What happens when you sign up for something hard? You build a story around it. You pick a number. You decide in advance what the finish is going to look like. And then the course corrects you. Sometimes before you are even through the first mile.
I ran a Spartan Ultra this past weekend. Fifty kilometers. Sixty obstacles. A proving grounds in Ohio that my buddy John and I drove out to together. Off-road Jeep trails, hunting grounds, open fields, muddy trenched paths, water crossings, barbed wire. The ultra runners went first, purple bibs on our chests, and every time another runner or a spectator passed you on the course, they called it out:
“Great job, Ultra. Respect, Ultra.”
I did not expect that. I did not expect to feel the weight of that kind of community on a course in the middle of Ohio, at 6:45 in the morning, starting in freezing cold water, heading into something none of us could fully see. But it was there. And it mattered more than I would have predicted.
I had a goal. Under eight hours. I pulled that number out of nowhere, built it off my normal mile pace, and it felt right. No real data. No course experience. Just a man and a number that had not met the terrain yet.
The number met the terrain at the first real obstacle.
Horizontal bars. Eight feet off the ground. You step up on a small platform and swing across. I decided to skip the first bar and jump straight to the second to build momentum. I grabbed it, swung backward, and fell. Landed on my back. Twisted my knee on impact.
I got up. Hit the bell. Kept running. Within five minutes the burning hit. The side of my knee, sharp and sustained, like someone was holding a hot iron against a tendon. I kept running. It got worse. Around mile five, running was off the table.
So what did I do?
I got quiet. I stopped arguing with the race I was no longer running and found the one I actually was. Three and a half miles per hour was the maximum speed I could move without excruciating pain. So that became the race. One mile. One step. 3.5 miles per hour. No clock.
The obstacle was not blocking the path. The obstacle was the path.
Here is what the rest of the course showed me.
About two-thirds of the way through, I hit a water crossing that looked like a calm, shallow pond. Clear on the surface. Twenty-five feet across. No warning from anyone about what was underneath. About six inches below the water line was a layer of decomposed foliage. Mulch, tree branches, everything that had been rotting beneath a clean surface for who knows how long. And the mud under all of it had the consistency of silicone paste. It grabbed my feet with every step and pulled. I was up to my neck before I fully understood what I had walked into.
Panic moved through me. The real kind. The kind that says this is too much and there has to be a way back.
I kept moving. I clawed forward. I came out the other side covered from head to toe in red, sticky mud. I squeezed it off my arm with my bare hand. Then I kept going.
That crossing was not an obstacle on the way to the race. That crossing was the race.
This week’s lesson: Your course will not wait for your plan. Your plan has to meet your course.
What the Course Showed Me
At registration the night before the race, I met a man who was fifty-five years old. His wife is a flight attendant. He uses her travel benefits to fly into Spartan races around the country. He had flown in the day before, was running the ultra the next morning, and would be on a flight out that same afternoon. A UPS driver. On his time off, he finds a race, shows up, and finishes. He had done them all over the country.
Did he look like someone trying to win? No. Did he look like someone chasing a number? No. He looked like a man who had made a decision about what kind of man he was going to be, and who showed up to keep that promise to himself, wherever the race happened to be that week.
I did not stop thinking about him the whole time I was out there.
There were people on that course who were not in incredible shape. There were people who were clearly going to be out there for a long time. And every one of them had made the same decision: I am going to finish. That is the only goal. I am going to finish.
I took my earbuds out about two hours in. Stopped the music. I let myself be in it:
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The weight of the sandbag I was carrying for a mile across uneven terrain.
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The section of telephone pole we had to roll under barbed wire through the mud.
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The mud pit that grabbed my feet and tried to pull me down.
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The purple bibs moving past me in both directions, and every time: “Great job, Ultra. Respect, Ultra.”
Something about that I want men to hear. When you do a hard thing, you are not only doing it for yourself. The man watching you carry the weight on the course, or at the office, or at home, he is taking something from it. You give people permission. You show them what is possible by refusing to quit. That is not something you intend to do. It just happens when you keep your word to yourself in front of other people.
I am deeply sore today. Everything. And I want to stay sore for another day or two. I have a built-in forgetter. When something hard is over, I forget how hard it was faster than I should. The soreness is proof. Fifty kilometers. Sixty obstacles. A knee that could not run and a race I had to relearn how to run. My mother was praying for me the entire time. My son Bryson was running his own race that same weekend.
The soreness is not a cost. It is the point.
Men, doing hard things is not entirely about you. Every time you choose to finish when you could stop, you build something in yourself that the people around you can feel. Your kids can feel it. Your team can feel it. Your men can feel it. You give them permission to do hard things too. Not because you told them to. Because you showed them you would.
Next, This Week’s NFN: Commit to the Finish Before You’re Ready
An NFN — a Non-F#cking-Negotiable — is something you commit to doing one day at a time, for as long as it serves you. Not a goal. Not a resolution. The smallest unit of honest discipline you can make to the man you are working to become.
I did not know what fifty kilometers was going to ask of me when I signed up. I signed up before I could commit to a specific outcome. I committed to the finish. That was the whole thing.
One of the men I work with set an NFN about six months ago that had nothing to do with a number. No outcome target. No performance measure. One thing he was going to do every morning before the world got to him, for as long as it served him. He did not miss a day. Over six months, something shifted in him that a goal never could have produced. Because a goal ends. An NFN continues.
And the men around him felt it before he told any of them what he was doing. That is the ripple. One man keeping his word to himself, day after day, raises the standard for the men who are watching. Not because he is trying to inspire anyone. Because he showed up.
Your challenge this week:
Identify one hard thing you have been postponing because you are not confident in the number. Not the time. Not the outcome. Just the finish.
Commit to showing up for it. Let the course teach you what it needs to teach you.
That’s it.
What’s Coming Next
You have read or listened this far. That means something to me.
This newsletter exists for one reason: to help men build the direction and discipline that achievement alone will never give them. One man at a time.
The Insurgent CEO is in motion. More on that soon. And if you are standing at the start line of something hard, or you have been carrying a weight you have not told anyone about, I am an open door. Reach out. Tell me where you are.
Keep climbing your summit.
Thanks,
~Bill
