Picture the challenge
Let it set in
Picture the challenge that awaits or know that it will beat you.
This is the bargain you make when approaching a hill or a long, drawn-out straight away or miles that you dread. If you don’t fix these challenges in your mind as you would a painting or a place that you love, you will not approach them as if they are real. Instead, you’ll negotiate, and they will win.
In the last half of the last mile of one of my regular routes there is a hill that goes on far longer than anyone could want and then, just at the final 20 meters, angles sharply up. It’s already a long hill, and the upward tilt is so sharp it feels personal, as if the hill were being unfair to anyone running or walking up it.
I could change my route but the way I have it makes the path a perfect figure eight with only two traffic-y crossings at Sunset Blvd which is not even always crowded and reliably changes lights. Besides, I’ve tried all the roads around this one and they’re all just as bad or worse. The hill is a substantial one. The size of an entire neighborhood. A giant, rocky plop shoved into the pain by some long ago earthquake the strength of which I cant even imagine. The hill is stronger than me. It is bigger. The only way to get past it is to fix the challenge it presents in my mind and to go up. And never try to negotiate.
Negotiation with a hill or a straight away or the miles you find grinding never works. The bargaining that you do is in your mind. The conversation you’re having is with yourself. You offer to slow down to ease the pain and it says yes and so you do but the pain doesn’t ease; it elongates. You offer to put your head down and ignore the pain and your mind says yes but the pain doesn’t go away; it nags at you. You offer to stop and walk and it says yes and so you do. Then the run is ruined.
Acceptance gets you out of this cycle. As the ancient Stoics loved to dwell on, the hills and the straights and miles are indifferent to you; you must also be indifferent to them. That does not mean you have to love them. No need to embrace the pain in some insane attempt to convert the pain into motivation. Just know that the challenge is there, and that it will be hard.
That’s what I mean by fixing the challenge in your mind. We all know that the hill or straight away or miles won’t respond to our bargaining, but we sometimes try it anyway. I hesitate to call this weakness because it is simply human to want to take the easy way. None of us are heroes.
But fix the challenge in your mind before you physically face it and its reality will sink in. You will accept it. You will not bargain because you know that the challenge is there, inevitable. Then, you can try your best to get through it as well as you’re able.
Negotiation takes energy even as it achieves nothing. And energy is what you need to get through the hills and straights and miles. Fix the challenge in your mind. Don’t bargain with something that will never bargain back. Go run.
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