As with any big effort, you gotta divide the thing up into manageable chunks, put your head down…and grind away. For example, last week I tagged along for a monster tour with friends. A half hour from the car I realized I’d forgotten my food–imbecile! Too far in to go back, I mooched two granola bars and signed on for the ride. Ten hours, 6500 feet up, 8K down, and I limped out to the trailhead dehydrated and sweaty. The last hour I kept telling myself, “You’re only half empty.” I sure as hell didn’t feel half empty. I was shattered!
Why that particular mantra? Years ago I read a New York Times Sunday magazine piece on Slovenian cyclist, Jure Robic. He’d won several of the world’s hardest ultramarathon cycling events, including the Race Across America and Le Tour Direct–a contest in which competitors race a Tour de France-style course as quickly as possible (in his case in 2005, 7 days, 19 hours for a 3000-km loop). Keep in mind these events were less than a month apart. Robic was an expert at going way, way, way past the limit, mentally and physically. He knew how to go deep.
Scientists tell us when the body screams “I’m done!”, you’re often only “half empty.” In Daniel Coyle’s interesting Times piece above, he writes, “Fatigue, the researchers argue, is less an objective event than a subjective emotion — the brain’s clever, self-interested attempt to scare you into stopping. The way past fatigue, then, is to return the favor: to fool the brain by lying to it, distracting it or even provoking it.”
So when the going gets tough give your brain the finger (provocation), tell yourself, “I’m totally up to the task (often times an outright lie!), or do the Homer Simpson and think about beer, boobies, and donuts (distraction). A triathlon of desperate compensation.
Mostly I stick to reminding myself, “I’m only half empty,” whether it’s at an interminable hour at The Alpine Training Center, during a long (nearly foodless) ski tour, or over the course of years in trying to get my international certification in mountain guiding. So now, with one more course and three-day exam between me and full “aspirant” status–bestowed by the American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA), which is our member organization to the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations (IFMGA)–I keep reminding myself to just shut up, watch and learn, guide all summer, and keep grinding away: I’m only half empty.
In September I’ll take that final aspirant course and exam (in the alpine discipline)…and then go for my final exam in the rock discipline in October. Tons to do, plenty to learn, too much to practice. After that, the winter will be all skiing–my final ski exam is most likely somewhere in Canada in April, 2014–and then spring and summer turn to the alpine. That will be my final exam, September 2014, in the Cascades, most likely.
It’s been a long, time-consuming and expensive process just to get here and the hardest bits are still ahead…but I keep telling myself I’m only half empty. And if that doesn’t work, well, there are always…beer, boobies, and donuts.
