Ultra Attached
Why sheer force of will isn't actually a strategy
In 2019, I signed up to run a two day ultra marathon called Race to the Stones. Unlike the high-octane, sports-drink fuelled marathon, where runners often go all out to beat a particular time, ultras have been described as, in essence, a long slow run where you also get to eat the component parts of a picnic along the way. Sold.
The race was due to take place in July 2020. In the autumn of 2019, I found out I was pregnant, so got in touch with the race organisers to defer my place - although, it turned out I needn’t have bothered, as the pandemic put pay to it altogether that year. You can only defer your place once, so my choice was to do it in July 2021, when my daughter would be almost exactly one year old, or give up the place altogether. There is nothing that winds me up more than money wastage - I once had a standing ticket for Shakespeare’s Globe on a night when it was pouring with rain, and, despite the fact that I had paid a mere £5 for the ticket, I absolutely wouldn’t hear of not turning up. (Side note: the show I saw that night was Emilia, a brilliant raucous feminist tale by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, and I had one of the best nights at the theatre that I’d had for a long time. Sometimes, being tight pays off). Suffice to say, I was determined to get to that start-line.
Whilst I am a passionate and enthusiastic runner, I am also fairly sensible about training load - my long term goal is to be one of those amazing eighty year olds that you see lithely bounding around their local ParkRun of a Saturday morning, rather than an injured creaky mess thanks to overtraining. After lucking out with a straightforward pregnancy and birth, I took some advice from a physio, had 12 weeks of no running whilst I rebuilt my, by that point, non-existent core muscles, and then excitedly downloaded the much lauded couch to 5k programme to embark on a slow and gradual return.
During my first run (which involved more walking than running) I felt a twinge in my upper thigh. It’s nothing, I thought. Just stiffness, the body adjusting to something new. But then, during the second and third runs, it was still there. Pretty soon I could feel it when I was walking too, and I knew I had to face up to whatever it was rather than pretend it was going to magically disappear. I went back to the physio and she diagnosed me with a groin strain. She gave me a ton of physio exercises to do, which I did diligently, but they didn’t seem to make any difference. I was now six months post-partum, and six months away from a 100km race, and I hadn’t even made it past the end of the road without experiencing pain.
It was at this point that I realised I needed to take a good hard look at the writing on the wall. The Race to the Stones had seemed like an amazing goal to aim towards to get myself back into running, an important part of my life that I’d missed a lot during the latter half of pregnancy. But far from being motivating, this goal had now become a near constant stressor. Every day that the pain didn’t shift felt like a training day lost, and, with no indication of when this injury would recede, I knew what I had to do. I had to give up the race.
This feeling, of clinging tightly to something like your life depends on it, is not confined to niche ultra-running races. I have felt it at work many times: this show has to sell, this grant application has to be successful, we must get our participant numbers up this year. These declarations usually come from a place of understanding and recognition - good leaders know what factors it’s important to focus on at any given moment, and directing your energy towards a particular area is often a sensible approach. But to grip these things too hard, to focus on them myopically, to allow them to haunt your every waking moment does no one any favours. You can only control the input, not the outcome. To give a production’s audience numbers weight and importance in order to empower your marketing team, or to devise a new programme that will increase participant numbers may make sense, but you don’t get to determine whether these tactics succeed to the level that you want / need them to.
There’s another thing that can happen when you grip too tightly to a particular outcome - you can spend too little time contemplating the alternatives, often because they seem too scary or painful. If that grant application doesn’t come through - what will you do? If you really need a surplus this year, but something unexpected pops up and you swing into deficit - what then? Our fallible human nature sometimes thinks that we can shape the world to our own design if we just will it hard enough, and any contemplation of a plan B is simply pre-emptive giving up. But often, I think, the opposite is true. A sensible plan B takes the tension (but not the focus) down a level, arguably a better state for everyone to do their best work and thus stand a better chance of delivering on the A plan.
After accepting that my Race to the Stones dreams were over, I spent a couple of weeks moping around then picked myself up and recommitted to my physio exercises, this time with no ticking time pressure to up my stress levels. A few weeks later, I re-started on the couch to 5k plan and, in a moment I still remember for its unadulterated joy, I didn’t feel any pain. As I ticked off the weeks in the plan, I looked at my calendar. There were still over four months until the Race to the Stones. Perhaps I could still make the start line?
I made more than the start line - I made the finish line. It remains one of the running achievements that I’m most proud of and the lesson I learned has been valuable in both life and leadership - that sometimes, if you hold an outcome a little more lightly, you give yourself a better chance at success.