015: Pre-Race Doubts

This time three weeks, I’ll be attempting the longest ultramarathon I’ve undertaken to date (here’s hoping that by Sunday afternoon, we might actually be finished.)

As you might imagine, an extensive training plan and accompanying spreadsheet have preceded my sitting here with a cup of tea, studying course maps and aid station notes while trying to turn custard creams into edible points of reference for the big day(s).

This week marked my final heavy week of training. From here, the mileage begins to wind down and the focus shifts toward arriving at the start line as rested and prepared as possible.

Reflecting on the road travelled thus far, I’d say that aside from the aforementioned spreadsheet (you should see it by the way, it’s colour-coded and everything), the greatest tool at my disposal throughout this training block has been my own doubt.

For months, doubt has been useful.

It woke me up before alarms. It followed me out into rain and dark evenings, whispering reminders about the consequences of complacency. It sharpened me and kept me honest.

But now, with the work largely done and my mind and body requiring rest and recovery, that same doubt is beginning to lose its purpose and turn inward.

My greatest weapon has nothing left to strike but the person wielding it.

I’m very accustomed to solving uncertainty through effort. But these final weeks of race preparation rob me of the ability to negotiate with fear through work.

Training offers simplicity:

run,
eat,
recover,
repeat.

Rest, however, demands trust.

And trust is often harder than physical effort.

The stillness arrives suddenly, and the mind, now afforded too much room to wander, begins interrogating every detail for weakness.

That being said, I’ve run enough of these races now to know that when the time to act finally arrives, the body and mind adapt remarkably well. Problems are solved incrementally. You eat when you need to eat. You reach checkpoint after checkpoint and keep moving forward.

But in these quiet weeks beforehand, my imagination becomes untethered. Like Macbeth standing before visions of a future not yet realised, I find myself haunted less by reality than by possibility.

“Present fears,” he observes while contemplating the murder of King Duncan, “are less than horrible imaginings.”

As I sit scribbling this, though, I’m trying to remember that doubt is not necessarily evidence of unpreparedness. I have to imagine that those who understand the magnitude of difficult things are rarely entirely calm before them.

The runners I admire most still doubt themselves before big races. Experience does not seem to grant immunity from uncertainty; if anything, it sharpens your awareness of what the challenge before you truly entails.

A 108-mile ultramarathon should command respect. To stand before something enormous and feel nothing at all would probably be stranger than the anxiety I’m currently wrestling with.

The lesson, I think, in all of this is that the final phase of training isn’t about building fitness, but trusting it.

And maybe the discomfort I’m feeling in this quiet before the storm has less to do with reduced mileage than it does with shaking hands with the fact that the outcome is no longer entirely within my control.

At some point, preparation has to give way to trust.

All that really remains now, I suppose, is to arrive honestly at the start line, content in the knowledge that I’ve prepared as best I could…

…and let the play unfold as it will.