Flow State

Last post on pre-race nervousness.  Promise

I did not sleep well last night. Not even a little. I woke up this morning stressed to the hilt about tomorrow’s 70.3.

I have spent weeks telling myself this is just a supported training day. I have said I don’t care about my time. I have said I am not trying to PR. I have said I have trained well, have a better fueling strategy, have a pacing plan, and the weather is going to be much better than the 85-degree death march I experienced riding the course.

Apparently, my Chimp brain did not receive the memo.

Fortunately, three things pulled me out of my mood.

First, coffee on the back deck. It was sunny and mild. The backyard was full of flowers and plants. Birds were out. It was one of those mornings where you think, “Oh yeah, the world is actually a pretty nice place.”

Second, while reading the newspaper, I came across a quote from the late artist David Hockney:

“The world is very beautiful if you look at it but most people don’t look very much, do they? They scan the ground in front of them so they can walk, but they don’t really look at things incredibly well, with an intensity….I do.”

That hit me.

Sure, it was reminiscent of the famous quote from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Tomorrow, I am going to look around.

I am going to notice the river. I am going to notice the wooded areas and the farm fields. I am going to appreciate being outside on a day when I am healthy enough to swim, bike, and run for hours.

I am not going to spend the entire race thinking, “This sucks. I hurt. Everyone is passing me.”

Because yes, everyone will probably pass me.

I will come out of the water near the front and then spend the next several hours being passed by people who are better cyclists and runners. That has always bothered me. Tomorrow I will try to look at it differently.

Look at all these people doing something difficult. Look at all these people pushing themselves. Look at all the family members and friends standing around all day cheering for someone they love.

And yes, to be completely honest, there may be moments where I think, “Damn, those are some nice legs.” I am only human, and triathlon women are hot.

The third thing that helped was asking my wife for her opinion. And if you know anything about my wife, asking her opinion means you are definitely going to get it.

Her message was essentially:

“Give your balls a tug.”

A very sophisticated psychological intervention. Part of it was simply: stop navel-gazing. Do the thing. If it goes well, great. If it goes badly, nobody cares.

The other part was her reminding me of everything I have and everything I have done. It was a little bit of Clarence showing George Bailey what his life means in It’s a Wonderful Life.

It still came with “give your balls a tug,” but the message was the same.

She also reminded me of all the parts of tomorrow that have nothing to do with the race.

I get to drive to Rockford with my daughter, who is excited to go to the expo and watch me race. I get to have dinner with my wife and daughter at a restaurant I used to go to as a child. I get to sit in a hotel room watching bad television with them. Tomorrow night, regardless of my time, I get to have deep-dish pizza with my family and then go home and watch hockey with my wife and son.

That sounds like a pretty damn good day.

So I am in a much better place now. I have rested. I have trained. I have a nutrition and hydration plan. I have a pacing strategy. The weather looks cool, which is huge because I hate racing in the heat.

It will be what it will be.

My bad mood will not make me faster. It will not make me stronger. It will not make the race hurt less.

Which brings me to the final quote that keeps coming to mind. In Bridge of Spies, when James Donovan asks Rudolf Abel whether he is worried that the Soviets will shoot him when he is returned, Abel responds:

“Would it help?”

Exactly. Worrying won’t help.  Being anxious won’t help.  As they say, the hay is in the barn.  I have my race pace plan, my nutrition dialed in, and I did what I needed to do.

Tomorrow, I will swim, bike, and run.

I will suffer some.

I will probably complain.

I will definitely look around.

And I will try to remember that I am very lucky to be there.

It feels somewhat absurd to be sitting at a coffee shop reading the Bhagavad-Gita and thinking, “You know what? This ancient spiritual wisdom about duty, suffering, and the human condition really applies to me and my recreational triathlon.”

To be clear, Arjuna was standing on a battlefield, looking across at relatives, teachers, and friends, facing a conflict that would shape the future of a kingdom.

I am looking at a race course in Rockford and thinking, “That run is going to be really unpleasant.”

The stakes are not exactly the same. And yet, the deeper problem is surprisingly familiar.

For the last two weeks, I have been anxious about this race. Not because I have not trained. I have completed several 70.3 races. I have ridden the course twice. I have swum the distance. I have put in the hours.

The truth is simpler: I am afraid of suffering.

Not the dramatic movie-soundtrack kind of suffering. The very ordinary kind that arrives around mile eight and a half of a half-marathon when your legs begin negotiating a ceasefire, your brain starts offering very reasonable arguments for stopping, and every person who passes you seems to be having a wonderful day.

(They are probably not.)

The Bhagavad-Gita has a remarkably practical answer.

Krishna tells Arjuna:

“You have a right to your actions, but not to the fruits of your actions.”

In other words, focus on what is yours to control and release what is not.

I control:

• My preparation.
• My pacing.
• My fueling.
• My attitude.
• My next stroke, pedal stroke, and step.

I do not control:

• My finishing time.
• My place in my age group.
• The weather.
• Whether someone who looks like he was built in a laboratory specifically for endurance sports goes flying past me on the run.
• Whether the race decides to hand me a difficult day.

My anxiety has spent a lot of time camping out in that second list. I have been suffering Sunday’s pain for the last two weeks. That seems like a poor bargain.

The Gita also describes the ideal of the “steady person” – someone who remains balanced in success and failure, pleasure and pain, praise and criticism. That does not mean a steady person never hurts. A steady person in a 70.3 does not float through the run saying, “This is delightful. I hope it lasts forever.”

A steady person says:

“This is the hard part. I knew it was coming. I am still here.”

And maybe that is the real challenge of this race.

Not whether I can finish. I have done that before.

Not whether I can run every mile with a smile on my face. That would frankly be suspicious.

The challenge is whether I can take all those books I have been reading this year and actually use them.

• Epictetus tells me to focus on what I control.
• Kant tells me to do my duty.
• Emerson tells me to trust myself.
• And now the Bhagavad-Gita tells me to act without attachment to the outcome.

It would be a shame to spend the last few months reading the Harvard Classics only to ignore them when I need them most. So on Sunday, when the discomfort arrives—and I have no doubt it will—I want to remember a very ancient lesson applied to a very modern problem.

One stroke.

One pedal stroke.

One step.

Do the work.

Let go of the outcome.