SpokeNWords - Andrew Titus
Teach, Ride, Live
I was recently a guest on an episode of the Motivate to Move podcast. You can check it out here.
From the intro:
“Andrew was a heavy smoker, drinker, eater, everything bad. Join us in following Andrew through his very own journey of a very low fitness level to extremely high fitness level . His triumphs and his setbacks and a lot more in between. An accident that would harm his running ability was only a slight speedbump , perseverance should be his middle name.“
Where I live, the snow really comes down. The snow really comes down and then the wind comes up and then we all stay in. Back to the dreadmill or the track, convinced that we can pass the winter in 400’s, doing speedwork, staring at the wall or, worse, Netflix. Or, for those of us with enough Shackleton in our blood, we snap on the snowboarding goggles, layer up and head out anyway, into whatever is waiting out there, trudging through hours of 8 minute kilometres and repeatedly telling ourselves that it’s all strength training, that it’s all good.
And while all of this is true – all of this and the goodness of skiing and snowshoeing, back country trekking and skating – I have yet to find anything as satisfying, challenging, or engaging as cycling all winter.
For the sake of some street cred, let me first say that I live in Fredericton, New Brunswick where last winter we got 409cm of snow between November and March and where the average temperature in January and February hovers around -10 before the wind chill. So yeah, winter.
After commuting year round for the past four years and recently taking up trail riding in the winter, here are my lessons learned for those looking to really rock the season. (And, for what it’s worth, I ran outside as well, opting for the track only once – it sucked – and won my first race in the spring after almost exclusively basing my training for the five months leading up to it on nordic style skiing and cycling through the snow!)
Commuting: Given the severity of our winters, the amount that roads get salted and sanded, the variety of conditions that you’ll ride through, and the likelihood that you’ll have to get a ‘new’ bike every 3 – 4 years, I suggest that you buy a used, heavy, steel framed beater with gears. The kind of bike is really inconsequential, though I do recommend getting a second hand higher end bike going for $300 – $500 instead of a department store special. The steel frame will help you crush it through snow and slush and wind, and the original, better quality components won’t let you down when you need them most!
Trail: FATBIKE! As a friend of mine once said, mountain bikes are cool because they got us into the woods, but fatbikes are GREAT because they made it FUN! As opposed to the commuter, this is where it’s worth it to spend the money. That being said, if your primary interest is in winter trail riding/ cross training and not bikepacking, I recommend avoiding bikes (and the added cost) that come equipped with all of the bells and whistles to hook up a dozen saddlebags, and instead go with a hard tail with a 1 X 10 set up – seriously, for floating over the snow, powering the hills and getting super strong while staying lean and having fun all winter (common wisdom has it that winter fatbiking burns 1500 calories per hour!), the less moving parts the better!
Commuting: To commute with ease, I have found that studded tires and solid fenders are absolute necessities and worth every cent to buy the very best (which still isn’t going to even be a fraction of what your car’s winter tires are going to take you for). Seriously, everything gets better when your bike is sporting both. Not so necessary are things like saddlebags and back racks – when your sliding on ice, reducing unevenly distributed weight is a godsend (see “Clothing Accessories” below for the alternative). All told, and much unlike cars which need things like block heaters, bum warmers, antifreeze, antilock brakes, windshield fluid, etc. etc. etc., your commuter bike just needs something to keep it stable, two fenders to protect you front and aft, and for you to have a healthy breakfast. Warmth on a bike comes from the INside.
Trail: Unless you want a light to ride in the dark, there are no necessary accessories! Your FATBIKE — basic, stripped down, with low psi in the tires, cleaned and well-lubed – is all you need. The rest is all for show and, really, isn’t biking through the woods in the snow all the badass any of us can handle anyway? (Buy a light…)
Communting: Now it comes to the rub, right? How can I get to work or school without sweating to death, without freezing my body parts off, dry and (imagine!) satisfied that I can keep doing it? In his book ‘Frostbike’, Tom Babin comes to the conclusion that the primary factor in winter cycling isn’t the bike or the weather, but whether or not it’s easy; as such, clothes are a real concern — especially if you do not have access to a shower. That being said, here are a few of the things that have made my commute 100% possible and enjoyable.
Trail: unlike commuting, riding FATBIKE on trail is warm business, so with the exception of a pair of boots and mittens, you can usually get away with your base layer, some thermal tights and a warm upper with a wind breaking jacket. In other words – put on your running clothes. Seriously, 1500 calories per hour – what do you expect?
To my mind, there’s nothing mysterious or insane about riding your bike all winter – like running, it’s way more about the clothes and the attitude than it is about the weather.
The benefits – in addition to the Vitamin D to fight against SADD and the antidote to cabin fever – are numerous and include giving you a new, solid challenge, staying strong and lean over winter, and giving you some serious street cred. And after all, doesn’t all that really sum it up?
I’ve spent a lot of time in the basement this winter and spring; tinkering, one might say, micro-adjusting, putting an almost insatiable curiosity to the test and wondering into every dark corner of mind and body and heart. I’ve tried to repel down the harsh faces and regrets of my past and worries of undulating winds coming from the future, illnesses of self and society. “O the mind,” reels the great poet and fellow hermenaut Gerard Manley Hopkins, “mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed/… Nor does our small/ Durance deal with that steep or deep.” But I’m born of the north, of boreal forests and long nights for half the year, and like Kilian Jornet was made for mountains, I am of the dark, the cold, snow, and short summers, quick dips in the rivers and then plunging back into stoic necessities.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the basement this winter and spring; working a career that, for months of the year, sees me arrive before dawn and leave at dusk, my time outside from Monday to Friday becomes scant. Thoreau once said that “In winter a man is constrained to sit down and think”; in my case, that seat, like a meditation cushion, is the saddle of my bike, perched above a sleek black Specialized and strapped to a trainer, spinning like the world fast through the darkness. No screen, no virtual training partners likewise locked away somewhere in their dungeon; just me and my swirling, angry, anxious, aggressive demons. And Spotify, delivering more soul and funk and R&B than I’ll ever be able to consume in a single season. Hours and hours and hours… but for what? Shouldn’t I be fat biking or something?
Distance running taught me that the struggle of hanging on becomes an act of personal compassion, that suffering is relative to how familiar you are with yourself. I don’t recall the exact quote, but Rob Krar was once asked why he was such a successful ultrarunner and he said something along the lines that where other runners were trying to make it to the finish line before the demons of skeptical doubt and self-hatred came for them, he ran toward them, knowing full well that they were out there and that he was in hot pursuit. Endurance sport is to life as seated meditation is daily presence; that is, where your practice of mindfulness on the cushion leads to awareness of emotional states on a daily basis, moving for long periods of time nurtures a gentle stoicism that allows you to be more kind and understanding of your existential reality every single day. Sounds highfalutin—it’s not. I sit on the bike or run through the woods until I think I can’t anymore, that the training wasn’t stout enough, that this is silly and then, in an act of ultimate personal kindness, tell myself that it’s okay, that I’m going to be okay, and that I should keep going, for the sheer love of it. Because I can. Likewise, I encounter in my mind or the world obstacles that tell me things are not okay, that I should give up, that I’m not good enough, that I am worthless and, all of a sudden, like magic almost, I recall that I am strong, that I can keep on, that pain is inevitable but suffering is an option and that my experiences support that idea. The demons settle; we are at peace.
“Here!”, concludes Hopkins, “creep/ wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all/ Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.” We begin again, under cover of night, willing ourselves to be transformed. This winter I’ve spent a lot of time in the basement and the demons settle; I do not want to kill them, they are part of me, but to ask what they want. How can I do that anywhere but here, in the dark, in the cold, without distraction?
But perhaps Hopkins is the distraction with his frantic ramblings—Alfred Lord Tennyson always tells it like it is:
“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Carry on my brothers and sisters; spring comes and with that rush of water comes all the fruit of your hard and darkened labours.
-Originally published at irunfar.com
The last time we spoke a little over a year ago, I was pretty broken and trying to make sense of all the ‘what next?’ trails. I had suffered a fairly serious non-running-related knee injury that, for all intents and purposes, isn’t ever going to heal. Which means, quite definitively, running is out if, as several specialists said, I’d like to one day carry my grandkids around and march up the odd mountain. So, I did the Will Gadd and ‘kept moving.’ I did, in fact, keep mountain biking and took up road cycling and tried my very best to feel at home with my new homies. I read books and magazines and watched a ton of videos. I’ve thought about how things have changed since nothing more than a moment of inattentiveness has undone my running life entirely. I’ve settled into my new career as a teacher and sat a bunch on the cushion. I have cultivated gratitude and fed the positive wolf.
And yet, as I write this postcard to you, I can’t help but NOT say, “I wish you were here.” I don’t. I don’t wish you were here with me, but I do wish I was there with you.
Our man of punk and radical honesty Henry Rollins once said that “hope is the last refuge of the defeated” and so, not wishing to incur some sort of karmic wrath from the old man, I refuse to hope. But action–action is subtle and sublime and undoes empty words by filling them with intention and red marker on the calendar. “The most sublime act,” says William Blake, “is to set another before you;” action breeds action breeds, you guessed it, adventure.
So, I’ve put my shoes back on. See, I was never a real, real competitor, not one of the tough buggers that would give the field a run for their money, but I’ve long adhered to what our steward, spokesman, and muse Kilian Jornet has said, that “the one who crosses the finish line first is not necessarily the winner.”
How many of us have sat, Scott Jurker-like, at the finish line as the back-of-the-packers have come in, sometimes just moments before the cutoff? I mean, sure, the folks at the front suffered–running fast is totally hard!–but the ones at the back always seem to have a look of utter transcendence on their faces, written down their legs in mud, scratched into their arms, and carved into lines on their faces. I love these people. These people feel like my people. Last, yes, but not dead, but dead f**king last. Those who truly love Type 2 fun. Yeah, that’s me too.
And there’s a certain glory that comes with all that too, something that those of us who deeply and personally love this sport know all too well. Because, let’s face it, it’s hard to make it when all that’s left is just, well, making it. But remember that photo of Gunhild Swanson from the finish of the 2015 Western States 100? With just six seconds to go in the 30-hour event she came cruising across the finish line and there, amidst all of the phones and faces, as Swanson put one hand on her hip and said to the world ‘well, there,’ off in the background is our very own AJW with a look on his face like he himself had just won the whole damn thing! That’s the feel right there–the deep, visceral knowledge that something truly remarkable had just occurred and was worthy of a full, Viking-style celebration.
So, I’ve put my shoes back on and, I can hardly believe my luck, after all of this biking my legs are really, really strong. And so is my head. And the pain in the injured knee? Well, so long as I don’t run, it doesn’t seem like it’s there.
Hike. Just hike; no running at all. Can I do that? Take up ultra-distance endurance training and racing again, but no running? Not one step. Shooting for cutoffs instead of top 10s or even a solid age-level place. Honestly, I don’t even need to twist a spin and justify it–that sounds awesome!
Years ago, when I ran my first 100-kilometer race in Vermont, my kids met me at one of the aid stations around 75k and they were over the moon that I had made it so far. “You must have really big lungs,” they said to me. “All the better to hold this huge heart where you live,” I had said.
It’s an understatement to say I miss that, and all of you, and the pain and the community and the adventure. When it became obvious to me that I wasn’t going to run anymore, I used to say to people, “it’s not about the running, but about being outside with friends doing wild things in cool places.” But the more I said it, the more I forgot what that meant. Now I think I’m getting it. So why not hike–just to be there, pushing limits, finding myself in the midst of being lost, and discovering real civility in the middle of the wild. And if I’m last, I think I’d like that too. Who knows, maybe Scott or Bryon or AJW or Meghan will be there to give me a high five. And maybe you’ll see transcendence written all over my face.
Yeah. Relentless forward progress.
-Originally published at irunfar.com
A couple of years ago my oldest sister Ellen passed away. I know that sounds blunt, but that’s how death rolls; no one ever goes like they do on Shakespearean stage. We just give up the ghost, done, a breath in and a breath out and… Together my whole family and I let her go, holding her weak hands, and then we cried and walked out of the room in the Intensive Care Unit, one less.
Along with my folks and siblings, her son, and all the extended kin, we grieved, each in our own way and yet all following a cycle of emotions as well known as back roads to nowhere. I hung in disbelief, and then I cried some more, became angry, and finally… just let it go. In waves I worked through it all, often alone. She had been such a force, and then she just seemed to give up; I blamed her for not trying hard enough to curb her impulses, and I was frustrated by the fact that she had chosen a lifestyle over her grandchildren’s need to have such a cool older lady in their lives. But that’s not how these things work, and I let her go.
The ICU doctor, a gentle and kind and empathetic young man, simply said to us, “It’s really about what quality of life she would want now.” My sister was a powerhouse of song and story, a fiendishly good cook and treasure house of knowledge about the world and all the thousands of books she had read. She loved to dance in a way that made other people move out of the way and had a laugh that was so authentic that it shone into any dark corner of any depressed room. She shone fiercely; despite all the wrong choices she may have made, she loved people and she relished in every morsel of life’s eccentricities. All of these made our decision unfortunately easy to make. We together let her go.
A year later, just before what would have been her birthday, on one of those bright February days that seems to reflect the whole of the icy world under a too blue sky, I sat down in front of the department head at the university where I had been teaching for the past 12 years. This was a mundane event–every spring we got together and she outlined the courses available and asked me which ones I’d like. Sometimes we drank tea and I always left knowing what I’d be teaching in the coming fall. It was a very reassuring day, especially given the precarious nature of my position as a part-time faculty member and the extremely low employment rate in the have-not Canadian province that I live in and love. She put her hands on her lap, entwined her fingers and, without missing a beat, said, “So, classes this coming year… there are none.”
I let it sink in: there are none. She then said something about low enrollment at the university and reduced numbers of course sections and finances and budgets and I nodded and blankly agreed that it was certainly not her fault. Like blaming the bank teller for high interest rates. Sign of the times. Maybe next year and you never know though and, yes, there were definitely other opportunities for me given my years of experience.
Twelve years, to be exact.
The next few weeks were a cycle of grief I had already known well and I rolled through them, allowing the anger to well and subside, trying to let go of the need to understand it, doing everything I could to not lay blame or feel like a failure. Like having made choices for the right reasons hadn’t landed me in nothing short of a hot mess. Mortgage, family, all of it; such mounting uncertainty really only left one choice–let it go.
The summer came and with it the reality of my unemployment. I let it go, let it sink in, let it be what it was. Despite everything, I’m still a fairly optimistic Stoic. Here was a situation that I could control to a degree, and not to another; as such, forget what I couldn’t effect and effect with vigour what I could. So, I took my old pickup, nailed the shingle to the virtual walls of social media, and started shoveling dirt, hauling mulch, pruning trees, and mowing lawns. Food still needs to land on the table and, strangely enough, bills don’t pay themselves, and kids need nourishment of body and soul. I ran through the woods when I could and rode my bike to feel free and sort my thoughts and all the while rolled through the cycles of grief that started to feel like home. An ugly, old, and cold home.
Novelist and business man Eliyahu Goldratt once said that “good luck is when opportunity meets preparation, while bad luck is when lack of preparation meets reality;” trail running and long-distance cycling have taught me these lessons a thousand times, so I have no idea why I didn’t take it more seriously. And yet, though I was entirely focussed on making ends meet, while working I often chucked safety to the side. In my mind’s eye, I can see me standing on the bed of the truck, a particularly large tree trunk perched precariously on my shoulder; I bend my knees and heave forward, pushing the trunk off, it arches up and then bounces off of the tailgate, swings back up and the butt strikes me powerfully on the side of the knee. It is the kind of pain that sinks, my legs buckle and with no more of a sound than a gasp I collapse on the pile of brush in the back of the truck. I stay there wordlessly and motionless for a few minutes; the adrenaline fades and the pain settles in. Slowly I stand and lower myself off the bed. I can hardly walk. I knew inside my bones that this was bad; I’ve broken and strained and snapped enough things to know what a wicked injury feels like, and this was a giant. I had been struck down by a giant named foolishness.
Twelve months pass. Allow me to to make what is a very long and drawn out and ultimately insanely boring story very short and sharp: I refused to listen to my body, kept running, raced a bit, ignored the pain, let it get worse, only listened to opinions that were in keeping with my desire to relentlessly progress in the only way I felt was forward and saw a minor problem become a major problem become a debilitating injury. I was forced to stop running and medical intervention has ended with me on a cold, hard, steel table getting a digital picture taken this coming week which will help to confirm several opinions that these Baker cysts and paralyzing pains in my knees are the result of posterior horn torn menisci. Serious shit.
Twelve months pass; running becomes impossible. I try to take up hiking but even the impact of that is too much and anything over an hour and I am essentially lame for days afterward. I take months off at a time, sometimes trying a run here and there, rejoicing in the freedom of it, and then suffering sitting, walking, and laying down afterward. I try a walk-to-run approach—same thing. I hammer out a 10k and figure I’m fine—sign up for an ultramarathon that night in my elation, wake up the next morning hardly able to move, and write to the race director to ask for a refund, explaining my foolishness, utterly embarrassed. My real friends reprimand me. I suffer. I wrestle with my identity and berate myself for such indulgence. I look to let go; I practice yoga, ski in the winter, and sit on the bike trainer to sweat and think. When the spring comes I ride outside. Hard. I am having a hard time finding friends as noble as trail runners though. I like traveling far on my bike; I dislike not knowing how to repair it. At one point my wife is talking to an acquaintance of hers and my name comes up; “Oh yeah, the cyclist, right?” Maybe it was never about the running, maybe it’s still just about adventure. Maybe it’s about making sure you don’t just sit around. Maybe it’s about making damn sure you don’t treat life like a Netflix original. I love my bike, love the freedom it affords. I grow to feel a new kind of belonging and just let the pains of growing a new identity ripple through me.
Twelve months pass; I’ve decided, at 47 years old, to go back to school and get an education degree as there seems little reason to start over. Besides, I love to teach, love the kids and ideas and books and talking. It’s really, really hard; I’m also a father of three and much older than my classmates. I don’t party. I go to bed early and I ride my bike in every spare moment I have. The course work is immense and the practicum nearly kills me. I go far past exhaustion and keep going; it is an ultramarathon of will. On the last day a teacher of ours asks us to go outside and get a stone we like from the rock garden surrounding the staircase of the building we’ve been banging away in for a solid year. When we get back in she hands out markers and tells us to write down the one thing that we take away from this degree that we’ve learned about ourselves. I uncap the pen and without hesitation write “resilience.”
Running taught me resilience. It taught me how to overcome adversity and continue when everything, including my own reason and common sense, told me to stop. Running taught me that I can count on myself. And, in a moment of utter irony, when I needed running the most, during the most stressful period of my life, it wasn’t there for me—but the resilience it taught me remained. It’s all I needed. Running taught me resilience and with it I forged a new self in the crucible of cycling.
It’s one of those unspoken things that lots of us believe—that people and books and all kinds of things come into your life when you need them. That’s some pretty cool cosmic weirdness that we all like. The flip side, though, is that they leave too; and what are we going to do with that? Are we going to be cool with that too? A book ending is one thing, a person splitting or dying is something else. And what if you have to let go of some intangible thing? What if you can’t run anymore, after it’s given you so much—health, friends, goals, maybe even some notoriety and a ton of meaning—then what? Stolen bikes can be replaced, but what if your knees just simply say, “Sorry Central Gov’ner, we just can’t give’r anymore.” Can you keep in mind, like a friend or sister that has passed, its essence? Can you suss out what mattered most and then pour that into something new? There’s no need to start over, you know.
Like teaching in the university, I’ve had to let running go. It’s time to ride my bike—in the woods, down country roads, in the basement, when I can, and sometimes all day long. Because it was never about running. At its source it’s about adventure and exploration and doing awesome things, and in the end it’s about resilience. To mourn that loss longer than needs be would be to do it a great disrespect.
So here’s to all you cool runners. I salute you. And maybe I’ll see you from the flip side of the aid station or maybe I’ll be sweeping the course on my mountain bike. But it’s okay. Let it go, all the love is still there. All of the love is just surfing the ebbs and rollers of life however you can. And that’s the real relentless forward progress.
And my sister? Yeah, she never learned to ride a bike, but loved their form and simplicity and art. Directly in front of where my trainer sits hangs a big painting she used to own of a woman riding a penny-farthing. When I inherited it I took a pen a wrote on the frame, “Ride for Ellen.” Just keep moving, everyone. It’s the only surefire way to stay positive and feed the positive wolf that I know. Ride for Ellen.
-Originally published at irunfar.com
On the bike, thoughts come for you. Exposed and vulnerable, distance and landscape bring messages from your past, images of paths not taken, admonitions. Dreams so vivid they seem to almost have vicissitude and all the while you’re just cranking, cranking, breathing, watching, cranking.
Lately the demons are called Sadness and What Ifs; perhaps an improvement, I tell myself, over Anxiety, but they also bring with them their brothers Defeat, Regret, and, the worst of the lot, Profound Self-Doubt. I do what I have learned best—I sit with them in the saddle and ask them what they want from me. Fighting is useless as they are will-o-wisp, hydra, refugees from my own conscience. There is no running away, no defeating them. No pretending they don’t count. I ask them what they want. Often they are silent, more often they show me movie memories, less often they climb up and tell me they’d just like to hang out.
Cycling is far more than exercise or exploration; for this hermenaut, spinning the wheels is about exorcizing the spirits who lay in my bones and muscles and brain cells and riding them double on the handlebars or seat while we have a serious Mano a Mano. Inside me they reek havoc, trash the place, spray paint and defile and ghettoize the palace. At least out here, on the road or trail, in the wind and rain and sun, I can see them. At least out here it’s just the two of us.
***
Trail running has, for years, been my mainstay activity—it is my fitness, both physically and into this world, and where I learned that meditation can move. Long-distance trail running, in particular, has been my saviour, it has given my life focus and taught me about dedication, health, and the importance of excellent friends. And for a 47-year-old dude, those are, I’m convinced, the beating heart of lifelong wellness. So a year ago or so when my foot started to hurt I did exactly what anyone in my situation would do; that is, I ignored it and kept going. Kept telling myself that it would work itself out. That it was nothing. That everything was fine.
But it wasn’t. A small pain became a big one; trips to the chiro, the physio, and the internet all confirmed that this wasn’t going away. That it was time for a break. That healing would require rest. Rest; for someone like me, is a hard one to swallow.
Will Gadd—climber, smart ass, and all around world-class doer of awesome stuff—once said something along the lines that your job as an athlete is simple, to keep moving. That if something hurts, do something else. And so I took what was, up to that point, a thing that oscillated on the spectrum from toy to machine and decided to use it, as Henry Rollins once framed it, to reinvent myself, to carve myself from stone. To move in a new way.
Let’s be clear: while I’ve never been a fully invested couch potato, I was also not one of those stoked mid-’90s rad-dudes who saw the future and headed to the woods the moment Gary Fisher and the boys hit the market with their suped-up stump jumpers. I was too busy getting high, quite honestly. But those guys were my friends and so somewhere in the deepest stretches of my now-adult mind there was an inkling that yeah, maybe riding a bike was more than transportation or something that those working out the penance of a DUI did (which, FYI, fortunately never happened), that maybe the MAMLs were onto something, that perhaps while the bicycle is a toy for kids, and a means to get around for students, it was something else as well. Maybe it was more of an existential machine than I was giving it credit for. Whatever, it certainly beat sitting around beating myself up over a beat up foot.
In addition, I have the great fortune of living in a city that, first, is surrounded by forests and, second, where said forests have been the playground and sacred grove of the cyclists since the explorers of Marin County put two and two together and came up with a new sport. As a runner, I knew all of these trails like the back of my hand and so, naturally, felt that having an intimate knowledge of basically every root, rock, mud hole, and dip that was out there, learning to cycle them would be a snap.
Big mistake.
I also thought that because my cardio was basically bang on and that due to my work as a landscaper my core is pretty strong, my fitness wouldn’t really be an issue either.
Also, big mistake.
And so I managed to score myself a snazzy full-suspension MTB, sussed out a race or two, and hit it just as hard as I could. Low and behold, the demons were right there. As was my lack of skill. As were my inadequately trained muscles. As was the general population of seasoned cyclists. The hoard of Frustration, Desperation, Anger, Hurt Pride, and Self-Pity came rushing in for the party that the neurochemicals were cooking up in my brain and the cocktails flowed like buttery singletrack.
For anyone who has tried to pick up something relatively new relatively late in life, you know what I’m talking about. And doubt, that blood-sucking beast suckled in middle school and only made super strong by feeding it all the reefer and bad decisions any university student can muster, was right there. Who was I kidding? Seriously, mountain biking?
Our man Jens Voigt, he of leg shut ups and the kind of cruel tenacity that marks every noble lady and gentleman of sport, if he were to weigh in might say something like, “Doubt is a small voice, silence it!” And how right he would be. Because you and I both know that the podium is a mental thing, entirely relative to where you are in the great peloton of life (ugh, I’m really sorry about that one), that success really, truly, honestly is something so utterly subjective as to be… utterly within your own control.
A challenge, I often remind myself, has to be two things: hard and easy. In the first sense, it has to carry with it the real possibility that you won’t be able to do it; in the other sense, it also has to be at least plausible. A challenge, an activity that holds within it the potential for significant self-transformation, cannot just be overwhelming or a walk in the park. Take Harry Potter for instance—imagine that he and his friends were to have faced a dragon in the washroom instead of a great lumbering troll… result? Death, series over, tragic ending all around. But the troll presented real and tangible danger for the young wizards and called on all their abilities and few extra in order for them to meet the ordeal and transform individually and as a group. All myths are built on this kind of stuff.
And all myth relates directly to your life, your journey, your long and deliberate meander toward greatness. Joseph Campbell refers to this as the Cycle of the Hero, the drawn out process of self-discovery, fraught with inner and outer obstacles, that brings you, as Henry Thoreau said, “Back to your senses.” These days I may have traded my running shoes for some cool wheels, but the intent is the same: to reach my highest peak, to see the world fresh everyday, to meet excellent people with similar magic and join them exploring the wilderness, and to face down some demons. To reimagine what I’m capable of, to recycle this body over and over and over again till death come and do us.
-Originally published at irunfar.com