Post Sahara Race Thoughts

My thoughts over the last few days have been on what I learned from my limited time in the Sahara. I am always asked why I like to do these self-supported, long distance races in extreme environmental conditions. The answer is very simple: To learn something new about myself. My race in Chile earlier this year taught me about physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering. The Atacama desert revealed within me new depths of tolerance to suffering. I left Chile with a strong understanding of what I could endure, how far my endurance could be stretched. Now as a contemplate The Sahara race I actually feel like I learned something unexpected. You see when I went to Chile I imagined I was going to suffer but was unsure how much. Being better educated for The Sahara I believed I KNEW how much suffering was in-store and thought it would be the same physical, emotional, spiritual test I went through in Chile. I was VERY wrong. Going into this race I was slightly injured but well prepared. I trained right, ate right, my equipment was top notch (more on this in another post), everything was the best I could make it. It never crossed my mind that I would not finish, that I would fail. That I learned was my biggest mistake.

As many of you know I like to build companies and write a bit about the parallels of being a Entrepreneur and endurance athlete. The best companies I have built are the ones that I knew could fail but I did everything I could to prevent that from happening. My competition is never another company, it is always myself and my lack of seeing what needs to be accomplished to be successful. Companies do not fail, Entrepreneurs fail to imagine and implement success. Companies are inanimate, I am not. So my mistake in failing to finish The Sahara lies within me. I could blame being sick, but I knew I was sick before I started. What I should of done is postponed running until I was 100% physically. 2 days before I left to Egypt I got a sinus infection and was given 1200mg of amoxicillin/day and instructions that it would reck havoc on my digestive track. This is not good news for a runner crossing deserts. I choose not to take the meds and wait and see if it got better. And I did. Sniffles went away and I felt 80%. My mistake was believing that 80% was enough. As in building successful companies, crossing deserts requires you be 100% at the start as endurance is the slow eroding of your physical, emotional, and spiritual being. What you do to prevent this eroding is what makes you successful.

So as I sit here coughing up a lung, much sicker than I was before the race the thing I learned most from The Sahara is this: Failure is ALWAYS present. It is important to be 100% ready physically, emotionally, and spiritually at the start of any great challenge to insure success. As written in Dune by Frank Herbert, “A beginning is a very delicate time.” I learned in Physics that a miniscule error in the beginning magnifies greatly overtime. So now my plan is to get healthy, work on being a better Entrepreneur for awhile and dream about all the exciting challenges that I can choose from for next year. I am glad I learned about failure and know now what it takes to help prevent it.

MS