It was a warm June morning when I laced up my running shoes. One of my good friends signed up for a 50-mile back-country race and asked me to pace for him the last 26 miles.
The race course changes every year and the race organizers were not careful with measuring the distances to each aid station so my 26 mile leg turned into 31 miles.
31 miles!
It was a hard run through mostly back country on rocky trails. Honestly, I don’t understand the appeal at all to run that far, but that friend had been there for me during a pretty difficult time in my life so I was returning the favor.
We joked before the event that ultramarathons are really eating contests with some running in between. The way ultramarathons work is that you have to reach certain aid stations by a specified time or you’re not allowed to continue the race. We were okay on time until we hit the bottom of Bosun’s Hill which was a grueling climb almost 1,000 vertical feet essentially straight up the mountainside. If we were moving a quarter mile per hour I would be surprised.
Following the intense training of that summer and the event itself, I didn’t slow down much. I set a personal running milestone in 2023, ending the year with more than 1,400 miles under my soles.
In many respects, those were pretty uncomfortable years. I ran 200 miles in December 2023 when it’s typically below 30 degrees in the early morning hours. I had to work through multiple injuries sustained from running too far and too hard on worn out muscles.
Since then, however, I’ve basically given up running. Stress and anxiety have been my go to excuses for not exercising. It’s interesting that running used to be my primary stress relief until the stress got so bad that I couldn’t deal with it by running anymore. So naturally, stopping running was the correct choice, right?
Wrong!
Before I go any further, I don’t want to minimize the impact of mental health on everyday things like exercise. There have been days in the last year when I’ve slept very few hours a night for sometimes weeks on end and have been in survival mode. Exercising and self-care were fleeting thoughts and perceived luxuries I didn’t have time for amidst everything else I was trying to do.
Exempting times of illness and other legitimate struggles, a hallmark of Western society is how hard many people work. In fact, did you know that the United States is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t have federally-mandated paid vacation or holidays? We also tend to work more hours per year than other countries.
For years, I’ve used my employer as a scapegoat for many of the troubles in my life. I’ve worked for companies to which I’ve given heart and soul, and I’ve complained loudly and often about the situation.
The irony: I always got comfortable with my situation.
Wake up. Go to work. Work too many hours. Come home. Do it again the next day. If I wasn’t working, I was wasting my wife’s time talking to her about work or complaining to my kids about my boss.
Five weeks ago, I quit my job to start a software development business. It’s something I’ve been dreaming and scheming about for more than 15 years. Now that it’s here, the stress and anxiety of running my own business and being responsible for my own employees has been a wake-up call.
Make no mistake, there have been few events in my life that have excited me as much as this opportunity, but it’s also made me realize that I was too comfortable with my comfort in having a full-time job working for someone else.
People draw lots of analogies in life to marathons. It should be noted, however, that even the most extreme ultramarathons last fewer than 60 days. So many other things in life require deliberate, consistent effort akin to running a marathon, but the effort is required day after day for months or even years.
And when you look at the amount of effort required to accomplish certain things, like learning a new programming language, they start to look a lot like Bosun’s Hill.
I think that’s one of the predominant features of unstarted projects and goals. We look at them as though they need to be accomplished all at once. And, when what we really want isn’t in alignment with the goal, we’re not likely to make long-term progress.
Looking at Bosun’s Hill, we had a choice: give up there and walk to the nearest road where someone could pick us up or push hard enough to make it to the aid station. When we decided to forge ahead, we knew significant discomfort would be our companion. Several times, as we stopped to rest, we cursed the race organizers for putting such a difficult climb so far into the race.
We pressed on as quickly as our fatigued legs would go. Aid station eight was just beyond the crest of the hill, nestled in a beautiful valley high in the Wasatch Mountains above Provo. We made it with only minutes to spare, dropped our packs, and after helping my friend sit down, I walked to the table to get small Dixie cups filled with soda, a few handfuls of M&Ms, and these oversized, heavily salted, dumpling-like potato-and-pasta creations. After 20 miles on my feet, they were one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten.
Growth is always accompanied by a degree of discomfort, even if the discomfort is minor. Rapid growth often requires significant discomfort and considerable sacrifice. The other option, however, is complacency.
For the most part, I was really good at my job. I helped write grants and close deals for clients that totaled more than $50 million during my time with the company.
Did that mean there was no room left for me to grow? Of course not. There are opportunities to grow in everything we do, even the things we’re exceptional at. But, the work I did for the company was often not interesting to me or challenging in the way I like to be challenged. I let myself become complacent because I stopped actively engaging in the process of learning new things. Couple that with the overwhelm of having way too much responsibility for one person. It’s evident it wasn’t a recipe for long-term job satisfaction or success.
Growth is sometimes as easy as crossing an empty street and sometimes as difficult as Bosun’s Hill, and we get to do both (and everything in between) over and over again. Whatever you choose to do, it’s probably going to hurt a little as you get outside of your comfort zone. Most of us give up most of the time. However, there are those times when we have the fortitude to stick with it until we start to see results. Seeing results builds momentum until it feels a bit more like the first mile of a walk on flat ground than a slog up a mountainside.
Five weeks into running my own business with one of my best friends, I’m learning that a measure of discomfort isn’t something to be afraid of; it’s something to be viewed with a sense of gratitude because it often means you’re growing.
What’s your Bosun’s Hill? What aid station are you trying to reach? And most importantly, are you willing to take the first step, knowing it might be the hardest climb of your life?
Lace up your shoes. The aid station is waiting.
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