The Ultra

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t - you’re right.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man
who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

Bruce Lee, was the first Ultra that I have heard of. Ultras are folks like
you and I that train to jump a little seedling of corn. Day by day,
GRADUALLY, the little corn grows a little bit taller, and the little ultra
strives to jump a little bit higher.

In modern times the C25K comes to mind, meet Fierce Carli Just from
plain experience with jogging we can guesstimate that by GRADUALLY
increasing the length of distance, we will gain the endurance to run
hundreds of miles.

The human body has limitations. The human spirit is boundless.

The finish line, is a pine box.

Dean Karnazes, mentions Lactic Acid build up. I think of it as mostly
nonsense, where does the lactic acid go when your performance increases
from long distance running? Your first mile the first time you run will
burn, but the 10,000th time you will feel elation. Genetics are a myth.

Here is Dean’s book, it is a good read, and a good Audiobook. It contains
growing up, and adventures, and stories of triumph, and aches.
Ultramarathon Man

Pain, is just a chemical signal, it is a squirt of goo – pain my dear
friends, does not hurt.

It is when you stop, and all time scrolls by you, that really hurts. This
is why I write to the youngest of you, one of the greatest Storytellers of
all generations once discovered a great wish that we all wish for
eventually.

“Make me young again” - but you are young now, you can make most of it, no
wax, because it is all ahead of you. Go, close your eyes and connect with
your 80 year old self, and make the wish Killgore Trout did: “Make Me Young
Again”, and open your eyes, and be young but wiser for it. Therein you will
discover the nature of the Ultra. While we live our only life, poetically
we live as it was countless lives already. By wiggling forward and back we
can see where we are headed, and end up where we always wished to be.

Friedrich Nietzsche is asking you to review your decisions, treat them with more gravity, “Would you be willing to relive your life again, and again, and again? Or would you prefer to stay dead and if so, then you need to review your decision making.”:

The heaviest burden: What, if some day or night, a demon were to steal
after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you:

This life, as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live
once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it,
but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh… must return to
you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this
moonlight between the trees and even this moment and I myself. The eternal
hourglass of existence is turned over again and again—and you with it,
speck of dust!

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon
who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you
would have answered him: “You are a god, and never have I heard anything
more divine!”

If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you as you
are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “do you
want this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your
actions as the greatest weight.

The workout is powered by the soul of a very old warrior, who lived many a
lifetime in daydreams, stories, books, and poems. There is no pain, it is
just a signal.

On the Mind part, focus on gaining wisdom by all means. On the body part,
keep extending your endurance, the pain is too primitive to catch up with
an ultra.