Endurance works like the manager or director of a company who walks around a workplace testing the strength of the people and the environment.
Is this place running well?
Is it strong?
Can this place hold up to external forces and extreme conditions?
The manager is constantly testing and measuring, recalibrating, and seeing how a workplace can improve. And just like this manager/ director when the workplace, (a metaphor for the body and mind) is challenged, it’s the endurance and resilience that keeps me above the fray and shit fight.
Life sends turbulence, negative emotions, deep and horrific challenges, streams of resistance from family, colleagues, humans, yet I feel you can’t go wrong if you can endure.
When I’ve trained for Ultras, like running from Melbourne to the Sunshine Coast 2000km in 18 days, or The Hurt 100 in Hawaii, the Blackall 100 on the Sunshine Coast, I was testing all the parts of my wholeness and dependable components of my body and mind. I’ve found there is so much to gain and learn from these self-imposed struggles. Though historically, I use to feel tremendous pain in Ultras (of which I’ve ran for 20 years) to hide the grief from losing a loved one.
I was using the sport as a saviour, to shield the suffering, a way to avoid all life’s problems. And then I took an inventory of myself, I had a chat to myself, by myself about myself. What am I running from? IS THE STRUCTURE OF WHO I AM CAPABLE OF HANDLING ALL OF LIFES ADVERISTY? And not just the ones I selectively choose to test myself in. DEEP QUESTION, and one I answer in my new book to come, The Ultra Marathon of Life.
The great news is, endurance allows us to meet ourselves, enforces the ability for us to hang in longer, work a little harder, maintain relationships, friendships etc and endure. I have learned to handle majority of all life’s situations with the simple framework of training for endurance events, yet is this enough to thrive and survive in the Ultra Marathon of Life?