Life is an evolving mystery and so are we. One good reason to train as athletes is to work through our many layers and to more fully express ourselves. As I write this on my 43rd birthday and reflect back on my life, I’ll share some of my personal experience with this.
Since high school, I’ve been pretty compulsive about training. Despite my training drive, much of the time I’ve actually had a fairly shallow understanding of why I was training. Occasionally I became fixated on some competitive outcome and ramped up and adapted my training a bit, but my link between training and competing was actually fairly weak. I have generally trained with just as much enthusiasm and consistency in the years that I didn’t participate in any competitive activities. I’ve always wanted to live to my fullest potential and having stamina and muscle strength seemed to be part of that. Plus, I’ve always just liked training. Training was the practice that kept me happier, less anxious, and more focused and less restless during the remainder of my day.
My athletic inspirations started pulling me increasingly towards more intense experiences in nature, occasionally causing me to quit secure law firm jobs to follow them. Increasingly I also started replacing gym work with more outdoor activities (which I approached with similar methodical consistency and obsession as I applied in the gym). This has led me to a deeper understanding of what has likely been driving my training. What I am discovering is that pursuing intense challenges in nature provides a mirror for us to confront ourselves, gives us opportunities to find pathways through our inner obstacles, and helps our own unique inspiration blossom.
The further that I have ventured beyond the paved roads and trance-like rituals of modern life, the more I have found this human experience to be wild, powerful and deeply mysterious. It seems the true purpose of my training has been to bring me into nature so that I could find the person that I wanted to share with the world and learn to trust him. There has always been a tremendous amount of anxiety and insecurity standing in the way of me doing things my own way. The wilder and more challenging the athletic inspirations that I have pursued, the more eccentric, creative, and happier I have become in general and the more that I have aligned my life with my values. I am now starting to believe that a society that cuts itself off from nature inhibits human development and blocks people from knowing and sharing their truest selves.
Nature is a kaleidoscope of constant life, death, growth, transformation, and expression in which all growth is supported by nature and all other life. To think that as humans we can fundamentally alter this aspect of our nature actually seems pretty absurd. On the surface, it may appear that the substance of our lives is different, that we are somehow immune to this reality, or that we have somehow managed to conquer nature. With the complicated structures of our brains we are certainly good at manipulating nature, at filtering or denying reality, and at building walls. Underneath our perceptions, however, we are just like all living beings existing in nature’s process of growth and expression.
In pursuing outdoor challenges, we can find messages and pathways to deal with our personal struggles. This is, for example, something I feel I have gained from 24 hour mountain bike races. These races tend to throw a lot at us personally, especially at night as we get lonelier, colder, and more exhausted. I started racing 24 hour solo events because it felt inspiringly outrageous. In 2010, my friend Peter and I decided to each register in the solo category of the 24 Hours of Moab and ride it together. I was a decent mountain biker but I had no idea if I could complete such a challenge. I hadn’t done anything even close and the longest ride I had ever done was probably about six hours. With some EMTs at the event site, a bailout possibility every 15 miles, and a friend to ride with, we figured we probably wouldn’t die. We finished the race feeling like we had energy left in the tank, I was massively inspired about human potential and by the powerful experience of biking through the desert all night, and my eight year odyssey into the quirky athletic dimension of 24 hour mountain biking began.
Within a couple years I had some strong performances and finished on some race podiums and I found myself starting to obsess about performance and competitive results. That wasn’t bringing me more happiness and I generally knew that those things didn’t really matter, at least not on the level I was thinking about them. Rationally, I understood that it is actually insignificant where we rank or how fast we can go in some amateur cycling event, that winning our inner game is more valuable, that I was past my athletic prime with a full time job, and that riding a bike all day and night was itself a compelling and interesting challenge. However, there’s a deep part of my wiring that tells me I need to perform and excel in order to have value as a person, and this voice is frequently stronger than rationality. I know this voice well; it has been driving me in many areas of my life. I’ve realized that in many ways it is a form of insecurity that causes me to look at what other people are doing. It is also a big part of what keeps me from being fully myself and living on my own terms.
My experiences during these all night ultra endurance challenges have helped me wrestle with this part of myself. These adventures have brought me experience that is far deeper and more compelling than anything that can be measured with a stopwatch or at a finish line. It has really changed my perspective on competition to face my own smallness under a sea of stars. I have gained a powerful confidence in myself and my own path as I have emerged feeling strong, joyous, and resurgent in the sunrise after surviving dark and grueling nights. It's taken a bit of mental effort to separate what I loved about 24 hour racing from what was holding me back, but the experiences seem to have changed me and made a strong difference in my life. I still deal with the competitive and comparing part of myself but I’ve become a lot stronger at managing it.
As helpful as it can be to read, think rationally, listen, and talk about our mental struggles, for me, confronting my personal challenges directly in nature makes the insight that I gain powerfully and viscerally real in a way that reading and talking can’t do. Other people can help guide us, but ultimately we can’t send other people to learn ourselves and to confront our personal hangups. When I perceive insight in nature as I am in a deeply challenged state, I can truly use and apply it in my life. I often emerge from certain challenges ready to do things in life that I wasn’t ready to do before. Certain experiences also come back to me sometimes as flashbacks as I confront other challenges in my life. That’s actually been helping me right now with getting Indigenous Strength off the ground.
Although I have spent many years packing my head full of information and skills, that path didn’t teach me much about myself. Learning to be myself and finding purpose in my life have followed an entirely different training path. As good as I became at the reading, talking, and debating approach to education, the most personally meaningful learning that I have done in my life and my personal breakthroughs have come through direct outdoor experience. On some level, this seems so obvious and intuitive. The path of development of all living beings on Earth for billions of years has been a process in nature. Why would I be any different?
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