds of logistics: fitting, strapping, buckling, bundling, clomping, shivering. But the effort is worth it, because the frozen water unlocks superpowers we would never otherwise have. It allows us to glide, slide, soar, whoosh and hurtle. Skiers go flying over moguls at 75 m.p.h. Speedskaters shoot over the ice, leaning and pumping, weaving through competitors. The payoff for the ridiculous logistical nightmare is the gift of fluid speed.

And then, of course, there is cross-country skiing.

Cross-country skiing is the least glamorous, least pyrotechnic, least watchable of the major Olympic sports. It is notoriously, almost inhumanly, exhausting — a brutally sustained nonthrill. Its longest races drag on for more than two hours. Even the sport’s greatest champions, over the course of an event, average speeds that would be legal in a school zone. In the racers’ slowest patches, struggling up terrible hills, schoolchildren could probably outrun them. Cross-country skiing is where the elegant majesty of winter sports goes to die an excruciatingly drawn-out death.

So why would anyone do it? And why on earth would we ever watch?

Because cross-country skiers are existential heroes in goggles and tights. Instead of offering us distraction — the glittery melodrama of figure skating or the quirky novelty of curling — cross-country skiers lean right into a bleak truth: We are stranded on a planet that is largely indifferent to us, a world that sets mountains in our path and drops iceballs from 50,000 feet and tortures our skin with hostile air. There is no escaping it; the only noble choice is to strap on a helmet and slog right in. Cross-country skiing expresses something deep about the human condition: the absolute, nonnegotiable necessity of the grind. The purity and sanctity of the goddamn slog.

In cross-country skiing, every single mile per hour must be earned. You pump your arms and legs against an endless and relentless resistance. When cross-country skiers run into a steep incline, they refuse the petty shortcut of a ski lift. Instead, they suffer their way up. Where other skiers use gravity as jet fuel, cross-country skiers conscientiously object. They feel the tug of gravity and say: “No, thank you, I would prefer to take care of this myself. If you will excuse me now, I am going to mush my way across this gigantic flat hostile landscape using only the power of my huge, beleaguered thighs.” When they reach a downslope, they accept its burst of speed reluctantly, with gritted teeth, knowing that they will earn it back, with interest, soon enough.

To an outsider, cross-country skiing seems less like a sport than a survival technique, an absolute last resort — something you might come up with when your snowmobile crashes in the wilderness and food is scarce and everyone is on the brink of hypothermia, so the toughest self-punishing puritan of the group pulls the runners off the snowmobile and duct-tapes them to her feet and goes slogging off toward civilization, crossing the empty miles, fueled by desperation more than hope. The only thrill a cross-country skier will accept is the masochistic one of pushing her heart to the point of bursting.

And yet consider the world that this suffering unlocks. Racers rake the stark landscape with their angular shadows. They slide into a whiteness beyond civilization, etching thin parallel tracks over the face of infinity, through places most of us will never go, past the pitter-patter of animal tracks in old-growth forest. This is one of the sport’s great consolations: access to a landscape so stark it merges with the spiritual state of absolute exhaustion, a simultaneous emptiness and fullness that is essentially religious — topographical Buddhism.

Unless I survive an apocalyptic snow disaster, I will never cross-country ski again in my life. As I child, when I was too young to object, my father used to take me, and I have never escaped those unpleasant memories. But I loved him for loving it. I don’t know why these people are out there, devoting their lives to this particular form of self-torture, training for so many thousands of hours to gain glory in a sport that offers the equivalent worldwide fame of competitive whittling. But bless them, forever, for grinding that grind. And look at them go.