It’s simply too much.

The project is too long. The goals too big. The dreams are wayyy too far out.
How the hell are we going to get there? How in the world would we make it? It’s simply too much, too far.

“It’s a marathon not a sprint”

They say it all the time, don’t they?

Intellectually, we understand it. People say and we give them a simple little head nod. Makes sense, right?

It’s not news, but damn is it hard to implement.

Give it to me now. I want it now. I deserve it now.
Vacations, relations & graduations. They all take too long. They only come around every so often and holy smokes it’s not enough. I am not waiting, I refuse. Make them a reality.

Hold the Uncontrolled

But time is an unwieldy beast. She can’t be forced or frightened, not shirked or shaken.
Patience is our only remedy.

Now is our only experience. Now is the only the only thing we can experience. So now we go. Now must be now.
And it must be treated as such.

Any truly long term project cannot be compressed nor consolidated. It can’t be folded up into one tiny little bite size chunk. They must be endured. An experience from end to end all the way through.

The race.
The training.
The mental game.

All of it.

We must live through it. There is no speeding up of time.

Then a Marathon was ran

In September, my buddy called me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to run a marathon with him.
It was in Hawaii.

Ooof. Oh fuck. Oh please. Don’t make me do this.

“Dudeeeee, that sounds great… I’m in!”

God damnit. Can’t believe I just agreed to that. God damnit. God damnit

Welp. Guess I was running a marathon.

Shit.

To date, the furthest I had run nonstop was quite possibly a whopping mile and a half. And let me tell you, it was not my most confident act of the day.

I liked doing hard things. I love pushing myself. I’m always up for a good challenge.
This one was going to be tough. But there was no going back.

I was putting off purchasing tickets, procrastinating as if in denial.
A week later, I came to my senses knowing that plane tickets weren’t getting any cheaper, and finally laid down the cash. There was no going back now.

Nothing like a couple of green ones earned with hours of pain to solidify 6 more hours of pain.

Come here, Mr. Marathon, I’m ready to run you 😉

Terrified to Fail, So I Have to Succeed

I am a lot of things, but a quitter is not one of them. If I start something that truly matters to me, damnit I’m going to finish it.

The completion of the race was non-negotiable. I didn’t care how fast and I didn’t care about time. But I knew 2 things for absolute certain:

• I was going to finish
• Aside from aid stations, absolutely I would not be walking

I trained like an absolute rookie.
No trainer. No official training plan. A couple here and a couple runs there.

I made some slipshod training plan as I trained and here’s what I ended up with.

35 minutes of running 3-4x each week.
Maybe a total of 5 long weekend runs, including 3 half marathons.

While training, my time was way more valuable than the actual workout I did, so I started tracking my runs in terms of time it would take instead of hours.

1st long run:
1 hour

2nd long run:
1.5 hours

3rd long run (sanctioned half marathon)
2 hours 15 mins

4th long run:
2 hours hiking a mountain & 2.5 hour run

5th long run:
4 hours

I realized that your suffering becomes inversely proportional to how much you train. Regardless of training, if you want it bad enough, you’ll get there, but how badly do you want to suffer?

David Goggins proved that with his first Ultramarathon (poor video but it’s a quick 1-minute synopsis) on 4 days of training.

You’ll make it, but how much bullshit do you really want to put up with?

I did a bit of resistance training and some hikes here and there. Other than that, I was just going to have to suffer. In the absolute core of my being, I committed to running the fully thing so any lack of training would be made up for with brute force sheer will.

Game time, baby!

Ultra Good Advice from an Ultra Runner

My roommate had run an Ultra-marathon and given me some advice in passing. Little did I know how much of a total game changer it would be. One line that changed my entire mental framework for the whole race. One tiny piece of advice that somehow stuck with me months later and translated to Life.

“You have to break it up in to smaller goals otherwise it really just goes on forever”

My Mystery Roommate

At the time I didn’t think a whole lot of it.
But for some reason, it laid out an entire mental framework.

It didn’t even click until half way through the marathon.

I ran 12, maybe 13 miles and all of a sudden thought
“Alrighty. Yup. I’d really rather be done with this right about now”

Done done done. Please be over. Let me just sit down already, this is taking forever.

The run just went on and on and on and on. It kept going and going.
I just kept running and didn’t feel like I was getting any closer.

I had been thinking about the whole thing wrong.

If you think about the 26th mile, you focus on all the miles you haven’t run. The 6th mile becomes a wholeeeee lot more painful.

The hours crawl by. The Gatorade starts to taste like cardboard and Africa by Toto for the 17th time sounds more like a toddler crying rather than a Battle Cry.

I wanted to be done.
I was tired of running.
I was thinking about the end and I wasn’t enjoying it.

And then, like Yoda’s ghost materializing in my mind, I remembered this man’s words of wisdom –

“Patience, my young padawan. Enjoy every mile, you must. Smaller goals to set, you should”

Smaller chunks. Smaller goals. Make it palatable.
That was the key.

‘Screw it, let me just get to double digits’.
‘Alright, I’m almost at a half marathon, let me get there’
‘Okay, Hot and Cold by Katy Perry is almost done with it’s 10th loop, let me just finish this final song’)

I was focusing on the end instead of the now. I wanted it over instead of appreciating as is.
I was so hell bent on ‘running a marathon’ that I had forgotten to even run the marathon.

It was a pretty incredible realization during the race. I started thinking about Life and progress towards any long term goals.

We get so caught up in the destination and the finish line (quite literally) that we forget why we’re even running in the first place.

The cool breeze and smell the flowers.
The joys of movement. The appreciation for my friends. The warm wind of the tropics. The feel of the run. Even the embracing of the pain, because it meant that I was alive. It meant that I had the capability to even let myself suffer in such an incredible way.

I mean I was in Hawaii ffs. Enjoy the damn views!

It seemed clear as day. I had been focusing on the wrong things. I was thinking about all the things I didn’t have, rather than what I did.

Long term goals tend to do that sometimes.

Birthday parties and Christmas Day work the same as a kid, vacations and promotions as an adult.

I had forgotten to enjoy the moment. I had stopped appreciating what I had. I was looking too far in to the future and it was making me anxious. It made me realize that some forethought is incredible, but too much and we stress ourselves out.

We can’t control the future. We don’t know what will happen. Having a plan for it is great, but trying to control it is impossible. I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to finish the 26.2 miles. I didn’t know if I had it in me. I didn’t know if my knees were going to blow up on my with 3 miles to go.

But I did. And my knees didn’t.

You can’t control the future that far in advance, so why was I stressing about it?
I needed to enjoy the present and trust that the future would play itself out.
I had prepared enough, I just needed to trust in myself.

Smaller goals helped put the whole thing in perspective. They helped me dissect and stay focused on the present.

Once I stopped focusing so far in the future, and concentrated on smaller, more tangible goals it all became much easier and more enjoyable.

I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I could taste the end of my mini goal so I didn’t even have the think about the end. The next Milestone was right in front of me.

It didn’t matter that people were passing me.
I didn’t care about the people I was passing.

I only cared about running my race and meeting my goals, and I trusted that I could make them. One goal at a time. Then another. Then another.

I started having a lot more fun with it too.
The orange slices tasted just a bit more juicy.
The ocean looked a little bit more blue.
And the homeless people looked just a tad less frightening.

I started to enjoy the race because I wasn’t concerned with finishing it.

I quickly made a mental note and quietly stashed it in my mental pocket.
With ache-y knees and a droopy grin I ran my final steps across the finish line.
26.2 miles. It was over.

I had run a marathon, but more importantly I had enjoyed it.

Further Reflection

A couple weeks later, I thought about the race again as I read a post by Dan Koe:

‘If you don’t project yourself far enough into the future you experience boredom, but if you project yourself too far you become anxious. You don’t yet have the skills or experience to figure out how you’re going to get there’

It sealed the deal for me.

I don’t know where I’m going in this Life.
But I don’t need to know the end.
I have a rough idea to guide me, but beyond that I can just focus on the goals right in front of me, work hard, and trust that it’ll work itself out.

I’ve been dreaming of the future (that’s what everyone says to do, isn’t it?) but I’ve been too far in the future. I’ve been dreaming of myself living a wild, crazy, free life, but I’ve been forgetting to enjoy the moment right where I’m at.

I need to enjoy the moment right where I’m at.
Or this Life thing is going to go on forever.

And the orange slices are going to be a lot less juicy.