A week from tomorrow, I’m going to wake up at 5:00 am, even though it will be a Saturday and I’m the sleeping late on weekends kind of a girl. I’ll only let myself drink one cup of coffee. I’ll eat toast, a banana, and almond butter, and put on SPF 100 sunscreen because my skin is the color of Elmer’s glue.

And then I’m going to run 31 miles (a 50k) up and down some mountains in Georgia, where it will be 85 degrees with 90% humidity, if I’m lucky.

Training for my first ultramarathon has been a whole new enterprise, something I couldn’t have conceptualized even two years ago. It’s given me sore muscles in places I didn’t know I had muscles. I had one training run during the “shelter in place” part of the pandemic quarantine where I was nowhere near any open store with a public restroom and had to find some bushes in a suburb to pee behind (I’m not telling you where). It’s pushed my limits and my bargaining power, because there’s nothing like the bargaining that happens when you’re 16 miles into a 20-mile training run and you aren’t close enough to the end to feel optimistic but you’re far enough into the run to feel like it wouldn’t be that big of a cheat if you stop 4 miles early, so you talk yourself into finishing every step of those last few miles. As in, every single step you say, “Come on, you got this,” and then you answer yourself, “The hell I do, also I hate you.”

This is me after running 20 miles. Don’t let the smile fool you. I felt like death.

Some day, I’ll write about why I decided running 31 miles all at one time was a good idea, probably after I finally figure out why I decided running 31 miles all at one time was a good idea. But for now, I’m just going to share with you 7 truths you should know about tackling that Next Big Thing, whether that Next Big Thing is starting your own business or losing 120 pounds or getting your black belt or learning how to make pasta from scratch. I came to all of these during one or more of my gajillion hours of running miles very slowly and badly to prepare for running a gajillion more hours slowly and badly.

I believe that these things are true:

  1. You are going to suck at first. Everyone does. I grew up with this idiot notion that if I wasn’t immediately good at something new that I tried, that thing was not meant for me. This is nonsense. With outrageously rare exceptions, people only get good at something after being very bad at it first. Get this in your head, and alter your expectations.
  2. There are no shortcuts. I wish, dear Odin, I wish there were shortcuts. You cannot know how many shortcuts to everything I have tried. I have attempted shortcuts in weight loss, fitness, therapy, education, home improvement, and a whole host of hobbies. I tried meditation shortcuts (did you know this was even a thing?). I even spent time trying to figure out how to train for a whole marathon with no training runs longer than 9 miles. Every reputable book I read on running was like, “You’ve got to increase the mileage you run,” and I was like, “We’ll just see about that,” but they were right, and I was wrong. You cannot hack your way out of the hard thing. In the immortal words of J.R.R. Tolkein, “Short cuts make long delays.”
  3. Progress is not a straight line. There are all sorts of side roads and false starts and cul de sacs that you at first thought were thoroughfares. Writing your epic poem or doing that oil painting of your French bulldog might be going magnificently one day, and you will think to yourself, “I am amazing! I have cracked the code, and all of the universe and its abundant riches are mine!” and then the next day you’ll swear you took stupid pills or grew extra thumbs. Those setback days are important, too. They train you to keep going when it feels rotten. It gives you discipline, and discipline is where you get the good stuff.
  1. Failure is part of the process. Professional basketball players have bad games; professional cyclists choke on the Tour de France. The best authors produce some stinker books (The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling, anyone?). Mozart wrote some pieces that were snooze-fests and some songs by iconic rock bands are just crap. It does not matter who you are, nobody bats 1,000. You will mess up. You will accidentally call your boss “mom” or bang your funny bone in the middle of an important presentation or have stage fright in that big audition or take stupid in a test or have a truly terrible training run. Failure only takes you down if it is a) permanent, meaning you don’t get back up and try again, or b) if you don’t learn from it. Fail up, fail forward.
  2. You get to care about what you care about; you don’t owe anyone an explanation. I don’t know that I will ever understand fully why I have to run. It is, quite obviously, unconnected to any aptitude that I have. I just know that when I run, when it’s hard and it demands everything from me and then I give everything and it asks for more, I feel more alive and more powerful and more connected to the wonder of All That Is than I feel doing anything else, ever. I run because I need to. I don’t know what you feel that way about, but whether it’s romance novels or making the world’s best cupcake or spreadsheets or the hadron collider or making kites, you get to care about it, and find joy in it. It doesn’t matter if it’s for everyone. It’s for you.
  1. Doing hard things is better than doing easy things. I will absolutely go to the wall on this one. Drinking a full liter of coke while eating oreos is easy. Watching Netflix is easy. Drunk dialing your ex is easy. And you should not feel at all proud of yourself for doing any of these things. Doing something that challenges you, whether it’s showing up at the library and admitting you have been carrying an $85 fine that you’ve been too cheap to pay for the last 8 years and you’re ready to pony up, or sitting down and making a budget even though every fiber of your being screams when thinking about money, or going to your boss and explaining why you deserve that promotion – is hard. And this is why people often don’t do those things, and this is why their lives tend to suck. There is nothing more satisfying than knowing you handled something extremely difficult well. And that success builds on itself, and leads to other success.
  2. Audiobooks make everything better. This is the secret sauce for a long run. I assume it works for literally anything. Can I recommend a space opera with gratuitous violence? An extremely melodramatic murder mystery? Or a regency romance with a suitably aloof hero and a fair amount of intrigue? Just let me know.
Laura the Intractable Mental Discipline, Motivation, Persistence ,
Your Why
The Joy of Last