How Bad Could It Be?

This is a question I’ve asked myself many times. It’s supposed to be a rhetorical question, one that you ask to psyche yourself up before doing some daunting task, athletic or otherwise.

I’m sure I’ve even asked it before events that have gone well. But if I have, I have since forgotten. It’s only the events that have turned out worse than I could have expected where I also recall doing this.

The first time that pops to mind was Leg 5 at the Sinister 7. I had nearly DNF’d in leg 3, and finally got a bit of a second wind in leg 4. By the end of that, I had about a 30 minute buffer on the cutoff time. Leg 5 was listed as 22.7km and the cutoff was at 5 am. I was leaving at 11:30. It was listed as the second hardest leg, but I’d already completed the hardest one. My exact thought as I left was: It’s a half-marathon and I’ve got 5.5 hours, how bad could it be?

The answer was way harder than I ever could have expected. I climbed up a ‘dry’ stream bed in the Rockies for 14 km. My feet and lower legs were soaked. Frost set in and I got cool (luckily, not cold). This was after overheating in a previous leg. Then I hit the downslope, which was no easier. Technical terrain, in the dark in another stream bed. I was hallucinating, demoralized and the cutoff got closer and closer. I managed to finish with 3 minutes to spare.

Eight weeks later, I attempted my first 100 miler. I joked during the racer intros  that I had done the 50 the year before. How much harder could the 100 be? 

The answer was again: way harder than I thought. I wasn’t fully recovered from Sinister. My crew had to bail out the week before, so I was there alone. I both didn’t sleep well and overslept (a tricky combo!), and I was over tired. By the 93 mile mark, my feet were covered in blisters. As I left the aid station at that point, I burst one of the bigger ones when I hit a tree root. For the next 5+ miles, I gritted my teeth through a lot of pain, occasionally screaming when I hit the ground slightly wrong. The last two miles were on road… they hurt but not as much. Plus the thrill of seeing the finish was a nice painkiller.

But those challenges sound big, so you might expect that they could have some incredibly tough sections. But my third classic example was much smaller: My first triathlon. A ‘Try-a-Tri’. 200m swim, 15km bike, 3km run. I ran this a week before my 100 miler. I was nervous because I had not swam in over 8 years, and I was never what you’d call a ‘good’ swimmer. I figured: Survive the swim, then do the easy stuff. You’ll be ok. How bad could it be?

I got the predictable answer, although not in the way I was expecting. I finished the swim in the middle of the pack. Which I felt satisfied with. The bike was where I figured I could make up ground, and moved up to 2^nd by the transition. Then the run: My strength. Only 3km? No problem. I took off and tried to pull the leader in. Around the 1km mark, the leader passed me coming back from the turn around. With a 1km deficit, there was no way I was catching him, so all I could do at that point was to hold on.  I was feeling wonky though, so it wasn’t easy. I couldn’t believe that a little 3km run was doing this to me… I rationalized that it wasn’t really hurting and kept pushing. Or tried to. At about the 2km mark, I stumbled to the side and puked my guts out. By the time I was done, I had dropped back to 4^th and there was no catching up. I finished with my tail tucked firmly between my legs.

The point to all this? I’ve got some big challenges coming up. I’m alternately terrified and excited. On the terrified days, I try to ask this question to help me out. Then I remember these answers and get terrified again. I think I need a new question to ask.

Bullshit

Bullshit (or bull$#|^, or BS or however you want to put it) has a bad name. Once you find out something is fake, or a deliberate lie, or just plain wrong, most folks react with either contempt or disgust. Possibly anger. No one likes being deceived.

But here’s the interesting thing: A good dose of bullshit can drive a person to action. It’s easy to trigger a kid, just say: “Did you hear what Timmy said about you?” In the real world, marriages are broken by bullshit. I wonder how many Hollywood marriages start to have trouble because there are headlines saying that there is trouble in the marriage. Fortunes are built on bullshit. Just ask Bernie Madoff or the Wall Street bankers in charge of the mortgage crisis. Wars are fought on bullshit. This one is obvious. Politicians make their careers out of bullshit.

This isn’t a rant, talking about what should change, or how terrible this is, or whether or not we need to wake up and fix what is happening. No, this is just recognizing that this happens. And that it will happen again. This isn’t a new thing, it’s just more common now because bullshit is easy to fling everywhere.

So what?

So… think about it. One of the best ways to motivate people is to lie to them. Feed them bullshit. I’m no different. I get more worked up over the fantastic lie than the mundane truth… But what use is that, if I can’t control the lie?

But what if I could? What if I could lie to myself? Feed myself my own brand of bullshit? I could be unstoppable!

Unfortunately, I don’t have full control of this yet. I can do this at times:

• During a track workout I can manage a 1600 with this line of bullshit: “Well, I’m at 600m, that’s halfway through the second lap. Only 200m to go and I’m halfway. Halfway is practically done… which means I’m practically done”.
• Swimming is largely the same. Counting lengths and counting down the sets I use the same flawed reasoning.

Other times, I call myself out on my own lies. I know that despite the fact that I’m ¾ of the way through a long run, if it’s a 32k day, I’ve still got 8k to go. And it’s the worst 8k. On those days, I hate that worthless liar.

Even so, lying to myself has gotten me through the worst situation I’ve ever had in a race. During a 100 mile ultra, I started to have stomach issues around 25 miles in. I couldn’t keep any food down. 

Considering I had about 3 marathons to go, that wasn’t a good thing. My solution: Bullshit! I started to tell everyone I could talk to that I had told my son that I would do my best. And that I wouldn’t quit no matter what, I would only stop when I reached the finish line or if an official pulled me from the race.

It was a lie. I didn’t promise that to him. And even if I did, he was young enough so that he would not have understood it. But that little white lie was enough to keep me going, because I started to believe my own lie. I managed to finish, even if it was a bit slower than I wanted. My feet were horribly blistered. I spent time in the last 12 km screaming in pain (literally) as they burst open, but I wouldn’t stop. Because I had to honor that promise. That promise that I didn’t make, but that I had told several total strangers about.

That’s the power of bullshit. 

Somehow I’ve got to make it work for me on a regular basis.

Heartbreak Hill

On this hill, in 1936, defending Boston Marathon champion John Kelley overtook “Tarzan” Brown, patting him on the shoulder as he passed. This gesture annoyed Brown, who rallied, pulled ahead of Kelley, and went on to win—breaking Kelley's heart. And the term“Heartbreak Hill” was coined.

I love this story. Not because it’s famous, because it’s not. Mostly the name remains, but the story is mostly forgotten. Or if people know it, they don’t care. But to me, it illustrates something perfectly:
The motivational power of assholes.

Motivation like that is rare… and it’s awesome. It’s terrible in the moment. It gets you angry, it riles you up. And just like that, your fatigue isn’t so bad. Your legs don’t hurt so much. You can keep that pace because “Fuck you, if he can do it, so can I”. And you can. You will. You do. Nothing changed, except your attitude.

The problem with this is that it’s not easy to tap into it. It has to be genuine asshole behavior to invoke the ‘asshole response’. And luckily (for society’s sake), most people are generally nice and polite. And if you try to provoke that kind of thing, well, then you’re the asshole. (Though to be fair, it would probably work anyway… although other people will be using you as their own personal motivator).

Which is why I was quite happy when some of this motivation just dropped into my lap the other day. I was discussing an upcoming race with a gym buddy. He was talking about trying to get a podium finish in it. I was talking about maybe running the short course with my son and a few friends instead of the longer, more competitive heat. But when I told him that I had placed 5^th last year in that heat, his response was: “Oh, well, if you can do it...”

And there we have it folks. All the asshole motivation I need. It’s childish. It’s petty. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter. But the gauntlet has been thrown. And I’m going to respond. I can talk about how the course plays to my strengths, how my endurance will play into things, how my planned training for next year will make me better than ever for this race. But, in reality, it comes down to this:

You have no chance. I am going to crush you. Because “if I can do it”, then I’m going to do it. Again.

Asshole.

And then after our post-race beer together, I’ll celebrate by running the short course with my family and friends. No hard feelings 😉