Hard Things
One of my goals this year was to participate in a backyard ultra. I had signed up for one in May. However, that was the month my dad died and so it was not to be. However, I am someone who likes to have something to guide my training so I looked around for another one that I might try later in the year. Not wanting to add more travel to my schedule, my options were limited. I found what seemed like a similar run of a type labeled “last man standing.” For those who may not be familiar, a backyard ultra, conceived by the infamous Lazarus Lake is a 4.167-mile loop, where everyone starts again on the hour until only one person finishes a final loop alone. These can last days and people run hundreds of miles. Of course, once you cannot make it around the loop (or yard) in the 60-minute allotted time to start the next yard, you are finished. I vaguely understood the concept of the last man standing to be similar; however, it is different in one fairly serious way. For each ~ 1.75 mile loop (loops can be any distance in this format) the time allowed to complete it gets shorter. So ultimately your ability to increase your pace as you go limits how far you can go. As someone whose pace definitely has a limit I anticipated I could achieve a marathon and maybe one more loop before the pace became an impossibility. Being a rookie at this format I didn’t take advantage of the time I could have to walk and chill in the early rounds; therefore, I didn’t quite make it to my goal. The heat and humidity, in the 80’s by midmorning and topping at 86 degrees by noon, led to leg cramps that I battled for the last 6 miles of the 24 miles I did complete. This was a hard thing, hard in a physical sense and in a mental sense. It is hard not to quite achieve something you set out to do; it is hard to manage pain, it is also hard to just show up for a challenge.
Naval Ravikant has a principle he labels “run uphill” defined as if you’re evenly split on a difficult decision, take the more painful one in the short term. Lean into the hard, it is what makes life meaningful in the long term. He further opines that our real resume is a catalog of our suffering. Doing hard things gives life meaning.
Many times, I am asked by others why do I keep doing these things that are hard on my body and might risk injury? Because showing up and doing voluntary hard things reminds me that I can do hard things when they show up unexpectedly and when I would not voluntarily choose them.
An often-repeated mantra of mine is “This is hard. It is a good thing you can do hard things.”