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 2nd 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 4th 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.
