Are you living in a story of false inferiority? (Find out what you are truly capable of.)
About a year ago, my friend Coll asked me and a group of other friends if we wanted to take part as a team in what I came to call ‘a crazy running thing’.
It’s called Endure24, and the setup is this: there is an 8km/5 mile course, and the aim is for the team to do as many laps as possible in the 24-hour race period. (Some people do it as individuals, but we weren’t that crazy.)
I was hesitant - my running in the last few years has mostly been one or two 4-5km runs a week. Not since the pandemic had I run more than that. And when I did regularly run more in the pandemic days, I developed serious pain in my ankles.
Then I went for dinner with my friend Guy, and told him about it and he said he’d done the event in Reading (Coll was planning to run in Leeds). He talked about how fun it was and said, ‘well, you’ll be able to do at least 3 laps’. I nodded along, while internally thinking ‘24km! in 24 hours! Are you sure??’
But then, speaking to my friend Simon, who Coll had already sold on taking part, I had a realisation that… well, in the end I’m going to say yes to this, because I’ve decided I’m not the kind of person who runs away from these kinds of challenges.
And because as I approached and then passed 40, I’ve started thinking like this about physical challenges: it’s basically downhill from here, so if I don’t do it now, it’s only going to be harder to do something like this in the future. If I’m going to do it, best to do it now.
That was similar to how I thought about starting to play football again.
Here, I also layered on my beliefs about practice: if I start to get injured here, I can use this as a chance to learn about my body and about what practices will keep my knees and ankles healthy. That included some toothbrush-inspired balancing.
After I committed, I didn’t do any extra training apart from extending some of my runs to 7-8km.
I started to get anxious and overwhelmed by the challenge and then remembered what I’ve learned: in the face of overwhelm, just start.
And I started with a completely glorious 10km run along the coast of Anglesea two days after my 40th birthday in March. And then… whatever happened it was worth it: the views, the sense of freedom, the wind, the sea. If it ended in injury and disappointment, the commitment and the starting had given me a gift. Inspiration had appeared.
Then I started to build up, with the help of a training plan from the race organisers, ChatGPT and amazing support from my wife to take extra logistical burdens while I was out running.
I decided to aim, as Guy had suggested, at 3 laps. That sounded reasonable.
When our team - Simon, Coll and our friend Chris - caught up on Zoom six weeks or so before the race, I felt anxious again: the other guys were talking about having done more than one run in a day and I realised I hadn’t ever done that. And I was then going to try and do 3!
I turned my next run - by now I’d built up to the longest run in my training plan, 30km - into two runs of 15km in a day.
As I got halfway round the second one I found myself laughing somewhat hysterically at the idea I was halfway through my second 15km run of the day and I felt fine. Me of a few months earlier would have found that completely laughable. And… me of that day found it laughable, too!
And then we get to the race. At the end of an impossibly intense work month, Simon, Coll, Chris and I arrive at a campsite in Leeds. And we start to run.
Part way through my training I had started to think: I’m going to get excited on the day - maybe I can do 5 laps.
By the start of the day, when my family asked, I said I was thinking of doing 5-8 laps.
But I didn’t commit.
In the end, our team ran 33 laps, coming 4th out of the Small Men’s Teams, and 26th our of 994 individuals and teams overall. An amazing result.
Three of us ran 8 laps each and Coll ran 9.
I once heard Tim Ferriss say that everyone should get really strong at least once in their life, to feel what that’s like. To see what you’re capable of.
That’s what I felt like after Endure24. A sense of what I was capable of.
And it was a truly absurd 64km of running in 24 hours.
It was an amazing experience - a wonderful adventure to go on with friends, and strangers, in a beautiful park in Leeds.
Towards the end of the race, I spoke in disbelief, really, about how much I was running, and how my expectations of what I was capable of had been so low. Way off.
And Coll gave me a grin as he pointed out that he had known I would be running as many laps as everyone else. He’d even put that in our spreadsheet.
So Coll knew.
He knew what I was capable of, but I didn’t.
I thought I might run 3 laps, and throughout our team’s efforts, my predictions of how far I would run were below my friends’ predictions of how far they would run.
And yet in the end, my average lap time was the lowest of our team. (Coll did have to run an extra 8km, though!)
So my sense of what I was capable of wasn’t just off, it was way off.
And why?
Some old story of a pre-puberty me coming 72nd our of 80 in the middle school cross country race?
Some older story of being the least athletic in the family?
Some safety mechanism, to underestimate my capabilities to stay safe from failure or judgment?
Whatever the reason… be careful.
Be careful of where you may be underestimating yourself.
Because while in some ways this is an amazing story of someone breaking through what they thought they were capable of and having that story written anew…
Despite that, it has a flavour of personal tragedy for me: how much false inferiority have I felt in my life? What has it changed? What could have been?
But that, of course, is just another reason to find out: what are you truly capable of?
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PPS Big thanks to Si’s employer, Unforgettable Travel Company, for the support.
PPPS Read Si's reflections on the race and see some more pictures here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7347026454683000832/
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. (I cheated a little on this one in order to finish the story)