Ultra

8 Jan 2017

This is about you, by yourself, against all that, out there.

The race started six hours ago.
It’s been a really tough day.
It’s eleven degrees below zero.
I have another six hours to go, and it’s starting to get dark.
I’ve already put my head lamp on, but it’s not dark enough to turn it on yet.

The race is won by whomever can cross country ski the furthest in twelve hours.
In the past, I’ve been able to ski 150-165 kilometers.
In shorter races, when it’s cold, my fingers will freeze down to the first knuckle before I’d warm up.
This race was different.
My fingers were freezing down to the second knuckle.
The time exposure and extreme temperatures changed everything.

My skis and the snow were not getting along.
Their marriage was akin to that of a fingernail and a chalkboard.
There are waxes that help with this sort of problem.
Unfortunately, the snow was so wretchedly abrasive that the effects of the wax were short lived.

Even with fresh wax, the skiing was pitifully slow.
This compounded my efforts.
Exacerbating the biggest problem faced while racing in sub-zero conditions.
Perspiration.
It’s the staying dry that’s the trick.
Here is the thing. At these temperatures, you’re extraordinarily likely to get frostbit or become hypothermic if you make a mistake.
Cross country skiing is hyper aerobic.
You’re going to get wet.
We had a tent set up with an open flame propane heater so we would have a warm place to change during the race.
On the drive up, we stole two bails of hay from a farmer to use as insulation.
I know… not good, but we needed some way to stay warm.
We called our tent ‘the manger.’
It’s remarkable the entire thing didn’t burn down with all the hay we had around this raging propane torch. That sucker was on high for over twelve hours.
A lap was five kilometers.
My wax was wearing off every ten.
My friend Kevin had come up to wax for me.
So this was the routine,
Every ten kilometers, which was roughly every forty minutes, I’d come in.
While he was waxing my skis, I would change.
Changing this frequently, I ran out of dry clothes faster than I prepared for.
So I had started to hang my stuff next to the propane heater to dry.
This particular pitstop, I hadn’t yet realized what had happened.
I pulled my off my steaming polypro shirt and flung it over a piece of the tents framework.
When I grabbed the shirt, that I’d previously hung to dry, I was shocked.
It was frozen!
Dejected and with little other choice, I had to put on my wet long underwear top again.
Wet and cold is a bad combination.
This is fine when you’re working hard.
But if I slowed down, I knew I would be in trouble.
The problem with races of this distance and time is that you’re going to slow down at some point.
On top of all of this, keeping my hands warm and dry was proving to be my biggest issue.
I had long since run out of dry gloves.
I was left with no choice other than trying to dry off the gloves that I was racing in. I held them in front of the raw flame while waiting for Kevin to finish waxing. Within moments, they would start to sizzle and steam.
Paranoid, I kept checking to see if they were burning.
Miraculously, they never did.
Unfortunately, only the outside of the gloves would dry in the ten minutes it would take Kevin to wax my skis.

Frostbite and hypothermia were knocking on the door.
Knowing that the only way to warmth was skiing, I pushed myself to get moving.
I also knew, the cost of this warmth was my fingers first had to freeze.
It would only take a few minutes.
The intense pain would stop the moment they did.
I could sense the hard coldness, on all of my fingers, down to my second knuckle.

By that time, I knew the routine.
My fingers would typically start to thaw in about fifteen minutes.
The pins and needles would start as an annoying burn.
Within a minute or two, it would consume me!
The pain was stunningly bright.

I’ve been in darker places mentally.
Ironically, it was the ridiculous conditions that kept my psyche together.
Survival brought about a certain acuteness to my immediate experience.

The temperatures were relentless.
Not having enough dry clothes was a serious mistake.
The colder I got, the slower I got.
The slower I got, the colder I got.
The cold and the time took their toll.
A remarkably tough day.

These races are all mental.
It’s your head that will beat you.
If you can be gentle with your thoughts, you have the ability to do things that will forever change your perception of reality.

This week, I watched a few documentaries that profiled ultra endurance athletes and the events they were participating in.
The remarkable thing is that some of these participants wanted to be broken.
Think about that for a moment.
What does that mean to you?
How many people do you know that desire to be broken?
One of the documentaries that I watched was about a race called the Barkley Marathons.
It was ten years before anyone ever finished this race!
And another six before anyone was able to do it again.
It was assumed that it was impossible.
Which is a unique concept for an athletic event, don’t you think?
Since 1986, fourteen people out of roughly one thousand participants have finished.
I’ve done a fare share of ultras and they have this remarkable ability to dismantle you and bring you beyond your limits.
Every race I entered, people finished.
These were all remarkable feats,
Every one of them.
All ultras are remarkable.
Primarily because you’re dealing with an event that gives the participants the opportunity to transcend possibility.

The Barkley marathons offers something unique.
It’s the expectation of failure that’s rare.
Lazarus, the guy who started this race said, “There are people who are used to succeeding. We have such a high number of (participants) people that have graduate degrees because they set goals, they accomplish them, and they don’t let anything stand in their way. And I think the race appeals to them because they could fail.” “This is about you, by yourself, against all that, out there.”
The race is five laps.
One lap is ludicrous!
The leader did it in a little over eight hours!
Most took much longer.
With that in mind, they call two laps a ‘training run.’
Three laps is called a ‘fun run.’
Sixty hours is the cut off to complete five laps.
63% of the competitors in 2012 quit by 24 hours.
For years it was believed three laps was all that was possible.
For many, three laps at Barkley Marathons is a lifetime goal.

Laz says, “People have their own concepts of success and failure and they… a lot of them, by the time that they have been through the ordeal, really are not concerned how other people evaluate their performance and they make their own judgments about success and failure.”

When they asked Laz if this is the hardest race, he said, “When you talk about being the hardest, there is not really such a measurement because you have races that are in extreme heat, that are at extreme altitude…so we never really thought about it, that this will be the hardest race. But we felt like we would put something out there that was right at the limit of what people could do. One of the big motivators in running an ultra is that people want to challenge their limitations, they want to see how much they can do. And you can’t really tell how much you can do until you try to do something that’s… more.”

A remarkable notion of transcendence…

I think that people that go through this are better for it. They are not made of better stuff than other people, but they are better for what they’ve asked of themselves.
~Lazarus lake

18 Sep 2016

“Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it’s not fish they are after.”

~Henry David Thoreau

I’ve heard many people over the years talking about yoga as a way they center themselves. Some tell me that as they are going deeper into their practice, they are experiencing altered states of consciousness. I know people on the fringes of society are using psychoactive chemicals and plants and isolation tanks to access a variety of altered states. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Flow, suggests that these states are not only for those that explore the more esoteric realms. He suggests that everyone can experience them in a multitude of ways. He speaks of a factory worker who consistently worked at a heightened state of consciousness, which he refers to as flow. I have a coworker that works within that flow space; he is nothing short of remarkable. My wife falls into this state somewhat regularly; it’s magical. People in this state are on another plane. Like a highly trained ballerina, they float through the air defying physics. They exude grace, precision, and ease; flow. I think most will agree, these altered states of consciousness are remarkable to those that witness them and arguably more so for those that experience them.

I’ve experienced deeply altered states of consciousness that radically reshaped my world while doing long distance bicycle races. Ironically, the first experience left me feeling isolated and mildly embarrassed. The distance and time on the bike were so unusual, people asked how I was able to do it and what it was like. Because of my lack of context and experience with this sort of thing, my immediate response was, “I saw God!” I honestly really felt like I did. It was that profound. But I had also just gotten off my bike and was still consumed in a fog of euphoria. It was clear by the responses I received that my comments were misunderstood. Likely, because I didn’t fully understand what I was saying myself. My community of cyclists didn’t discuss altered state of consciousness; at least that I was aware of. Needless to say, I didn’t receive any help or guidance with this before or after this event. I was on my own. The simple reality is, when it happened, I was a changed person from that point forward. I had experienced something that was so far off the charts and so profound that I was left simply in awe. It literally took me years to understand and articulate these experiences with any fluency.

Now, I assume the following:

That others have had equally profound experiences.
That others have found the ability to replicate these experiences with some relative predictability providing semi-regular access to these states.
That these states resonate at a frequency and level that is very personal and special to the practitioner.
That there is a certain dogmatism with your relationship to these states of consciousness.

I understand, these states and realizations do not come easily. They come from a diligent and likely, very personal practice. They provide access to what some would refer to as a spiritual realm. It’s not a mistake that nearly every religion has some sort of practice or tradition that brings about these states. These states provide a physical experience that can be used to support the validity of the desired ideology.

I would like to suggest something to think about.

If you’re like me, the desire to re-attain these states are, or were, a consistent thought and allure. But I had made a mistake. I thought enlightenment was a permanent, altered state of consciousness. I later learned that enlightenment is rather an evolving stage of consciousness. Ken Wilber, a contemporary philosopher that specializes in integral philosophy, articulates the distinction between states and stages of consciousness. A state of consciousness is non-abiding and temporary. A stage of consciousness is abiding and permanent. An example of a stage of development would be when a woman becomes a mother. The broadness of her concern has permanently expanded beyond herself to the child, from egocentric to ethnocentric. A state of consciousness would be the euphoria of finishing your first running race, the buzz from a glass of wine, or an emotional response to a movie. All of these are non-abiding, and not permanent. I understand that there are exceptions to these examples I gave, but I’m just trying to get across a general idea.

Getting back to these heightened states of consciousness. Many people have heard the eastern traditions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism) concept of enlightenment or awakening. The western traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) allude to this idea, but it’s not widely recognized or acknowledged. Our world is filled with tales regaling those cultural icons who have attained these heightened stages of development and set the precedent for man kind. Joseph Campbell wrote a book called A Hero with a Thousand Faces to illustrate this point. Every culture and ideology has that special iconic figure. They are central characters in the ideology’s spiritual and enlightenment saga. All of these people are perceived to be special for a reason. They have developed an elevated stage of consciousness that is remarkable within the culture they live. What’s worth realizing is that these stages of development are attainable for you too. You have everything within you. The hero’s journey is for you to undertake. Joseph Campbell is talking about finding the hero within yourself. He is alluding to a stage shift in consciousness that transcends the egoic perception.

The state experience gives you that valuable glimpse of the nonphysical, or spiritual. This takes these concepts out of the abstract realm and places them into the tangible. It’s stage development that will bring forth and reveal an abiding awakening or enlightenment.

Evolve…

“Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had sought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence, and where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”

~Joseph Campbell

5 Jun 2016

“You’re better than you think you are you can do more than you think you can.”
~Ken Chlouber (Founder of the Leadville 100. An ultra distance mountain bike race and trail run.)

Is that the secret? Pushing through? Is doubt a natural process of realizing fuller aspects of yourself.
What can’t you do?
That’s an interesting question isn’t it?
How is it that we come up with these ideas of what we’re not good at. What tilts the scale towards emphatically declaring something as a talent or a deficit? Are your declared deficits just detractions keeping you from realizing unknown potentials?
It’s interesting that many of my gifts have been hidden under long held insecurities.
I hated gym. Couldn’t catch, kick, or throw. Not surprisingly, the more I obsessed over these ideas, the more I manifested these insecurities. Gangly and awkward without full control of my limbs, I was at the bottom of the pecking order.
Sport became my nemesis.
Years later, sport became a central axis of my identity.
I pushed through my insecurities, my limits forever changing. I’ll never forget this realization. Given consistent food and water, I could ride my bike for distances that would break my body. I was capable of going beyond what I was physically capable of doing. Disregarding every signal my body gave me to stop. This was a stunningly powerful realization. A transcendental experience that transported me from the flesh. My biology was weak but my spirit was indomitable. I was no longer confined by the physical.
Distracted and uninterested in school, writing was something I learned to loath. Reading, an activity that was expected of me. I spent more time trying to get away with not reading than reading. Ironically, I wanted to be a reader, I liked the idea. The allure was there, just not the drive.
I remember the first book I loved. That’s all it took. A late bloomer, I was twenty. Seventeen years later with hundreds of books in my head I was richer and fuller than I’d ever been. Yet, I found myself unfulfilled and lost. With a head full of ideas and doubts, I was searching for truth. It was time to process everything I had learned. To manage this horribly complex distillation and find a cohesive whole.
Enter: the pen.
The pen is, in fact, mightier than the sword.
I found myself unable to sleep because the words were consuming me. I was shocked! Me, writing?
At 1:00am I’d start to bargain with myself. At 2:00am I’d tell myself to go to bed. At 2:30am I’d relent. Unable to sleep, I’d continue to write until my eyes would surrender. Only a few hours later I was up again, writing. The words, an insatiable deluge. Distracted at stoplights, I was writing on gum wrappers. In between clients, writing…
I was sure it would end, after each story was told and idea processed.
That was ten years ago.
The remarkable thing is I’m just now realizing that I haven’t stopped.
My sister, a musician. She can’t not be.
My brother, a photographer. He can’t not be.
Me, still writing. How laughable!
The kid who hated to read and write.