Beaten by your mind or your body?
Pushing yourself to the limits is something endurance athletes talk about a lot. But what does it really mean? And is it even possible?
New Zealand ultra runner Will Hayward might just have some answers, I reckon.
Hayward just ran for 59 hours, covering more than 395 kilometres, in a race where there’s no finish line – you just keep going, completing a lap every hour, until you can’t. The winner is the last person standing.
He came oh so close, but eventually was outlasted by incredible American athlete Maggie Guterl.
Hayward spoke to co-host Matt Rayment and me this week about his performance at the Big’s Backyard Ultra in Tennessee.
It was a telling insight into motivation and pushing yourself (it helps that Hayward is an experimental psychologist, currently based at Hong Kong University as the dean of social sciences).
‘‘My mindset going in, my mantra, was this was really about pushing my boundaries,’’ Hayward told us. ‘‘This is an event where you can really see where your limits are and I wanted to find those.’’
If you think about it, life doesn’t often serve up many opportunities where you can do that. Society’s ‘‘safety first’’ mentality often constructs boundaries that stop us long before we get to the edge.
And our own minds build barriers, too.
In running, I’ve been in plenty of races where the little voice inside my head started telling me to slow down or stop. And many times I’ve listened.
At an ultramarathon last year, when the going got tough, I didn’t get going – I stopped and recorded my first DNF (Did Not Finish). My brain had convinced my body that I was done.
But in the days and weeks afterwards I thought, ‘‘hmmmm, was I really done? Could I have pushed myself more to get to the finish line? Was I just looking for excuses to stop?’’
I don’t regret stopping that day, but it’s an interesting thing to think about.
We also spoke to Katie Wright, the phenomenal Nelson doctor and runner who became the first woman in the world to win a last-person-standing event when she triumphed at the
Riverhead Relaps in May, qualifying for Big’s Backyard.
She made the top four in Tennessee, battling a plethora of problems, including hip pain which eventually stopped her after 50 hours.
But she was left wondering: did I get beaten by my body or my mind?
‘‘One of the reasons I was gutted I had to stop was because I still don’t know whether I was using that niggle as a get-out-of-jail-free card, whether it actually is just that my mind caved and I should have just pushed through,’’ Wright said.
Wright is one of the toughest people I know, so I doubt that
there was a blip of mental weakness. Lesser mortals would have stopped hours earlier.
Her performance – and Hayward’s – at Big’s are utterly remarkable feats of mental strength.
Hayward had qualified by winning the Hong Kong event in
April. But he’d finished a bit dissatisfied.
‘‘I was feeling pretty terrible and was ready to stop when I finished, but once I stopped I felt like I had more to give. So for this event [Big’s], I wanted to explore that and push into the unknown.’’
He sure did that. Heading out for his 60th lap – that’s 60 hours of running, embarking on his third night of no sleep – he fell asleep while he was walking and started to hallucinate.
‘‘All the rocks that I was walking up, they just seemed to be shifting in and out. It felt like there was some kind of video editor in my brain putting in new images that I had no control over.’’
He thought he was in a village in the hills above Hong Kong and was stumbling around looking for a trail down to the city.
After a while, people came looking for him.
‘‘They found me about a kilometre down the trail. In my experience, I thought I was still wandering around [in Hong Kong].’’
So when those who’d come looking for him called out, ‘‘I said, ‘What are you doing here’?’’
Sleep deprivation and confusion had defeated him, Guterl was the winner. His race was over.
And his understanding of what it takes to push yourself to your limits had taken a giant leap forward.
Eugene Bingham and Matt Rayment are hosts of a trail running podcast Dirt Church Radio. Learn more at dirtchurch radio.com or get in touch via email dirtchurchradio@gmail. com