"What a waste of time and money. And not only your time, but your friends and family's time who came all the way to Arizona to support you."
"You're a joke, you say you want to win these races against these amazing competitors and you can barely make it past half way."
"You are an embarrassment."
These are just a few of the things that went through my head after deciding not to continue about 140 miles into the Cocodona 250. This voice, the one beating me up and chewing out my insides, is a strange, enigmatic part of me. More often than not, I'm grateful the voice exists, for it is he that gets me out of bed in the morning if I am feeling lazy and holds me accountable to finish my scheduled training for the day. For this reason, I'm going to refer to this voice throughout this post as The Motivator. But The Motivator can also be an asshole. He doesn't take context into account and if I'm not doing the things that this angry little thing perceives that I should be doing, the dialogue inside my head can become extremely negative.
The overriding emotion I've dealt with in the wake of quitting, failing, DNFing at Cocodona this year is shame. Shame is often imposed by one's surrounding social context, but in this particular instance the shame I've been feeling is entirely self-imposed. The statements of The Motivator above don't come from anywhere but deep inside me. Personally, I feel that a lot of the shame I've felt the past week stems from the fact that I had publicly ambitious goals for the race and the end result could not be further from achieving them. Not only did I quit, but I didn't even push to the breaking point. I could have gone further and pushed my body in ways that may or may not have ended up with me in the hospital in a kind of sick repeat of 2023. But I didn't. And there's shame associated with the simple fact that I stopped when I could have kept going.
At Cocodona 2023, I was leading the race until mile 220 when my breathing problems became so acute that they led to a mental and physical breakdown. I ended up finishing, but then spent a night and two days in the ICU as a result. The issues started descending from Mount Mingus into Jerome. At the same point in the race this year, I had an awful deja vu experience. In 2023 when I picked up my first pacer in Jerome, I remember telling him that I was hallucinating voices in the woods, but that the sound I was hearing was actually the wheezing of my breathing. Coming down into Jerome this year, I had literally the exact same thought as I looked into the woods searching for the source of the mysterious sound. What do you know, it's my lungs. Again.
This year I did all the things that seemed smart in the circumstance, I slowed my pace down and kept my breathing under control. I used my albuterol inhaler more than normal and really focused on taking deep breaths. I got to Jerome and took an antihistamine. I carried on another 9 miles to the next aid station, took a nap, saw the doctor and a medic and had them listen to my lungs. I obsessively checked my 02 saturation with a pulse oximeter. Contributing to future feelings of shame, much of the medical metrics were coming back with positive signs. My 02 wasn't bad, in the low 90s, and my lungs sounded okay to continue. The doctor gave me some breathing exercises to try and with renewed hope I started out from Dead Horse.
There were a few moments where I thought I was feeling better, but as soon as I started to run up even the slightest hill the problems started again. My heart rate skyrocketed and my breathing felt shallow and painful and became audibly wheezy. Even writing about it now I just feel this absolute sense of frustration and helplessness. It doesn't really matter what a pulse oximeter says, if you can't take full breaths and it's painful, and you can audibly hear your breathing, something isn't right.
There were moments in the 2023 race where I was actually scared. An inability to take full breaths is awful, there's no other way to put it. And this year, when I pictured pushing myself to that point, it made me feel sick. As I ran with my brother through the mostly flat, dusty trails of Dead Horse State Park toward Sedona, we discussed my options. With three more races on the calendar, including the Tahoe 200 in a month, it seemed silly to push the lungs too hard knowing that they could quickly decline and turn into a severe problem from which it would take a while to recover. I'm grateful to my brother, for, ever the rationalist, he didn't push me one way or the other but just laid out the facts. It ultimately made sense to stop. I'm confident I made the right call and I've been told the same by friends and family several times in the following days.
And yet The Motivator won't shut up. He's there in the back of my mind barking at me that I'm a failure and an embarrassment and that the fact that I've got these ambitious goals isn't a sign that I will one day be successful but is just a totem of delusion standing tall in the abyss of my psyche. He's like the emotion Anger from the movie Inside Out except that there's nothing funny or remotely likable about the way he's treating me. The Motivator, at this point in time, is a bully. A wrecking ball that's trying to tear down an edifice of confidence and self esteem that ironically he also helped construct.
I'm obviously talking about two sides of myself here. One, the rational and level-headed person, can forgive this DNF because it was out of my control. How could I possibly have expected to develop the exact same issue in the same place two years in a row? But the other side, The Motivator, will not accept that garbage as anything but an elaborate excuse.
"You were just struggling and suffering and in your weakness you were looking for a way out. The breathing issues were just a convenient reason for you to stop because you already wanted to."
This final statement from The Motivator is perhaps the most pernicious and vicious that he can make because it contains a tiny kernel of truth. I was struggling. I still have yet to figure out the chafing solution for my own body and to top it off I had developed some insane blisters on my big toes in just the first 80 miles of the race. Because of the blisters, I was running in size 13 shoes, a half size bigger than what I'd normally wear, and the difference in the shoes was hurting my feet and causing me to have to bumble clumsily down or up anything remotely technical. If you don't believe how much of a difference a half size makes in your proprioception, you should try it sometime. It was driving me insane how difficult I was finding navigating the rocky terrain of the course.
So he's right, that I was suffering and I was struggling to have fun, given all the small factors that were causing me pain every stride. So the kernel of truth in The Motivator's harsh conclusion about me hurts. But though it took me a while to realize, he just couldn't be more wrong. There's nothing in my history as an athlete that lends any credence to the idea that factors like blisters or chafing or simple foot pain would lead me to stop moving forward. I'm just not that person. I stopped because I wanted to do what was healthiest for me and so that I could be successful moving forward.
What has really helped me overcome The Motivator's negativity and anger this past week is thinking about how I perceive other people's DNFs. I would never see someone I respect quit on a race and assume that they did it because they are weak. I would never think any of the things about them, that I had been thinking about myself. It is totally unreasonable of this voice in my head to hold me to account in ways that I would never, could never, possibly hold anyone else. So in the past few days when I've heard the angry, critical voice in my head, I've shifted those words onto a nameless third party. And that immediately makes me realize, wow, what a total douche this Motivator guy is.
As humans we have this strange ability to push ourselves beyond conceivable limits. The Motivator is such an important tool in my arsenal when I am training or when I reach difficult points in races. But when the rational brain needs to take over, the meathead can't help but overreach his usefulness and slide right into abject and unforgiving negativity. It is such a strange dichotomy and one that it would be nice to be able to rid oneself of entirely. But this is the nature of doing hard things: sometimes you will fail. And I think that it's only natural to have a bit of a spiral afterward.
So forgive me if I've rambled or if I took "The Motivator" metaphor further than was useful, but writing this has definitely helped me express some thoughts that needed to come out. As I look toward the Tahoe 200 on June 14, I still feel excited about the challenge that awaits. In the wake of DNFing, my wife has been incredibly supportive and helpful. She told me something that she took from the show Parks and Rec and that I'm sure the writers there stole from somebody else but it goes like this:
"This thing we call 'failure,' it's not the falling down but the staying down."
And I don't think I will be staying down.
Comments