This past summer I tackled a new (extracurricular) challenge: running the Wonderland Trail around Mt. Rainier: a breathtakingly beautiful, but unforgiving, 92 mile, 26k ft. elev. gain journey requiring a ton of planning, and very little margin for error. In the months leading up to it, and in the days after, I reflected upon the keys to successfully completing such an "epic" undertaking, whether it be an unsupported Ultra run, an Ironman, or the purchase or sale of a business. The following are a few takeaways…
1. If You’re Not Afraid, Something’s Wrong. Fear = a healthy respect for the epic challenge. For me, this is a key ingredient in the “Love It” recipe (see below). I had a “been there, done that” feeling with triathlon, having recently qualified for and competed in the Ironman World Championships (Kona), and I was keen to get out of my comfort zone and push the limits. The fear also comes from good research – knowing what you’re really up against – which means learning all you can about the challenge. In my case: poring over maps and GPS data, reading trip reports, weather data, and probably most importantly, talking to people that had come out the other side. Fear makes you ask the right questions (see “WCSs” below) and work through your responses until they are second nature.
2. You’d Better Damn Well Love It (Embrace the Suck). You picture the “finish” in your head. You may even dream about it. But what about the daily grind, the dirty details? There’s simply no substitute for putting in the work. In endurance athletics, this means acute soreness, early mornings and late nights when you’re already exhausted, PT and massage maintenance, solitude, and monotony. In other words, “embracing the suck.” If you can find pleasure in such dirty details of your craft – you’re on the right track. I find that benchmarking is critical to finding satisfaction in the “suck”– what are the “right” metrics to monitor? how best to record them? and how do we measure success? In business though, it's not as simple as charting pace splits and average watts. No doubt, there will be some ugly “lows”, so you’d better make sure that not only are the “highs” worth it, but that if they don’t turn out to be quite so high, you enjoy the daily work and trust that the “highs” will come, in one form, and at one time, or another.
3. Who’s Got Your Back? Choosing my mates for the WLT was easy. In Porter Bratten and Dave Brown, I had two that were a) younger b) fitter and c) smarter than I am – two engineers by training. I trusted them completely and knew them to be forged-steel under pressure, and as important...funny. Having a team with the requisite skill set and experience is a given, but keeping spirits high is often overlooked. Before signing up for your personal or business “epic”, you’d be wise to make sure your family, key staff and/or professional advisors know what they’ve signed up for, and that when a Worst Case Scenario (WCS) erupts, that they’ll have your back. And on-board them early...if you're going to perform as a team, you'd better train as a team.
4. Embrace Worst Case Scenarios (WCSs). The Wonderland Trail is wilderness – in its truest sense. Even in the peak season, you can go for hours without seeing another soul. And you can easily find yourself off-trail due to washouts, landslides, or overgrowth. Get in trouble out here, and you’re on your own to get yourself out of trouble. Bears, mountain lions, raging glacial rivers, severe weather and hypothermia, and serious injury were on our list of WCSs. Underscoring this exercise was the news that in the weeks leading up to our trip, two highly experienced trekkers had gone missing in separate incidents – and only one (deceased) had been recovered. In packing and training for the WLT (see below), I mentally drilled for the likely WCSs, knowing that in the midst of an “epic”, we operate under diminished physical and mental capacity (though capable of short bursts of adrenaline induced super-capacity) , so our ability to logically problem-solve is severely compromised. Translation: if you’re encountering a totally unanticipated problem, the outcome is not going to be pretty. Fortunately we didn’t encounter any hungry bears or mountain lion… I still don’t have a WCS response for those.
5. Go Light…but not too Light. They say "speed kills", but in epic challenges, "weight smothers." Fully-loaded, my fast-pack for the WLT was 12 lbs, the majority of which was water in the rubber membrane, which would fluctuate up and down, for an average of about 9 lbs. But with any epic challenge, you have to take the macro view, and consider the cumulative toll. Assuming approx. 180,000 strides over the length of the WLT, this represents about 32 million pounds of lifting including bodyweight. Bottom-line, each ounce counts, big time, so every effort was made to minimize load. Here we walk a fine line between “going light” but not too light. Simple is always better, with the caveats that what we bring with us has to be field-tested and able to hold up to the challenge, and we may need to have redundancy for critical systems (see “Lock it Down” below, and “WCSs” above).
6. Lock It Down & Don’t Look Back. We’ve all witnessed some version of the guy that shows up at the pre-marathon expo and buys the new pair of shoes that he’s just now convinced will solve that Achilles issues and vault him to a new PR. To some degree or another, we all feel the temptation to tinker with our plan on the eve of the big event. Don’t. Ever. Whether it’s a Garmin GPS or ERP system for your business… do your research, select your resources, and train with them extensively and repeatedly, well in advance. Field-test those resources & take them through the wringer. How do they perform in the rain? How do those shorts feel after running for 10 hours? How much sediment can that water filter withstand? What’s my ideal carb : protein ratio? and how does my gut feel fueling on that all day? Work it out, then leave it alone.