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.