Three Thoughts

On climbing mountains, Courtney Dauwalter + Father's Day

Good afternoon, friends! ☀️ I’m departing from my usual publication cadence of an essay a week, followed by my list of race recommendations, as I have had a jumble of things on my mind and thought I’d share them.

So, here goes…

How am I approaching my running? Like climbing a mountain, or like a daily practice?

The May running challenge that I and many of you participated in last month was an eye-opener for me in a lot of ways. Even though I’ve run for years and years now, I’d gotten off-track with my own running, with my regular practice of being in tune with my body. The months leading up to May were pretty sporadic for me; I only got in a handful of runs in April, and February and March were pretty much the same. But after I committed to running with you all, something changed for me in a significant way. I didn’t reach my goal of 100 miles — I ran 81.6, according to Strava — but so many things improved for me: my mindset, my commitment, and my health.

So what changed? It dawned on me that, in the past, I’ve approached running a bit like mountain climbing. I put a lot of effort into training to get to the top of the mountain, and then once I have, I allow myself to rest a little too long. (Maybe way too long!) What that means is, by the time I’m ready to run again, I’ve allowed myself to get to a place physically where it’s hard to motivate myself to get started again. But last month was completely different for me; I didn’t expect too much out of any single run. I just ran the miles I needed to run for that day, knowing I’d be back the following day to pick up where I left off. It was a daily practice, in a way a kind of meditation, so that each run was “enough,” because I knew there’d be many more coming behind it.

It’s a completely different mental approach to trying to do big things — that’s what stands out to me about it. Almost as if, the way to try to do something big and challenging is not to think about it at all; yes, you do need to get started, and point yourself in the direction of the thing you want to accomplish. But the daily effort is what gets you there, little by little — not the obsessing about the mountain you hope to eventually summit. That’s what (I hope) I’ve learned, deep in my bones.

Courtney Dauwalter’s approach to ‘the work’

My friend

Mike Sowden

, who writes the wonderful, fascinating newsletter

Everything Is Amazing

, shared with me a fascinating thought he clipped from Oliver Burkeman’s old column at the Guardian newspaper, which formed the basis for his best-selling 2021 book Four Thousand Weeks:

The capacity to tolerate minor discomfort is a superpower. It’s shocking to realise how readily we set aside even our greatest ambitions in life, merely to avoid easily tolerable levels of unpleasantness. You already know it won’t kill you to endure the mild agitation of getting back to work on an important creative project; initiating a difficult conversation with a colleague; asking someone out; or checking your bank balance – but you can waste years in avoidance nonetheless. (This is how social media platforms flourish: by providing an instantly available, compelling place to go at the first hint of unease.)

I was thinking of that as I was listening to a podcast interview Rich Roll did with famed ultra runner Courtney Dauwalter two summers ago, in which she shared how her approach to what she calls the “pain cave” has changed since she first began running 100- and 200-mile-long races several years ago:

Dauwalter: “For me, I enjoy that place we get to go to in these ultras where it hurts really bad, I think that’s pretty cool. And it’s gotta help [that] not avoiding it, but wanting to get to it, has got to be factored in there somehow.”

Roll (sounding skeptical): “Yeah. Sure…”

Dauwalter laughs, prompting Roll to say, “let’s go a little bit deeper.”

And she replies: “So, I call it the pain cave, that place. I guess probably four or five years ago, I viewed the pain cave as this place that you should try to put off as long as possible in a race. Like, make your pain cave be as far away from you as you can, and if you arrive to it, then you just sit in it and try to survive. But in the past couple years — it’s just a mindset, right? It’s all in our heads, this thing — it’s been the place I want to get to.

So, changing it to a place that I get to celebrate that I made it there, and then that’s where the work actually happens. So, making the pain cave bigger is how I view it, instead of pushing the pain cave away. And I think our minds are so powerful, so even changing the story line makes it a whole different game.”

Roll: “So what is the script that you flip when you’re in that headspace, and it’s getting really hard?”

Dauwalter: “It’s like, perfect — this is what we wanted, now we get to actually do the hard work of making the cave bigger. It’s like picturing a chisel and making tunnels in my pain cave in my brain.”

What clicked for Dauwalter, she adds, is that she found a way to tell herself a different story about “the place where it hurts so bad — before, it was about surviving it, and now it’s about, ‘we made it here, and now we work.’”

The “work” she describes is something I think all of us find, or can find, on the run — whether it’s something about ourselves, about problem-solving our way through pain, or really anything. Dauwalter sees it as a privilege to get to spend her life doing this, and that she does it in such a relatable way makes it possible for us to imagine ourselves alongside her, on a similar journey ourselves, I think.

It’s something Burkeman touches on in his column, too:

“It’s possible, instead, to make a game of gradually increasing your capacity for discomfort, like weight training at the gym. When you expect that an action will be accompanied by feelings of irritability, anxiety or boredom, it’s usually possible to let that feeling arise and fade, while doing the action anyway. The rewards come so quickly, in terms of what you’ll accomplish, that it soon becomes the more appealing way to live.”

On Father’s Day, learning how to manage oneself

I think I’ve shared this with you already, but my daughter is going off to college this fall. We’re incredibly excited for her; happy, anxious, thrilled, sad, looking forward, but also doing lots of looking backward right now. What we can’t change, however, is that she’s eighteen now — our job of parenting with her, while never truly finished, is mostly done. We’ll of course always be there for her, but our relationship will change — and keep changing, no doubt, the older she gets.

But we’re still in the middle of raising our nine-year-old son, which means the challenges of parenting are still very much on our minds. The older he gets, the more amazed I am by him; his creativity, his talent in drawing, his enthusiasm for football that’s here one week and gone the next, followed by another equally obsessive enthusiasm that… fades later on. It’s as if you get a new child every year, if you think about it.

This has been on my mind, especially after listening to this episode of The Next Level podcast with author Ryan Holiday, in which he and one of the co-hosts (Jonathan V. Last) share what they’ve learned about parenting. What Last, who has four children, had to say about teaching kids about failure really caught my attention:

“Look, the thing which I focus most on is teaching the management of failure. And that is something that I did not do well with, and I got very lucky get. When I in general, I think most people wind up hitting some form of catastrophic failure in their lives. And when if it comes too early, then you don’t learn anything from it. And if comes too late, then maybe it wrecks your life.

Right? I mean, if if catastrophic failure hits you at like thirty five, it can be hard to to recover from it. There’s a sweet spot. Where if you fail at a really large level, you can learn from it and make it productive. I was very bad at that and something I’m cognizant of and it’s something I’ve really thought a lot about with my kids is trying to sort of talk them up to about failure and try to help them be prepared to manage failure in productive ways when it does come to their lives.”

I’m not so interested in whether Last is right or wrong about when failure enters your life, and if it’s truly hard to recover from it at 35, or 47, or 22, or whenever. What I am interested in is how we learn to handle it, how we learn to regulate ourselves and manage our emotions, when things go wrong for us — in big ways and small.

To be honest, I’m 52 and I’m still working on this! (I’m not kidding!) What pains me as a father is seeing my youngest struggle with his emotions, just like I did; inevitably, bad things happen to him, even as young as he is. A kid is mean to him, or something adults do seems unfair. What I wonder is, how do I model for him the way to handle this? Not necessarily to come out unscathed by it or emerge somehow victorious, but to deal with painful experiences in ways that we don’t end up sabotaging ourselves, and our peace of mind?

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle is credited with saying: “Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy.” That saying has stuck with me since the first time I heard it, because it implies that we have a decision, a choice to make, when something bad happens to us.

That’s not to say I know magically the solution to all of life’s problems now, but it’s a good place to start.

That’s all I have for now — how was your weekend? How are things in your running/life? Feel free to share your thoughts on any of the above in the comments — I always love hearing what you have to say.

Your friend,

— Terrell