Breaking through the wall

Men's Fitness, April, 1999 by Michael Bane

I first caught a hint of this landscape in Death Valley. I was biking and running alongside competitors in the Hi-Tec Badwater 150, a 150-mile footrace from Badwater, the lowest point in America, over two mountain ranges to the portals of Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous 48 states. Temperatures can range from 125 degrees down to below freezing.

It was morning, and I was running alongside a rodeo-cowboy-turned-successful-banker, a guy who did ultra-endurance events the way normal people do 5K runs. The temperature was just cracking 100; we'd been running the flats and walking the climbs. As we walked, he was relating to me some of the basics of the mental landscape.

"In an event like this," he explained, "your mind goes to strange places. You'll experience every emotion, from the highest highs to the lowest lows."

And then he told me about the dragon. And what an amazing dragon it was. Scales like roofing tiles; eyes blazing yellow fire. It was, he said, a dragon created out of a person's fears and doubts and fatigue and pain. As the temperature soared, the banker described the dragon; how it came at a person's lowest ebb, feeding on all the pain and suffering, every thought of failure, every couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't.

As he talked, the great convection oven that is Death Valley sucked every drop of moisture from my skin, leaving only a fine, white dusting of salt.

"What do you do when the dragon comes?" I persisted in asking.

"Why, nothing, of course," he said. "Keep running."

That must have been a good lesson, because in my two marathons, I've never found a trace of the Wall. Mile 20 was no more - or less - painful than mile 18 or mile 23. Certainly training had something to do with it. But more important, I have found my dragon on the cold ice of Alaska, and on the sides of big mountains; once even within sight of the lights of Malibu, after all night on a trail and a full day left to travel. He's there, though, always waiting. If you go far enough, there's always the dragon, always a Wall. The question is, are you prepared to deal with it when you reach it?

Breaking through

The ex-rodeo cowboy told the truth - the mind will go to strange places, and despite how easy those relaxation and focusing techniques seemed in your bedroom, you your bedroom, you won't have much control. Instead, here are some thoughts that have helped me, and can help you.

* Accept that a portion of your race will be run on a mental panorama, and that it can be a scary place. It's a landscape littered with your own failures and successes, your pains and your losses. It's home to mythical creatures and places of legend, and your journey will be uniquely your own.

* Understand that you may be beset by storms of powerful emotions - exhilaration, despair, fury. But like storms, these spikes of emotion pass and have no meaning. I once ran alongside a woman who described how she planned to kill her new husband, because she hated the bastard so much. I don't think she talked like that when she wasn't running.