Doing Stuff Anyway
I really, really don't want to run this race I have coming up this weekend.
As I've chatted about with the crew at the gym over the last couple of weeks, I was already doubting whether I'd be able to make the aggressive 2 hour, 45 minute cutoff time at the 18 or 19K aid station. I'm not exactly slow, but my race pace on a recent previous event of comparable length was about 11 minutes per km, and to make this cutoff I need to run about an 8 minute, 40 second per km pace. I know that's pretty meaningless to anyone who doesn't run and track their pace regularly, but to put that in context, that pace difference is a little more than the difference between driving 100 km/h on the freeway vs. 125 km/h. It is BIG, and I'll have to sustain that pace for nearly three hours.
To top that off, it now looks like we're going to be hit with the first "atmospheric river" of the fall season this weekend, and the forecast calls for something like 35mm of rain during the time I'm going to be racing on Saturday. The trails are likely to be a soupy mess, and the already not-very-runnable rocky downhills leading down towards Lindell Beach will be even more treacherous.
There's a REALLY high chance that I won't make the cutoff time, and some pretty serious risk of injury even if I take it more conservatively with my pace. Which, of course, I can't do, or I will for sure miss the cutoff.
Oh, and then IF I make the cutoff, I have another 10-11 km of trail to cover, including a couple of really steep, miserable, leg-destroying climbs and long, knee-destroying descents, followed by 2-3 km of road running to the finish. The "expectation" from the race organizers is that I'd be finished all that within another 2 hours and 15 minutes.
In short, this is going to be misery stacked on top of suffering, and there's a pretty strong likelihood that I will fail.
So why do it?
It's easy to push right up to your limits when what you're doing is familiar. Even if it's at a solid 99% of your known capabilities, it's still within the "known" - it's comfortably uncomfortable.
This is a step into the unknown for me, performance-wise. I've never run that far, that fast on a trail. Heck, I've rarely run that fast on a trail, period. Maybe a handful of times in the past eight or nine years, for maybe 7 km max. I'm also taking this on under conditions that, quite frankly, scare the crap out of me.
But, in similar fashion to how finishing my first-ever ultramarathon on my 50th birthday wasn't the big, WOW, life-changing experience I thought it would be, failing at this (if that happens) won't change my life either. It'll either be establishing a new benchmark for what I CAN do, or discovering where my real limits are right now, beyond the familiar level of suffering and suckage.
Sometimes, you just have to check your ego at the door and see what you've got.
Even if it scares you.
Even if you might fail.
Sometimes, you just do stuff anyway.