The other day, I had to give myself a pep-talk mid run. I’d gone running with a friend of mine who was expecting to complete a far greater distance than I was planning to, and I thought it would be a good idea to push myself further and see if I could complete another lap on our 1.5 mile loop. My options, I decided, were to wait around for an extended period of time, or see what happened when I tried for a 4th loop.
10 years ago this wouldn’t have been a big deal. I ran all the time, I was active. I biked more. I swam more. My body was conditioned to be on the move. I ran constantly over snow banks in the winter, and freshly laid asphalt in the summer. There was no problem. But 10 years on, I’d grown sedentary. Despite being 165 lbs. I’ve grown something of a beer gut that makes me disgusted with myself, and last summer I dislocated my arm which, despite being cleared to run, isn’t something I wanted to risk. I generally, as a rule, enjoy my appendages best when in their appropriate socket. For the first time in about 10 years, I was going to run more than 5 miles.
Distance is not an important thing; at least not in the scheme of things. No matter how far and how fast you’ve run, there are people out there who make that look like a joke. With the advent of Ultra-marathoners, few mortals are really impressive anymore. Not to mention if you just go through the practice routine, anyone can make it from A to B if they want to. We’re designed, as a species for distance. What the 6 miles really was asking of me was “Do you have the mental ability to go further than you really want to?” At the end of the day, that’s what drove me to endurance sports in the first place.
Mental toughness is not something easily measured or flashy enough to hold a national televised interest. Anyone who’s ever watched the Iron Man or Boston Marathon on television knows that they delve endlessly into back-stories and the good will organizations that are affiliated with the athletes. But that, as a group, is what we’re after. These are generally individualized sports, not because they lack a team, but because greatness is subjective. The person competing, and maybe a small group surrounding them, know what they’re capable of, what they’ve done to get here, and if they really pushed themselves. To outsiders, it all looks like a rank of people crossing a line somewhere.
Back when Lance Armstrong was giving Europe regular heart attacks by dominating the Tour de France, one of our home grown sports writers wrote an article that went something like this: “Its an impressive feat to finish [the tour], but the Tour de France isn’t a sport, its just people peddling a bike.” And that, in a nutshell, is what I mean. He’s not wrong – it is just peddling a bicycle – but that’s not the test of strength we’re looking for. What we don’t see, and what we can’t film, is the seizing muscles and nervous system telling the body it should stop. What we don’t see is a mind trying feverishly to focus on the task at hand while the nagging of organ failure is knocking at the door. There’s no camera watching the mental discipline of saying “I should drown out the zipwheels hum coming up behind me” or the “don’t be tempted to chase him, stay on pace…he’ll burn out in two miles.” Anyone who’s run a 5k has felt the bait of the season veteran, in the senior bracket but still sharp enough to bait younger, arrogant runners into listening to their pride and trying to chase them down. The toughest thing is all of endurance sports is to have stayed on task. There’s a brinkmanship out on the course that makes everything that much more interesting.
With Lance, everything was a little easier to market. He overcame Cancer which, until recently (past 30 years) wasn’t even discussed it was thought to be so awful, referring to it instead as “The big C.” He not only raced before the cancer, he’d raced after treatment to come back and win it. Papers told of him on the trainer, vomiting into buckets through the pain and toll the Chemotherapy treatment had taken on him. Not to mention it spoke to a national interest: An America, stepping onto European soil, playing a European game and winning 7 times in a row. He had a pugnacious attitude that people embraced as a 21st Century cowboy bravado. Sports writers could get away with disparaging him only because he was a big enough entity to warrant discussion.
But for the rest of us, the struggle remains our own; Too tame for the ESPN crowd to really sink their teeth into, too personal for anyone else to see. We’re seen less as sportsman and more as Fitness people. “I’m a runner” is generally followed by “I wish I was in that kind of shape.” Our response really ought to be “Mentally of Physically?” Our great race happens on a daily basis. That pep-talk I gave myself consisted mostly of starving off the same old lions. The same old talking points that are your only line of defense when you’re miles on and you need to go more. Don’t think about the finish line. Don’t look to see how much is left. The next step you take has nothing to do with any of that. Just keep going, one foot in front of the other. Think about bills, and plans, vacations, memories and everything else you can throw in the way until the last step is taken. But that’s not for awhile now. Stay focused, stay upright, and stay out of the road. The comeback trail isn’t such a bad place to be.
"I want you to know that you haven't lived until you've fought back, that you haven't won until you've lost, that you can't understand what it's like to relish something until you've suffered, and that some mistakes you never stop paying for"- Roy Hobbs
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