The Mantra

I love this, this is me, what a privilege this is, you paid for this, this is when it counts, you're on the finish line.

That is the loop that runs in my head when a race, or a session, goes past the point of being enjoyable and into the part I secretly turn up for. I mentioned it in passing after the 70.3, and a couple of people asked about it, which made me realise I have never actually thought about where any of it came from. I just say it. It has been assembled over the years without me noticing, a line picked up here and there, and it turns out that a lot of them belong to someone else.

“You paid for this”

This one is my wife. Whenever I tell her I'm a bit worried about a session, or fed up of training, or I'm just moaning about how tired I am, she says the same thing back to me every single time, and she says it in the same flat way. You paid for this.

There is no sympathy in it whatsoever, and that is exactly why it works. Nobody made me enter, nobody made me hand over the money, nobody is standing over me on a dark night making me get on Zwift or run in the rain. The pain I am complaining about is something I went out of my way to buy, so I can hardly send it back. It shuts me up at home, and when it comes out of my own head at mile 60 on the bike it does the same job on the monkey brain that is begging me to ease off. I don't think she knows it made it into the race with me.

“What a privilege this is”

This started life as the line about it being a privilege to feel pressure. That is not really what I mean when I say it/ It is a privilege to have a working body that I can put through this much pain on purpose.

Too many people I know don't have that. They fight their own bodies every day for things I don't even have to think about, and I get to take mine out on a Sunday morning and beat it up for fun, then complain about my calves afterwards. Framed like that, the discomfort stops being something that is happening to me and becomes something I am lucky enough to be allowed to do. It sounds a bit worthy written down, I know, but at the bottom of the pain cave it is the one that lands hardest.

“This is me”

Borrowed from Myles Lewis-Skelly. There's a video of him in training for Arsenal, absolutely flat out, and he says it once almost under his breath, more to himself than to anyone else. It stuck with me straight away.

It is a reminder that I am not enduring the hard bit until I can get back to being myself. The hard bit is the bit that is me. I chose this, I keep choosing it, and if I'm not the person who keeps going in there then I'm not sure who I am.

I recite all of it in my head, and I'm fairly sure I mutter it too, although it's hard to tell once you are that deep into it. Thinking and talking out loud start to feel like the same thing when the whole of your body is screaming at you to stop, and I have long since given up worrying about what I look like to anyone passing.

I'm not going to pretend there is anything clever going on because I don't even think the words matter much at all. What matters is having something ready before you need it, rather than trying to find it at the bottom of the hole. Courtney Dauwalter is one of my biggest inspirations and she talks about the pain cave constantly, about going in there on purpose and being curious about how far back it goes rather than afraid of it.