Setting Yourself Up For Failure

Around this time last year I had what at the moment seemed like an amazing idea. I would run 27 miles to honor my body and celebrate turning 27 years old. Mind you, I had never even run more than 6 miles at a time before this. I was also not a runner. I wasn’t even the type of person that would run after a bus, even if it was the last one that day. Matter of fact, I hated running. I hated the shortness of breath and the way my lungs stung. I hated how my untoned legs felt like cooked spaghetti. I imagined myself flailing down the sidewalk like Woody from Toy Story. I hated “running” at a walking pace and feeling my feet land hard on the pavement like stones. I hated not being good at something so I avoided it. 

At the beginning of the pandemic last year I started watching a lot more videos on Youtube. I had been following Courtney Dauwalter and was amazed at what she could do with her body. She ran ultramarathons of 100+ miles like they were 5k’s. I had also just recently learned about the endurance athlete, Colin O’Brady, and his collection of world records. Needless to say, I was feeling pumped. 

So at the beginning of April when O’Brady created the Calendar Club I didn’t think twice before joining and enlisting others. The Calendar Club is a challenge where you run the number of miles corresponding to the day. I created a team and divided the number of miles between 3 people. The first day I was running ½ mile. Cake. Every day after that felt “okay”. I didn’t feel like I was going to die. Initially, I started noticing a pattern, typically the first 1½  miles sucked. That was when my mind and body complained the most. However, if I stuck through with it, I could usually find a good flow. So I kept on running until I ran 6 miles in one stretch. 

I felt so incredible for having made it that far, but my body was definitely suffering. I had plantar fasciitis and my knee was swollen. The number of miles people were amassing on this challenge in a single day was too much for me to keep up so I decided to drop off the challenge. I continued to run sporadically and kept challenging myself to run 6 miles every now and then. I started working with a chiropractor and learned more about running and how the cushion on my shoes was affecting my feet. I traded out the big cushion on my running shoes for minimal soles and kept things steady. I was amazed at how my body was transforming as well as my mind. I would have never imagined myself running 6 miles before doing it. That stream of thought opened pandora’s box for me. What if I could run farther? How many more things could I achieve in life if I just stuck past the metaphorical 1½ mile marker?

So although adding 21 miles to my meek 6 miles was a mouthful, like the type of mouthful you choke on, I convinced myself that I could do it. “It’s all a mental game,” I would tell myself, I just needed to get past it. I Googled how to run a marathon in a month, I told my chiro what I was doing, and started to run. When a friend learned about what I was doing he sent me the audiobook, Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins. If you know anything about Goggins it’s probably that he has been deemed, the toughest man alive. I listened to his story, I felt disturbed and equally inspired to push through the pain.

I followed my running schedule religiously. Sundays were long run days. The description said that even if I had to take breaks or had a slower than average pace to just focus on covering the distance. I hit mile 10 on my first long run. I ran late into the evening with my mom trailing somewhere behind me with a flashlight. It was like being on a high I had never experienced. I didn’t feel overly tired but my body was definitely sore, I felt my shins throbbing a bit but paid no attention. I was ecstatic! The next day, however, I couldn’t walk. That should have been a clear indication to slow down and rethink my goal. I remember waking up that next morning with my toes curled inward, I couldn’t straighten out my feet or release the tension. I placed my feet on the ground and tried to walk with what felt like clubbed feet. The pain was intolerable and my knees were swollen as well. I was so fixated on achieving my goal, I didn’t want to feel like a loser. I had made it public on social media for crying out loud!

I wasn’t able to run that entire week, but I was determined to keep pushing, the following weekend I was scheduled to run 20 miles. I ran 15 miles before the pain was too much and I had to stop. My abdomen was cramping, my feet were in the worst pain I had ever felt, and to top it all off, it was raining and the wind whipped against me the entire time. I cried and wallowed in my own self-pity. I was just trying to cover the distance so regardless of the pain I kept walking. Somehow, walking felt worse than running. As my body began to cool down the pain got worse. My mom met up with me on the trail and biked alongside me as I continued my walk of shame. I listened to Goggin’s story about the time he tried out for his first ultra race of 100 miles and getting rhabdo, shitting on myself, and urinating blood. So after walking 4 miles, I still decided to run the last mile and covered the 20-mile distance. 

I followed the, “no pain, no gain,” mentality that Goggins had despite my body pleading for me to stop. He was great and I also wanted to be great. I wanted to get to the end of the month and say that I had achieved what I had set out to do. The problem was that I had spent too much time doing too little and suddenly decided to go full throttle and do too much in too little of a time frame. I overtrained and was unable to continue to run. What at one moment felt like I had discovered a new hobby soon became torture. I kept going to my chiropractor expecting her to fix me. She never discouraged me, it felt like she was a crew member trying to support me. However, during one of my sessions, she told me, “it seems like you’re punishing yourself.” Was I? Why was I trying to set a goal so big, only to fail and then continue with my lame self-talk? It was like I was trying to prove that I was worthy by setting out to do something amazing. For my body, at that moment, my goal was unachievable without a guaranteed injury.  

I sat with that thought and wondered how many times I had sabotaged my success only to continue with my addiction to feelings of worthlessness. How many times had I allowed my ego to compete against an arbitrary idea of what success meant? Every time I didn’t achieve a goal, it was like hardwiring a program in my brain that told me I wasn’t good enough. When I began to run, this program was put into question. I realized that the limitations I had set for myself were rooted in old beliefs and emotions of fear. It seems like a backward thought to think you’re addicted to fear or worse yet, addicted to failure. It’s not so much the outcome that we are addicted to, it’s the surge of adrenaline caused by the anxiety we feel when we attempt something new. The cycle happens when we approach situations with the same mentality and expect a different outcome. 

Setting yourself up for failure and expecting success isn’t only impossible, it’s cruel. There are rare exceptions where seemingly superhuman things happen without much effort or planning. However, as previously stated, those instances are rare. I am no longer interested in the miraculous, the overnight success, or the microwavable-instant achievement. As I continued to look deeper into the victories of the people that I admired, I began to uncover the years of preparation that it took for them to claim their success. Dauwalter has been an athlete most of her life, it’s taken years of layered physical and mental endurance training that prepared her for the ultramarathons she has placed in and won. There have also been failures and recalculations in her journey. There have been times when she has miscalculated her water intake, times when she has underestimated the trail, other times where external factors like the weather have contributed to her not reaching her goals. 

Similarly, O’Brady began his journey in a hospital bed in Thailand after he severely burned his legs in an accident. He made it a goal to compete in the Chicago Triathlon when he recovered. His training began the day his mother put a chair in front of him and challenged him to get out of his wheelchair. He won first place in the triathlon and went on to break world records years down the road. Both of these two athletes consistently talk about and praise their crew. On numerous occasions, they have made it clear that without their team, it would have been harder for them to achieve all that they have accomplished. We applaud the lone wolf that is self-made. The person that crossed the elusive finish line from mediocrity to success. We fail to acknowledge the trials and tribulations throughout their journey. It’s more likely than not that those who claim to be self-made did not get to their pedestal alone.  

After accepting my defeat and timidly crawling back into my hole, I began to ask myself what success truly meant for me. Not what it looked like for the people whom I admired, but what it consisted of and how I could make my definition of success and happiness co-exist. I have yet to arrive at a concrete answer. Truthfully, I’m starting to believe that success and happiness are ephemeral and they come encapsulated in moments that are meant to be savored. I feel the happiest when I incorporate play into the things I do. I feel happiest when I acknowledge my feelings and work through hard emotions. Among the nuggets of wisdom my chiropractor bestowed on me was this, “How wise is your spirit that it would convince you to run 27 miles in order for you to confront what you’ve been avoiding,” she said to me. I’ve been trying to move through this life faster as if I was running out of time. All the while, I've been avoiding myself and all that I still have to learn and heal.

By the end of Goggins’ book, he talked about how the avoidance of his emotional and mental state nearly killed him. Out of all the extremes he reached in his life, spending time stretching became his saving grace. He spend hours in a single pose creating space for all he had repressed to flow through him. By slowing things down and confronting his demons he became a better athlete. This human experience and the journey we are all on is not one that is meant to be rushed. There are layers of training that we all continue to go through. There are lessons we will likely have to repeat. The importance lies in the compassion we choose to show ourselves throughout these phases. Move with intention. Move at your own pace.