Before I started "Iron War," I read "Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why" by Lawrence Gonzales. Good book, you should read it. I'm going to paraphrase part of it here. Gonzales explains that people in survival situations – castaways, people lost in the woods or on a ski mountain, those wounded and unable to get out of whatever remote location they've become stuck in – go through many of the same stages of grief as the dying. A surviver goes through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, and then when it's time to reach the final stage, those who die choose acceptance. Those who survive reach another state; a kind of acceptance without submission where they accept their lot, but become certain that they are going to survive, no matter what. It's not that they are immune to bear attacks, the elements, and the like, they just resolve to fight and realize that they have the strength to endure.
Overblown prose aside, my quest is somewhat about a simulated survival situation. I know that if you held a gun to my head every day, I would find a way to cover 30K a day, but what kind of trails and mental depths would I have to go through to get there? What would it feel like, and who would I be when I came out on the other side. Cramming it in while still managing to work full time is a kind of death march in itself, with working being the death march part.
Today I felt good. I woke up not feeling sore, and knew I could run 18 miles today, and run every step of it (although I wound up cycling most of it today for other reasons). Then I knew I could wake up and do it again tomorrow. Not that it's easy, but today my body seems to have finally hit homeostasis.
And with that, I'm taking 5 days off. I need to go to Arkansas, which will be a kind of survival situation in and of itself.
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