Pretty amazing stuff, and huge congrats to Jurek, but this caught my eye in the article and really stood out:
On paper, Arbona and McCarthy were in over their heads, but they hung on heroically during the final 12 hours to keep the Yanks in the team medals. When they needed reinforcements, up from the middle of the pack came Michael Henze, who only a few years ago was a 300lb. non-runner. The Americans lost the team silver medal to the Italians in the final 15 minutes, but Henze’s late charge (from 30th to 12th place) and Arbona’s pure grit saved the bronze. It was the first time in history three U.S. men had run over 150 miles in the same race.
I did a little bit of googling on the guy and found the page for the World Championship 24 Hour Run USA Team:
Michael Henze, 40, Neenah, WI. Henze is the Plant Controller for a packing company, and is relatively new to ultrarunning. He once weighed over 300 pounds before taking up running and dropping over athird of his body weight. Since taking up long distances he has never finished worse than second in an ultramarathon race. In June, 2009, he won and broke the course record at the FANS 24-Hour with 147.41 miles.
Holy. Shit. And people have the gall to tell me I’m pushing sanity with my change. Yet more reason for me to keep pushing to marathon distances and beyond, if only for the eventual possibility to meet this guy and have a few minutes to talk to him and trade stories. To be clear, this guy went from being over 300 pounds some time in his late 30’s (I started last year at 288 at age 26) as a non runner to running 147.41 miles at a 9:46/mile pace over the course of a few years.
A little over a year from where I started, I have trouble breaking that average for an 8.5 mile run on a really good day.
I can see I have my work cut out for me.
Goal Setting: A Primer
Goals. I touched on this in a recent piece, but it’s really such a central piece to how my life changed that it really merits more attention and its own dedicated post.
Everyone (hopefully) has some sort of set of goals. This is vital, you have to have long term goals. The first place I see a lot of people get hung up is the inability to break these down into smaller goals.
It’s not enough to live in the hopes that you’ll eventually get there. You have to live your life for short term and long term goals.
The short term goals are just a breakdown of the long term goals. Weight loss/fitness becomes pretty easy and straightforward if you treat it like a math problem and realize you’re just going to have to commit to it over time. Learning what you’re burning in calories per day, and then upping that through exercise while controlling what you’re taking in to equal burning more than you’re taking in? You’ll lose weight. Determine where your current fitness limits are and then gradually setting out and following a plan to keep pushing those limits further and further? You’ll gain fitness.
It’s obviously a little more nuanced than that, but ultimately, that’s exactly what it breaks down to.
If you don’t have the long term goal, your short term goals, like “complete this workout”, “run these distances” or “eat x number of calories” aren’t really going to have any sort of real structure and you’ll likely end up aimless and losing any drive to make more of them.
If you don’t have short term goals that add up to your long term goal, well… Have you ever tried to drink five gallons of water at once? I don’t recommend it. Space it out over the week. The alternative is a recipe for water intoxication and assuming you survive, probably being unable to look at a glass of water without getting ill.
Finally, get used to the fact that you’ll never have a final goal. At first, it seems a little futile, but in the long run it’s both necessary and healthy. Doesn’t make actually getting to that goal you thought was damn near impossible any less satisfying. But I guarantee that after you get in the habit of taking out your short term goals and then nail a few long terms, you’ll find out that those monumental long terms weren’t actually that unfathomable. Just pretty big.
Example being that a year ago, I honestly gave my trainer an uncomprehending look when she suggested that I’d run more than two and a half minutes at a time. Five months later, by late August, I was managing to run the better part of two miles at a time, and I gave my girlfriend of the time an incredulous look when she suggested that I’d be a marathon runner. By Thanksgiving, I’d run my second 5K race and while still incredulous, I agreed to run the Seattle Marathon the next year with my friend.
Now I’m training at half marathon distances weekly three full months before I actually have to run my first half marathon race at Seattle Rock and Roll. I’m just now learning to become less and less incredulous of my limits, and now am growing aspirations in much loftier goals and crazy dreams and have pretty much resolved to keep pursuing them until one of them manages to take me down fighting and kill me.
And that’s the final lesson of Goal Setting. The only people I’ve ever met that figured out how to live for the joy goals and the thrill of the chase that stopped are dead or fixing to die.
I don’t plan on dying for a good long while and you shouldn’t either. There’s too much awesome stuff to do that’s a lot closer in my grasp than I thought.
