One recurring theme that I see in many of these endurance epics, whether they are blogs or books is the idea of meditation or zen. You set out to complete a task and cover a certain distance that will take all day and a great deal of physical and mental energy. You might think that you're going to get a whole lot of thinking done, but it rarely works out that way. Instead, the universal experience seems to be that your mind stops following a single line and eventually hits a meditative state where thoughts come and go with the same detachment and vividness as that period between sleep and wakefulness. On long runs and rides, I have had the same bar of one song stuck in my head for 10 hours, or have relived a forgotten experience from my past with such vividness that it's almost as if I'm back there again. When your mind is relaxed, that's when you are able to think along different lines and you can think outside your normal constraints and see windows where you only saw walls before. I usually say I do my best thinking with my pants off because all my best ideas come when I'm in the shower or on the toilet -- when I take a break. I've had those thoughts on runs too. This feeling of meditation must be what the monks are after when they give up their lives to run thousands and thousands of miles over 8 years. The more entrenched you are in your usual thought patterns, the more you wish for enlightenment, the more you must need to break out of them through hours of repetitive stepping and breathing, I guess. If one day of running can cause you to think deep thoughts, what must 8 years of ultra running every day do to your mind? No wonder they say they achieve sainthood in life!
There is another thing that draws me to their story. It is the fact that they cannot quit. If they quit, or if they can't run one day, then they commit to kill themselves. One thing that I think about a lot with my clients is how to override the instinct to stay within your comfort zone at all times. If I held a gun to my clients' head, they would surely not need that extra 10s of rest. But obviously I can't walk around holding a gun to someone's head for an hour a day and get away with it. But if your life depends on completing the task you set for yourself, failure is not an option. You stop thinking about how you CAN'T and instead the brain and body work on the question of "how can I go on?" There is always a way to go on. Find a way to continue, or die. As someone who has suffered from burn-out in the past, and who is always battling the urge to make excuses to take the easy road, I'm intrigued by situations where failure truly isn't an option.
One thing that the successful monks have described about their experience is that they learn that their own suffering is insignificant in the face of everything in the Universe. If you are tired, sore, or bored, the world doesn't care. If you quit and kill yourself, the world doesn't care. No one cares if you fail but you. So those who achieve great things in life; the Steve Jobses, Nelson Mandellas, Lance Armstrongs (drugs or no, he just wanted it more), Mohamed Alis of the world are simply those who recognize that for them to achieve greatness, they simply cannot make excuses, so they make the hard decisions that no one else will make. You can always quit, but for those who don't quit, there is greatness waiting at the end of it.
I recently finished "Running with the Kenyans" about another group of people who just run, forget the limitations. Unlike the Japanese monks that go for unbroken streaks unheard-of distances, the Kenyans defy all known speed limits; starting out too fast and only getting faster. The Kenyans have rewritten the record book and completely dominated in a sport that is everyone who is a citizen of the world has access to. And yet the Kenyans dominate to a point where it doesn't seem fair.
The author goes to live and train in Kenya for 6 months to discover the "secret" of the Kenyan runners (as if there were one that had been eluding every western scientist for so long). In the end he concludes it is the confluence of location, culture, and opportunity that means being Kenyan that also produces great runners. One of the factors that he identifies that I haven't heard before was that Kenyans grow up living a Hard Knock life, where making it big by winning an international road race is the only way to get out of spending your life doing hard labor. The style of training that he discovers is primitive in the same way that saving your money in your mattress is to advanced prospecting and investing. The Kenyan runners run fast when they feel good, and don't when they don't. Coaches (often Europeans) don't share the training plans with the Kenyan athletes, who just turn up to run and then run "fast" or "slow" based on feel, not splits. Finn describes one fartlek workout, attended by hundreds of elite runners where the workout was 25x1 min on/1 min off. Regardless of pace or ability, these 200+ runners all set out at the same time, and when their watches beeped, they ran fast, when they beeped again, the athletes all slowed down. When they had run for 50 minutes, they walked the rest of the way back home. Not measuring your training is another way that developing a keen sense of self and the body can lead to results far better than those that you could imagine through a structured training program.
Remember that itch that I was talking about; the itch to do something greater than? Well, I've been marinating on this idea for long enough that I think that I'm ready to commit to it. I want to try a new challenge; something to make me better. I have an idea, but what if I fail? What if I'm not strong enough to take failure off the table. Then what?
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