Ian Walker

“You shiver in the cold night air; you know you should stop and pull an extra layer of clothing from your pack but you cannot summon the will to do it. You have tunnel vision, unable to see anything other than the path ahead. At the same time, another part of your mind is screaming at you to stop this insanity, and reminding you that this is entirely voluntary. You can just quit! Go back to the aid station and hand in your number. Who’s going to care if you do? So how do you keep going when you are so desperate to stop? A big part of it is having been there before. Exposing yourself to a long difficult experience is like sailing along a series of waves. You go up then down then up again, over and over. But the series of waves is not steady and regular. The difference between the peaks and the troughs gets larger and larger as time goes on. In the early stages of a race, the waves are mere ripples, their dips and rises inconsequential – you perhaps notice that the running feels slightly harder for a while and then, some time later, it feels easier again. But as the event continues to unfold, the peaks start to get higher and the troughs lower. After twenty hours of running, the low points see you collapsed in a shrub gazing into an existential void and the highs feel like you’ve been injecting mega-heroin. Once you’ve ridden that roller coaster a few times, you gain enough experience to trust the process. When the bad times start to come... it’s fine, because you were expecting them. Hello, Pain, you think. I was wondering when you’d show up.”
― Ian Walker, Endless Perfect Circles: Lessons from the little-known world of ultradistance cycling