FEATURE STORY to my backpack: expectations, stress, and, especially, fear of failure. My pack no longer weighed twenty-five pounds but a ton, and I ran slowly and nervously. My mental narrative until then had been“ This is the most beautiful place I’ ve ever seen.” Now, all I could hear myself say was“ Don’ t mess up.”
I realized that my whole life had been lived with outcomes in mind— my own and my expectations for others. Today, I try to avoid having set expectations. I tell people that I can be counted on to give my best effort, and I ask the same from others. More often than not, whatever expectations one might have had will be met, and frequently they are exceeded.
10. TRIGGER THE ACTIONS YOU WANT For our biggest challenges, sometimes wanting to see it through is not enough to will us forward. What can work is to create a trigger that reminds us to stay the course even during the most difficult moments. I associated all the positive feelings I could into this trip, including beauty, adventure, achievement, camaraderie, personal breakthrough, teamwork, health and spirituality.
Once I became energized by these optimistic feelings, I associated them with a physical symbol of my desert journey, and carried that reminder in my pants pocket at all times. I woke up with it, trained with it, worked with it, and ran the race with it.
When negative thoughts came knocking, just touching the reminder in my pocket would serve to dissipate my fear. I had created my own Pavlovian conditioned response to help get me through each day.
11. CHOOSE YOUR REACTIONS Life hands us all unpredictable, difficult events. Often, it isn’ t the event itself that triggers us to stop or quit; rather, it is the meaning we attach to it. On our third day in the race, the course changed direction, leading runners from the bottom of a canyon up a steep escarpment in the opposite direction. Unbeknownst to us, a runner had moved the race flags and sent us in the wrong direction. When I reached the top of the escarpment and saw that there were no more flags, I didn’ t understand what had happened and felt utterly lost. In effect, I got hijacked by my own reaction. Feeling victimized, I thought,“ Who would do this, and why?”
My negative state of mind precipitated a negative spiral of events. On the way down the escarpment, I fell and was forced to stop, losing even more time as others ran by me. For 15 minutes, I actually quit the race. Eventually, I dusted myself off and finished.
Life hands us reasons to quit almost every day. Thankfully, if we can catch ourselves and consciously choose how we react, a more progressive path can reveal itself.
12. DON’ T DISRESPECT THE FINISH LINE I woke up on the last day of the Gobi having completed six marathons in five days and faced a measly 10-kilometer race to the finish. How hard could that be?“ Done,” I thought.
Instead of moving forward, I decided it was time to relax and celebrate. Near our camp was a beautiful, meandering river, and I couldn’ t resist its siren call. I decided to go clean my gear that had been collecting dust for five days. The gear not being the only thing that had not washed in five days, I jumped in too.
I had checked out emotionally and, thirty minutes later, so did my body. I imploded. My nose started to bleed, my toes got infected, and my body started to shut down. It was as if the karmic universe had seen me in my moment of hubris. Only an aggressive cocktail of antibiotics allowed me to make it to the finish line. After running hard for 240 kilometers, I painfully walked the final ten, pulled by another racer for most of it. I finished almost last and lost precious positions in the overall rankings. In the desert, as in life, smelling a finish line is a euphoric experience, but one not to be mistaken with actually crossing the finish line.
13. PLAN FOR WHAT’ S NEXT After achieving success, it can trigger the type of“ Now what?” reaction that can lead to complacency or even self-sabotage. If this is the case, it’ s time to invent a new Gobi.
In completing our final race, with victory in the bag, I was overwhelmed with having reached my goal. I started reflecting on the four deserts and hundreds of hours of training that had led me up to that point. Almost simultaneously, my teammates and I all got a neural signal that went something like this:“ You’ re done. You can stop competing now!”
It brought me back to our earlier experiences at the Gobi. Our pace had slowed down and our bodies had started to hurt near the end, even though there were still hours of running left. It was time to reframe the race, and invent a new purpose that would allow us to continue to give our best until the end.
As we were slowly overtaken by most of the field, we discussed what we should run the final leg of the race for. My friend shared that, with twenty-five countries represented in the Gobi, we were first among Canadian individuals by the narrowest of margins. As a point of pride, we agreed to run hard for that. Later, the team— all younger than me— noted that I was first amongst all individuals over the age of fifty. So they ran full force for another two hours to help me achieve that distinction. None of these incremental goals carried a medal, yet each gifted us a newfound energy to replace our aches and pains so we could continue with all cylinders firing until the very end.
In life, once we successfully reach a milestone, sometimes we need to redefine how to reach new highs. When our team crossed Antarctica in first place in 2014, we knew one day we would have to return to the race that had gotten away from us: the Sahara. That time is now, and three years later, we are back in training. Sahara, here we come! +
Toronto-based Stefan Danis is CEO of Mandrake Human Capital, which operates executive search, recruitment, coaching, and career transition businesses. His book Gobi Runner is available on Amazon. com. Stefan can be reached at danis @ mandrake. ca.
SPRING 2017 | 19