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The Funny Side Of Fatigue

 Now imagine, that you are deep into the journey of an Ironman triathlon. It is not simply a race of the body, though your legs scream with every step, your arms ache with every stroke, and your breath becomes a labor. No—this is a race of the mind. And, like life itself, it does not yield to those who resist it; it rewards those who dissolve into it. 

There comes a point, as the fatigue turns from a whisper to a roar, when you begin to wonder if you can go on at all. You think of the miles ahead—20, maybe more—and suddenly they appear as an impossible chasm, a task too monstrous for your finite strength. The voice in your mind, that old and familiar trickster, begins to whisper: “You can’t do this.”

But here’s where the magic begins. Instead of answering that voice, instead of entertaining its protests, you laugh as you let go. You stop trying to defeat the pain, stop trying to fight it. You join it. You become it. You dissolve, like a wave disappearing into the ocean. After all, pain, like all things, is an experience of the present moment. To resist it is to suffer; to dissolve into it is to transcend. You can't beat it, so join it. 

And so, in that moment of surrender, you don’t think of the 20 miles ahead, for the enormity of such a thought would crush you. You simply find the next telephone pole. You say to yourself, “Can I run 20 miles? I don’t know. But can I get to that telephone pole? Yes.”

And so you do. You arrive at the telephone pole, feeling the fatigue, the breathlessness—but you are there. The voice comes again: “Can I get to the next one?” And you find, curiously, that you can.

What you discover, mile after mile, telephone pole after telephone pole, is that the distance is no longer your enemy. The fatigue is no longer a foe to be conquered. The mind stops spinning webs of doubt about the enormity of the task, and instead, it flows effortlessly into the now. The race becomes a series of nows, each one carried on by nothing more than the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other. 


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