A Lesson In Kindness
I don’t think anyone really enjoys instant coffee. Especially the cheap supermarket stuff. Those faint-smelling, wishy-washy-brown granules, that, even when you heap in enough to fire up a horse, tastes like crap.
But when you really need a coffee – really yearning for that hot, heavenly caffeine kick that only comes from exhaustion and lack of other options, it’s almost a delicacy.
My favourite coffee was in the middle of nowhere, at about 2am on a windy, cold night, along the South West Coast Path after having run about 60 miles.
The coffee may have been crap but I’d have quite happily paid £10 for it in the moment. Maybe even £20.
The Oner
I’m sorry, I haven’t told you why I was there, shivering despite four layers, clutching that coffee like it was some kind of life-giving nectar.
I was a good chunk into an ultra marathon called ‘The Oner’. 82 miles along the beautiful, rugged and unforgiving South West Coast Path. I’d been running/walking alone for the past few miles. It wasn’t my first ultra, but one of the longest and most challenging ones I’d ever started.
Just me, the ever present inky-black-absoring all season alongside me, with the constant reassurance of the waves to keep me company.
I’ve always loved the sound of the sea. That sense of forever.
The way the waves have been rolling on and will do long past once we see them
The promises of adventures and fairways.
The yearning to be at one with it and the sky.
As amazing as ultras are, they’re also exhausting. I’m a mix of exhilarated and tired. It’s about 2am and I’m craving sleep. There’s a little devil sat on my shoulder saying ‘you could just jack this in’.
My Pity Party
I’m freezing cold and I’m really, really tired, and I get to an aid station in the middle of nowhere, which is just literally a man and a van, and we talk for a bit, and I start shivering. I’m just so, so cold. And I would love to sleep.
So the guy says to me, you can sit in my van – which was really, really warm. And he said, You got five minutes.
And it’s funny how comfortable the front seat of a van can feel when you’re shivering to the bone with cold, covered in sweat, mud and completely and utterly exhausted.
That front seat of that van felt like the most luxurious, beautifully upholstered piece of furniture in the world right then.
So I take my coffee, and I sit in the van, and instantly my body thaws out.
The coffee feels amazing.
I start to feel warm, and just like I want to be there all night, I would quite happily have fallen asleep in the front seat.
The problem with doing that and sitting down and sitting still during an ultra marathon is you’re not moving forwards. And as long as you’re not moving forwards, the race finish isn’t moving. It’s static. You have to keep moving to get the medal, your sense of achievement, your buzz.
So even if you’re moving slowly in an ultra, that’s better than nothing. The longer you sit, the harder it is to get out, and the longer you sit, the more you risk not making the cut off for the finish.
Five Minutes & No More
So sure enough, after five minutes, the guy opens the door, and I feel this blast of cold air come into my wonderful warm cocoon of the van, and he says
Get the fuck out my van.
And it was kind of said jokingly, but also not jokingly, because had he just left me there, it would have got harder and harder for me to get out. I would have made excuse after excuse about just giving me another minute, another two minutes, and probably I would have ended up falling asleep.
So him kicking me out after five minutes was actually a complete act of kindness, because he, like the rest of the volunteers and the ultra running community, want you to finish the race. They want you to succeed. And he knew that if I didn’t get the fuck out of his van, I wouldn’t. So I think for a couple of minutes I was really annoyed, because I was so comfortable and so warm, and it was really cold, and because I hadn’t been running or walking for a while, I was shivering.
So I get my layers back on. I think I had, like, a t shirt, a base layer, a top, a waterproof jacket, a hat, a buff over my face.
And I got going, and sure enough, within a couple of minutes I warm up, and whilst I was tired, everything kind of seemed right for the world for a bit.
Our Comfy Lives
Now, outside of ultra running, I think there’s something to be said for this in real life as well.
We want to be kind to people that we love and care about and we want to support them. We want to make sure they feel comfortable and they’re not in pain and discomfort.
But if we take that too far, they’ll never learn how to struggle. They’ll never learn how to push through to find out what they’re really capable of.
I feel like in our society, we’re inside that warm van too much and we don’t really realize how easy we have it.
Many of us have a comfortable home, job. We have electricity, water heating, and easy access to food. We have it really, really easy in comparison to many.
Push
And so I think it’s really, really healthy now and then to get way outside of our comfort zones, and that might be through Ultra running or another sport, or it might be completely psychological.
It might be doing something that you’re really, really terrified of.
This truth is, if we don’t, we coast along through life and we do the same thing every day, every week, every month, and life’s too short for that. Life’s too short to be sat in the van in the warmth with a nice coffee all the time.
Sometimes we’re able to get ourselves out of the van. We can catch ourselves getting too comfy or feeling bored or feeling like there’s no momentum in our lives. But sometimes we need someone else to do that for us.
And it’s one of the biggest acts of kindness I think you can give to someone stuck in that van, to get the fuck out of it.
It’s about helping them achieve what they want. To not risk a life of regret and beige. To not look back and go ‘I wish I had…’
Going back to that race, it was definitely one of the hardest races I’ve done, not just because of the length, lately, two miles, but also the elevation and being quite small race, I was on my own for a very long time, which I don’t mind, as an introvert, and it is a very beautiful race. You’re racing along the coast, which was just you always had this sometimes relaxing, sometimes ferocious noise of the ocean at your side at all times.
When you’re running at night, there in the dark with just your headlight to like to guide you. You hear this just constant noise in the background of the sea, and you can’t see it, but you can hear it, and it’s reassuring, but also it’s kind of scary, because you’re right by it.
I also remember clearly in that race in Portland, which is an island just after half of Weymouth, and you run it round it a couple of times, and I remember the sun is starting to come up, and we’re not often around when the sun comes up. We’re normally in bed and seeing the sun gradually come up and being around to see sheep and other animals start to wake up with it was really a blessed moment, and something that was really, really beautiful.
And We’re Done
I eventually finished the race, with a huge smile on my face.
And the end section of the race is over Beach, which is really, really hard to run on, I realised I’m very near to the finish, feeling so proud that I’ve done something. I’ve done one of the hardest ultra marathons in the UK.
I look back earlier in my life, not just as a runner, but before that, never having imagined that I could achieve that kind of thing. I reflected on all the work I’ve done to improve my mental health and my self esteem.
And I finished the race with a sprint finish, which kind of surprised the people there, I think, but I absolutely sprinted over this little bridge at the end, and was so full of adrenaline and pride and gratitude that I’d done it.
Would I have still completed the race if I hadn’t been kicked out the van?
I don’t know. Probably.
I think I would have, but I would have had a really good sleep in the van, and I would have taken a lot longer and been annoyed at myself.
Getting My Kicks
You don’t need to do an ultra marathon to feel proud or to push yourself. Pushing yourself or achieving things means completely different things to different people.
Where I get my kicks though is through ultra marathons.
It’s completing really long distances that seem insane and probably are insane, and
once I finish them, knowing that no matter how I feel about myself or how hard to judge myself, that I’ve done them. And that no one, including myself and nothing can take away from those facts.
So when I look at my medals and my buckles from my running, it’s really, really empowering.
Because I look at them and think how impossible those kind of things seemed back when I started running, before I’d even run a marathon, and I look back to when I would have been at my my 20s or 30s, and how insane these kind of things would have seemed if I’d have shown my younger self them.
But the truth is, no big goal, no big achievement, has real satisfaction if you haven’t struggled to some extent. And that might be a new job or promotion or a pay rise, or doing a presentation, or asking someone out that you really like, or having a difficult conversation, or giving up smoking.
There’s so many different things that can be but if all those things were easy, would they really feel like they’re an achievement? No, I don’t think they would. They just feel, well, nice.
But when you’ve really strived for something, when you’ve struggled to get something, when you put yourself through discomfort, when you’ve gone through doubt and overcome it because you wanted something so so bad?
It’s empowering, it’s self-affirming and it stays with you forever.