Unearned Confidence - Leadville SilverRush 50

Well, hello world. This recording podcast voice out into the void is going to be about specifically it's a race report which you can delete now, but I wouldn't. I think it's a pretty good story because it's about an event that quite frankly changed the way I approached a lot of things in my life. And I'm doing it today because the Leadville race series. So there's a series of races out in Leadville Colorado every year. There's a very famous 100 mile race. There's a 50 mile race. There's marathon, half marathon, and there's a mountain bite component for all of these, almost all of these as well. And this is about when I ran this race for the first time in 2012 and my experience at that race. So I thought, you know what? I'll revisit this. I had this written a long time ago, but I thought why not kind of push it out to the world now? I think it's a pretty good story. We're getting ready to start track and field training and I'm a coach at the high school level. I coach a boys and girls varsity team. And I talk a lot about confidence and unearned confidence, kind of what some of the characteristics that make up someone who's going to find whatever it is or however they define success. And I say it like that because success is not defined by me. It's defined by the goals that that person sets. And just because you don't meet your goals doesn't mean that you're not going to gain confidence. I don't mean that. It's more of a, it's my job to help these young people build these characteristics and the practices that it takes to become whatever it is they want to become. So let's get into it. These race recaps are rarely about just the run. They're really usually about what I learn about myself when I choose to do something that's painful, effortful, what they're suffering involved. And that's from oftentimes for me, it's only achievable when with through these feats of endurance and quite often lapses of judgment. And so I chose this race called the Leadville Silver Rush 50. And it was a very humbling choice. It was at the time the most breathtaking awe inspiring run I had ever been on racing across the sky is not a metaphor. It is the literal experience. At one point you're standing at 12,400 feet, feeling invincible, putting on some girl talk and then just lighting this fuse and blazing down the descent. And then two hours later, I'm cursing the race director. And there's this wicked uphill right before stump town. I'm like sons of bitches. That was the nail in my coffin. So the race starts at 6 a.m. which is early and it's cold that day even by Leadville standards. And I live in Kansas City where our Minda windows, they melt into the drywall in July. And where if you don't have AC, it's damn near a death sentence. But I like running in extremes. But I also like practicing in extremes to earn it. And that altitude is a great equalizer. And trying to prepare for it when you've never run that far or that high is kind of a fool's error. I had never done a 50 mile race. Why not do one that's crazy hard? You know, I knew that based on race reports that I had read that lungs can seize up your heart rate can spike uncontrollably. Your body just folds in on itself. At one point during the run, there's a guy next to me he's putting in headphones. And I ask, you know, what he's going to be jamming out to. And he said anything but my breathing. I thought, oh, I've heard my heartbeat on this race. You know, for him, it was literal. He was laboring loudly enough at that point to like echo off of the trees around us. But at that point, mine was pretty measured. And that Sunday morning calm was kind of all the way in me. I have these heavy laborers that I worked with in local 1290 back in the day. And the song that always comes into my head, especially when you're racing on a Sunday is easy like a Sunday morning. I love that song. So I felt really good. I'm at the start line. Singing school. But that's where my confidence starts to lie. You know, I was feeling calm. And I thought that that meant I was just golden. I wasn't the first 10 miles you climb to a little over 12,000 feet. And I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I'm power hiking. It's just fast walking. Like everyone else who's probably not in the top 10. I didn't have a plan period. That wasn't really unusual for me. But it certainly wasn't advised. You know, I, my brother-in-law was there. And I'll never forget this. I've told him this. He asked me, he goes, "So what's your plan for the race? This is the day before." And I kind of laughed him like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "What's your plan for the race?" And I thought, "Oh, I'm just going to go out there and rip it." Not realizing that was a huge mistake. And then he mentions, he goes, "Oh, my friends that have done this race, he's from Fort Collins or lives in Fort Collins." He said, "They had very detailed plans about what they're going to do between each aid station, how much water they're going to drink, the nutrition they're going to consume, and XYZ." And that was that conversation. I will not lie. Did kind of lodge into the back of my head, and I thought, hmm, a plan. But I didn't have one. I didn't wear a watch that day, which meant I was going to meet a lot of people that did, because I was still wanting to know where, how far I was, and what was going on. And it was, I met this really nice guy, latched onto this demo pilot. He worked for Beachcraft. And he was, he was from Wichita. And honestly, he was this really nice tall, sweet that basically coached me up the entire mountain with a smart strategy and smart restraint. And in hindsight, I realized he had earned his column through practice and intention. And I was just borrowing mine. You know, everyone who has done this or done something like this warned me that conserving energy early was important, because the climb out of this place called stunk town is brutal. I mean, brutal. The metaphor I use for it is think of a car crash drowning scene, right? You got the flashlight. It's sweeping. It's missing you by inches. The rescuers, they're never finding you until it's too late. They finally grab you, but then the defibrillator battery is dead. And then you just fade to black. That, I mean, that might be a little over the top, maybe. But when your heart rate spikes at that altitude and your legs are turning into these like tuning forks with cramps inside them, that is what it feels like. That section was about survival, not about racing. And altitude hits me nutritionally and metabolically. You know, hydration just for some reason it wasn't making any sense to me. I drank and I don't pee. I eat and I lose my appetite. It's like my system was going sideways. It used to and back in this time frame, it took me two weeks to acclimate. And I gave myself two days, because I had heard, well, if you just come out and race, that's good for the acclimation as well. That was like unearned confidence point number two. And then there were other mistakes. Mistake number one, I was dressing like I was going to the I did a rod. I had gloves, arm sleeves, long sleeve shirt, tights, neck wrap, gator. Whereas like every dude around me is wearing shorts, the shirt list, looking like some viking lumberjack. My dad spotted the warning before I did at this place called printer boy aid station. It's around mile 13 and a half. I mean, I looked great. I was barely sweating. But that was the problem. You see, I was sweating. You just couldn't see it. My clothes were trapping it. You know, the evaporative relief was not happening because I felt good early. I assumed I was doing everything right. but this toxic kind of thing. confidence it comes disguised as comfort. The salt lines were forming everywhere, they were on the front and the back of my shirt. And my body was screaming at me, but I didn't really speak that language, I didn't understand it. And then came the cramps. My calves, they do this thing where they start to bubble, it's like boiling water inside. My neck and my lower back started to seize on me, it was crazy. And here's the other part. And it took about three miles of serious discomfort where this inner monologue, that internal conversation just flipped from, "Oh, Ben, you got this, you're flying to, you're never going to finish." And that's how fast hubris empties itself out when you're at altitude. That stump town, so that descent from stump town is hard. And the realization that you're going to have to climb back out of it was a psychological warfare that I was not prepared to fight. Well, it was getting really loud, and it's yelling at me, that quitting is rational, pain is pointless. I had that internal, there was like a whisper inside of me would commit not to quit, commit not to quit. But I had swept that thing right out of my mental closet or whatever I was keeping it. You know, I tell people that I quit at my old 19 or 20 mentally. Physically I made it to the halfway point, which led to a very expensive long run, but I would never trade that experience in my life. You know, it's great, I'll never forget my dad found me. So you get done, you get to mile 25 and they're a turnaround point, and I told the people at the age station immediately, "I'm done, I'm not going back out." And I went, literally went and laid down in a ditch and thought, "Well, I guess this is it, knowing that it wasn't it, but I was just pretty much broken." And my dad had driven all the way up to the age station not too long after I had laid down the ditch and he just found me laying there, and I was like, "Hey, you alive?" I was like, "Barely." He goes, "You're calling it a day?" I said, "I am calling it a day." Many picked me up, no questions asked, and graduated me on getting that far. It was pretty awesome. And I did learn some things, right, like, don't introduce a PB and jelly sandwich to your stomach at altitude when you've never had one before during a race, ever, but you thought it might taste good, mistake. You know, don't dress for the person that you think you want to be, right? Like, I'm going to look really cool and dress for the conditions that you're actually going to run in. And, you know, don't assume that just because you're feeling like you're breathing calm, that you're being efficient. Sometimes it just means the problems you haven't earned the right to recognize yet. You know, confidence is only an asset when it's earned. Otherwise, it becomes this liability disguised as swagger or braggadocious. You know, I came in pretty hot, literally, when I got to the end, I was burning up. I thought I was bulletproof because those first 20 miles or so, they felt kind of easy, but the mountain and the mountain teaches you on its own timeline. It does not care who you are, how far you run before, what's on your playlist. Leadville will punish you. Mountain running will punish you, but that story does not end in defeat. You know, once that kind of the, I guess the dust settled, I did get some clarity. I gained a lot of clarity through this. You know, standing on top of a mountain strips away your ego a lot quicker than any self-help philosophy. It's taught me a ton. It showed me that insignificance and potential come in equal measures. One foot in front of the other. These tiny motions can produce impossible outcomes. You know, it felt like I had conversation with strangers and I had conversations with God. It was this church and motion. It was this belonging earned through some unnecessary, but maybe necessary suffering, not just through desire or wanting it so bad. You know, I started running to finish races, right? Then I started running to go fast and then it was to go to new places and now I run because I can, I mean, I believe in it, not just because I assume that I can. So I guess to recap, the leadville 50 or any of the leadville races are hard as hell. Have a plan, eat, drink, dress smart, respect the environment, respect yourself and when you find yourself on top of a mountain and you're surrounded by sky and life and light and all this wonder unfolding beneath your feet, remember that you are lucky to be there. This is about confidence. Confidence is not the belief that nothing is going to go wrong. This real earned confidence, how you get it is by knowing that things are going to go wrong but you show up anyway and do it. Peace.