The odometer of life is about to roll over to a momentous birthday.
Rather than listen to the conventional advice, my mind is yelling at me. Run! Build! Do! Make things happen!
This started with physical fitness. Given my age, my prior history, and my genetics, what can I accomplish?
Well, that depends on how I exercise and what I eat.
Upstream of what I do and what I eat (the actions) we find a choice. A choice to run, to lift, to eat in a way consistent with my goals.
And bolted to that choice is discipline. Having made that choice, do I stick by it? Do I execute?
In other words, the only variable in this equation is discipline.
Discipline is the crux of this climb.
It’s like that time on Middle Cathedral in the ‘70s when My climbing partner and I watched our water, food, and jackets plummet to the ground from six pitches up.
What to do? Give up and rappel down? No. Fuck it. Climb. Sleep cold on a ledge. Wake up and climb again. Finish the route.
I led most of the pitches the second day. Dehydrated on a hot spring day, maybe I would get 30 or 40 feet and have to stop, desperately tired. Route-finding skills? Nonexistent.
But we made it and came off the route with more hardware than we had started with, picking up abandoned nuts and carabiners from other climbers. We would even go off-route to get them.
Hiking off the backside I came across a fetid puddle, green slime and insects in the warm water. I drank deeply. On the Valley floor we hitchhiked back to camp. I, at least, felt triumphant. My climbing partner, I don’t know how he felt.
I know discipline. I can do the hard stuff.
It’s abundantly clear to me now that the running is all about discipline. I don’t run to run. I run to have an hour of constant self-discipline.
How I muster that self-discipline varies. It might be self-talk. That’s particularly satisfying. Reminding myself that I am, deep within, a beast. That’s motivating. And it is sustainable because it comes from within.) It might be inspiration from a podcast. It might be the cadence of music I’m listening to.
The goal I have selected has no finish line. It has no time limit. The goal is the horizon and my time limit is death. There is no rest, no respite, no recovery day.
I know I wrote about this before and I will write about it again as I work out my thoughts.
To choose a path that has no end, that promises only hardship, and asks you to make the harder choice every time . . . that feels like the right path to me.
The universe is in balance. Let’s put in the work and see what’s on the other side of the hard choices. Seeds of discipline. Expect nothing in return except the satisfaction of action. Go.