Courtney Dauwalter and the Pain Cave
Dear Friends,
I'm an absolutely terrible runner. The moment I start, my mind starts racing. I cover such irresistible topics as next year's tax return to a new system for arranging dishes in the dishwasher, and everything in between. I glance at my timer, which reads something like 0:12 seconds. Then I try a new strategy called "clear your mind and just run". And that works great! Until I check the timer again and it now reads 0:17.
Courtney Dauwalter is arguably the best long distance runner in the world. She competes in ultra marathons. Those are just like marathons, except longer and with more hallucinations. Races in the ultra category are 50, 100, 200 miles long, compared to the measly 26.2 in a standard marathon. And she runs each with infectious enthusiasm and curiosity despite the unrelenting difficulty of finishing the course.
Most people get pulled into hard mode kicking and screaming against their will. Courtney runs headlong into hard mode with a grin on her face. Naturally, I had to find out how she does it. Everyone is curious how she does it, because she wins most of the races she enters.
Courtney is known for a visualization technique that she calls the Pain Cave. The first time she attempted an ultra, she began vomiting and stopped. That was a rookie mistake, because apparently vomiting is kinda normal after a certain point. She would later say that was her first encounter with the Pain Cave, and she got right up to the entrance without going in.
Going into the Pain Cave means embracing, knowing, almost making friends with the pain. There's a curiosity about the pain. New types of pain are new caverns to explore, along with mental power-ups that symbolize solutions to problems. The cavern that represents a hot, dusty day might have a trove of frozen popsicles tucked away in a corner. It's just a mental image, but it helps. It's something to think about while racking up the miles. There's good evidence that Courtney spends a fair amount of time daydreaming about ice cream. Hey, at least we have that in common.
Every race, Courtney looks forward to going deeper into the cave and indulging her curiosity by discovering more of it. And there's plenty to explore. She's nodded off while actually running. She was so tired once that getting a single minute of sleep felt refreshing. She's been unable to keep food down - in one race, she didn't eat for 140 miles. She temporarily lost her vision and had to figure out how to run blind. When her vision is fine, there's the hallucinations to deal with. Raining eels, cartoon characters, and bears in a circle hugging. (She watches light-hearted movies the night before the race to keep the hallucinations from being too scary.) Not to mention the more pedestrian issues of trail running, from blisters to wheezing. On one particularly dusty trail, she had to be hauled to the nearest emergency room to have her lungs checked.
Listening to Courtney do an interview is inspiring because she doesn't overcomplicate things. She has this "gee whiz" attitude and just wants to see what's possible. When Ryan Holiday asked whether the Pain Cave helped her deal with sitting in traffic, she said No. It was an interesting answer, because I would have thought being stronger at one thing would make you stronger at everything. But maybe the difference is control. You can control your next step on the trail, but you can't make the cars in front of you go away.
In one interview, Courtney summed up ultra marathons: "The nature of the sport is not stopping." I guess that's also the nature of a lot of the challenges we face.
Keep Going,
Geoff
Notes
Courtney Dauwalter is the focus of The Source, a documentary of her run in the Tahoe 200. She has been profiled by The Ringer and appeared on the podcasts of Rich Roll, Ryan Holiday, Some Work All Play, and many others.
Photo by Sergey Nikolaev on Unsplash.
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