It’s not a hill: It’s just one step. Then another.

Race day finally came, and with it the last month and a half of “disciplined” training that I’ve been making myself endure has come to an end.
The thought that “I” have to make “myself” do something seems a redundant—if repugnant—use of the first-person singular.  Certainly, it sets this post up for an egotistical narration of how the race went.  This is not my intent.  God knows, few if any of my friends IRL get my running obsession.  I’m not sure if any of you digital friends will put up with it either.
Rather, yesterday’s race inspired this reflection: how do we keep ourselves motivated when we don’t want to do things, when we don’t want to keep going?  How do we make ourselves continue past the point of our will.
So, this is not a glorious tale of conquering my race–the Amphibious Duathalon at the USNWC, a 10k run split by a 2k paddle.  Looking back on the archive of this blog, I last ran the race in 2015, the last time I seriously trained to run before bout of plantar fasciitis sidelined me.  Then life happens, and it’s been three years.
Training to run is often a method I use to improve my overall health.  That said, that I was even ready to run on Saturday may be considered some type of accomplishment.  To add to small moral victories (hopefully for more than losers and minor league coaches)  I walked up and registered receiving my finisher’s t-shirt—the adult version of the participation trophy.  I didn’t win: the winning runner was across the finish line by the time I got off the water.  Nevertheless, by the time I finished my race had small glorious moments.  I never once walked a hill.  I cruised the kayak portion.  I even caught someone at the finish line.  I finished in the top half of my heat, and respectably in my age bracket.
But for all of this, there is one moment of the race that stands out above the rest.  It is in the third leg (on which I woefully underperformed).  Getting out of the boat and getting back to running was a struggle.  There’s an initial hill, but after that the trail levels out for quite some time.  Despite that, I felt like I could never could get my legs underneath me again.  Jelly legs.  Tired lungs.  I was riding the struggle bus around some slow winding curves.
By the time I got out of a long straightaway that I should have cruised, I had the distinct feeling that I was alone for quite some distance.  Anyone who had passed me was long in front of me; I hadn’t heard the crunch of footsteps for quite some time.  I could’ve been on the landscape of Mars and not felt any  more isolated than I did at that moment.
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Back to the isolation after we take a side trail and contemplate the mental aspects of running for a person in my state.  Many, if not most of my friends, claim they would only run if they were being chased.  For me, it’s something of a lone wolf endeavor, in that Juno, my husky, is my only reliable running companion.  Compile this fact with the hard truth that I know I will never, ever win any prize in any race until I’m old enough to enter an age bracket where I’m the lone participant, and it can be a struggle to find the motivation to continue when the going gets tough.
Compound the struggle: As any distance runner knows, if you run long enough at any given time, doubt creeps into your mind.  Often, it comes in the form of physical distress.  Your lungs are tired.  Your heart is racing too fast.  Your legs feel like wet wood dragging you to the ground.  Other times, doubt comes in the form of the physical layout of the course, such as when you begin a climb, look up, and see that the trail snakes up and up and up past your field of vision.
Labeling these “mental blocks” may seem like some sort of neo-Buddhist mind game as tall trails and tired lungs—indisputably facticity of the physical world—falls under the dictum “all reality is mental.”  However, as research is suggesting, fatigue is more mental that physical.  We trick ourselves into stopping before we have to as a survival mechanism.  When we break through this barrier is when we get a clearer picture of what we can actually achieve.
Training, in this sense, is as much mental as it is physical.  Runners don’t just condition their bodies; they condition their mind for when their bodies want to quit.  In the month and a half I’ve been putting in for this race, my body has become stronger to better reach the finish line.  But it has come with failures as well.  And each failure is an opportunity to retrain the mind for when that challenge inevitably rises again.
For instance, hills are the widow makers of the running world.  On any given trail or race course, the hill is the inevitable challenge that saps the will of the runner.   Nothing separates a pack like a steep climb. In McDougal’s Born to Run, he claims that he never ran a hill where he couldn’t see the top as a method of preserving himself.  But he was running 50 miles.  I’m only running a 10k.  A hill is an inherent challenge of a race, and even if I have to slow down, I’m not giving up. I’ve learned to see them as the inevitable challenges, to embrace them, to love them as part of the journey, but also hate them, to grit my teeth and spit at them as I stride over their immobile corpses.

 

Then there is the creeping doubt of failure.  It comes before the finish line, whispering that you’ll never make it, that it doesn’t matter because you’re not going to win, that you should just give up now and rest.  On first encounter, this voice is a demon, raging, powerful, taunting for our weakness.  He tries to convince us that the goal is unattainable, so just quit now.  Spare the pain and humiliation.   Each time we run long enough, we stare him down; each time, we realize he comes a bit later, and soon we recognize that meeting him is inevitable.  Oh, it’s you, old friend?  Come to tell me I won’t succeed?  Haven’t we had this conversation before?  Nice to meet you again.  See you at the finish line.
And then there is discomfort and pain—the struggle that the self (in physical form) is unequal to the task.  I can not begin to run more than a mile before my right ankle screams at me.  It’s been like this since I was fifteen, when I suffered a particularly bad sprain playing basketball.  During any given run, my shoulders may feel like they’re being stabbed and my knees may feel wobbly.  My right quad wants to give out.  My neck muscles tighten, reminding me of the dangers of pushing it too hard.  To keep going, we have to learn to live with discomfort, differentiate it from pain, and move on.
Life on the yoga mat has helped me on this one.  The first time a teacher put me in a half-pigeon, my hip burst into flame and my mind screamed and screamed to get me the fuck out of this position.  Over time, my body got used to this: I learned to expect temporary discomfort and breathe through it.
We often recoil from discomfort, and with good reason.  Avoiding physical pain keeps us from more serious injury.  But not all discomfort is pain, and often putting ourselves through discomfort is the necessary step for growth.  Now, a half-pigeon is a meditative spot that both eases the tightness of the him but strengthens the power of the mind to focus amid the distraction.
Life on the mat teaches us to breathe through and steady ourselves in this discomfort, and this is a lesson that works well in the race as well.  Check the ankle.  Is it serious?  No.  Can I keep going?  Yes.  Breathe in.  Breathe out.
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Creative distraction is, of course, a major comping mechanism.  Running in many cases can allow one to get into a hypnotic, ecstatic auto-pilot, where the body moves effortlessly as the mind does otherwise.  We can simply think about other things, but often the fatigue can crash that facade.  Often, music works well for this, the entrainment of the run to the powerful rhythm, and I would never traduce a fellow runner who uses music.  But trails are too treacherous for me.  As much as Gloria Gaynor imploring me that I would survive might help, trails have a rhythm all their own that I have chosen to respect.
So, I had no distractions.  Nothing when all my motivational strategies failed to prepare me for the crippling isolation that struck me a mile and a half from the finish line.  There are no fans here.  No water table.  Not another runner in sight.  There was no one there to cheer me on; conversely, there was no one there to disappoint.  It was me, alone on the pine carpet of the woods.  It presented me with a mental obstacle I had not anticipated: self-flattery.
Normally, I advocate that people don’t love themselves enough, that people should practice more self-care, more self-compassion.  So, as I began turning corners in the middle of a still wood with not a soul around—a peaceful, serene spot of solitude—I began to hear that I had done enough.  That this would good.  That I could walk off and enjoy the rest of a beautiful day and it would be okay.
That I had earned it.

To be fair, in the month and a half that I’d been putting in serious work, I got myself out of bed on many a summer morning on which no one was forcing me to hit Latta Plantation for run/paddle work.  I’d been (mostly) good about avoiding junk food.  I’d had the luxury of falling asleep in a hammock next to the lake at least once a week.  I’d made myself run sprints in the hot sun while everyone else was catching up on binge watching.  I could’ve spent the summer in complete sloth and not been judged for it.  I had been good.  What more did I need to prove to myself or anyone else?

Nothing.  And here’s the trick, I suppose.  In order to cross the finish line, there had to be something else.  The drive to self-improvement was irrelevant.  Through the last mile or so since I got out of the boat, I had been biding my time, working to save energy for the final push.  And here it was.  I used every tactic and power at my disposal.  I grit my teeth in the face of the hills.  I called on the hope and joy that stares down the demons of doubt.  I had long become numb to the tweaks of my body.  But somewhere doubt materialized to tell me that I had done enough, that I needed to do no more, that I could walk off, have a beautiful afternoon, and not let a single soul down.
It was the oddest demon that almost made me quit–the demon of misplaced self-satisfaction.    I had been running through molasses, but I found a way to quiet that last temptation and put one foot in front of the other until I was out of the woods and back in the sun.  Gravity pushed me down another winding trail,  that came out of the woods again where Isnaked up a knee-to-nose climb, then set my sights on a runner 50 yds away, under the powerlines, in the home stretch up the last two hills.  He was my rabbit.  Inch by struggling inch, I reeled him in, up the largest climb on the course, level back into the park, and up the hill to the finish line.
After I had crossed the line, gorged on oranges, and guzzled water, I ambled back down the hill, up through the woods—somehow with a peppy trot—toward my car to get a water bottle.  People were still climbing to finish the race as I came back to await awards.  A lady, maybe even in her late 50s, came in view, rounding the corner for the last climb.
“It’s not a hill,” yelled one spectator. “It’s just one foot in the other.”
Crossing the finish line floods with endorphins, and everything feels worthwhile in the end.  But for all those great endorphins, I still loathe that wooded section of the race.  But in that dissatisfaction, in facing down that demon, I remembered something to the question I had been asking myself all summer: Why am I doing this?
We have set ourselves a goal.  On any course, we all find our own spots where we must will our way through the darkness.  Sometimes we fail.  Sometimes we succeed, if ever so slightly.  But in any case, we reserve something of that struggle to propel us, allowing it to change us, strengthen us into something new, something that has accomplished but refuses to settle.
Like, next time I run that race, I’m going to smoke that little part of the peaceful wood like it’s a forest fire.