As we are on the tail end of the 1,000KM Voyage back from Antarctica and almost back to land in Argentina, I put some thought towards the lessons learned or leveraged for this trip.

Four I leveraged from past races and three new ones I learned in this race. An overall theme for all my adventures is from my number one strength of being a lifelong learner. Everything flows from there.

Where I would like to start today is acceptance and I will continue with some others over the next couple of weeks. I have used and talked about acceptance in the past and felt like it was operating in real time during this race. In past races going in, I would accept the crappy set of circumstances (usually the terrain and sleep deprivation), see myself half way through the obstacle and be ready on the other side to finish it out. In this race I felt I was quickly able to take the challenging circumstances and reframe the situation to a positive. Positivity in these adventures is everything.

Let me give you a few examples:

1. I sprained my ankle four weeks ahead of the race. Instead of wallowing in self-pity, I quickly thought through the obstacle and built a plan to overcome it. In addition, reframe into what I could learn out of this hardship. What came out of it for me was increasing my knowledge in rehab, increasing cardio through cross training, and improving balance and strength training for long term gain in the gym.

2. I always listen to music, audio books or podcasts when I train and do these races. Many people don’t as they find it gives them more presence. I had thought about trying this out and when I dropped my IPhone on its face and broke it the night before the first day of running, I gave myself the opportunity. I definitely spent some time trying to get it working, but in the 10 minutes after it happened, I pretty much accepted it was not going to be available and reframed that I had just given myself the gift of more presence. Don’t get me wrong, I really could have used some motivational tunes at certain points in the race and it would have helped me through, but putting energy into thinking about it, takes energy away from other areas or systems that needed it. We have a finite amount of energy, and energy management is key.

3. After mending the ankle and coming out of Day 1 of the race I was feeling very positive on how I performed, being able to run a good chunk of the day. I was cautiously optimistic, but knew coming in I would likely be walking and shuffling a good amount of the course. True to form on Day 2 after punishing the legs to the max, the lack of pounding in preparation left me pretty hobbled up and in pain. I knew this was coming and quickly reframed to the expectation I would fall back in the standings and need to be hiking a lot of the course. People would be passing me, but everyone is running their own race with their own set of circumstances. I was focusing to finish and being able to be proud of the fact, I had worked through some challenging rehab to give myself the gift of still making the race and a once in a lifetime experience. Everyone has different metrics. I accepted what success looked like this time would be different and equally meaningful.

Have a great end to the week!
Colin