Marathon coach and secret of life's exponential growth formula

If you read this story to the end, I hope it inspires you to power through any obstacle in your professional and personal life. I committed to run an ultramarathon for a charity, without thinking this through. … If you do not know anything about ultramarathons, imagine a 100k + run through some of the toughest terrains in the world like the Sahara deserts, the Amazon jungle, or mountains in Peru. The upsides are unquestionably amazing views and the adventure of a lifetime. The downside is my starting point, I do not run, I trod at a graceful pace.

This is when I got to know Maria Taveras, a professional with 20 years of experience in the financial industry and a phenomenal athlete. Collectively she ran over 60 marathons, which is approximately 2,680 miles roughly the horizontal width of the entire United States. Did I mention that she did that while holding a full-time job and raising a family? Amazing … right!?

Maria gracefully offered to coach me and keep me alive. You may think what is the big deal, it is just a run …. Well, ultramarathons, as I have quickly learned, are much more than that. It is all about grueling preparation both mental and physical. Also, the race itself lasts many days, and for a?majority of it, you need to be self-sufficient. Muscles do not get stronger unless you slowly push your limits. After a muscle gets physically worked the micro-tears heal, this strengthens them and makes them grow. To run an ultramarathon, or to accomplish anything of significance in life, you need to be capable of understanding the value of self-inflicted discomfort.?The same is true about expansion in any area of life, progress always comes with some level of uneasiness. If you think just now that avoiding discomfort in life is a better way, remember that this also comes with a price tag of stagnation and mediocracy.

You may ask, can you still run a marathon without preparation? Yes, but the massive effort can leave you broken. The shortcuts in groundwork are something that will always come out when you are trying to achieve extraordinary heights. The metabolic rate of a runner can increase 10-fold even during a shorter four hours run. Something as small as bad shoes or poor self-care can end your race before it has even started. Running is not only about performances or about competing with others. The first thing that I learned from Maria was that a marathon is really about preparation and pushing your limits, self-improvement and being healthy. It is also about mental fitness, and eventually winning the most difficult fight, the fight against yourself.

Boring basics, you need to master them first. Maria told me that even if you are well prepared, at some point you will hit the wall. It usually tends to happen around mile 20, when distance runners feel like their own body is giving up. She described that as choking shortness of breath when every inhalation feels like swallowing a fireball; when your heartbeats seem to be as loud as a drum, and blood hums in your ears with a force of mountain steam. If you did the work, you can push through. It is truly an amazing experience when you realize that there is another level. Your horizon literally expands, and you come to the realization that there is more, you can give more, and that your limitation is a moving skyline. The horizon broadens each time as we get closer to what we thought were our limits, to display novel levels of reality and possibilities we haven't even thought about.

To see beyond the skyline, you need to get closer to the horizon and have the courage to believe that the world doesn't end at some particular point, and it is really up to you where to draw a finish line. For a runner, a marathon is an opportunity to cross their individual limits and push our collective understanding of human capabilities. Like fearless Camille Harron who ran 100 miles at record time of 12:41:11, or four 80-year-old gentlemen that this year finished a 100-mile Nevada race!

My personal takeaway from the rushed decision to run an ultramarathon was that we have opportunities to expand our capabilities in every area of life, the key is to always understand that growth comes with a certain level of discomfort and sacrifice that we cannot shy away from. That self-imposed discipline and pain of growth is probably the biggest reward for our efforts, because without it there is no endurance and there is no resilience. The only choice that we truly have is if we voluntarily work to overcome our limitations, or wait for life to push us into a corner when we have no choice but to face them.