Has Hard Gone Soft?

Everyone seems to be doing hard things now…..

It is in the captions, it is in the bios, it is in about four hundred podcasts. Do hard things. Embrace the suck. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. I listen to a fair bit of it and my honest reaction is good, genuinely. More people attempting more than they did last year is a better world than the alternative.

Then I look at some of what is actually being attempted.

A cold shower. A 5km in the heat. Five days of a 5am alarm. Ninety days of something with a hashtag attached. These are useful things. I have prescribed every one of them, and I will again. But the word hard has been stuck to them so often, by so many people who have never been anywhere near the edge of themselves, that the word has almost gone soft in the middle.

The talking is not the problem. Talking is harmless. Calibration and perspective is the problem. How we measure ourselves against these things is the problem. The mind runs. What is hard for one is not hard for another.

“If that is hard, and I have done that, then I must be doing hard things.”

And so we stop. We think we are hard. We believe we have done hard. The narrative is making us soft.

I was not aware of it at the time but 2018 was a hard year for me.

In February after being hit by a truck whilst riding my bike I was left fighting for my life on the side of the road. An emergency room that served me the words “prepare for resuscitation”. Intensive care. Restrained to a hospital bed for days with broken ribs, broken scapula and a punctured lung. Yeah those that know me well may say I have a pattern with ribs and bikes, you have probably spotted it by now.

What followed was not very dramatic, it rarely is. It’s months of being a slower, more careful, at times a more frustrated version of myself, in a body that no longer did what I asked it to on the first go. More so when it happens to you rather than by choice. Although I would later reflect that I chose to get up that day and ride my bike. I was experiencing a new brand of hard. Maybe a brand many had sampled before me and passed through with less friction, maybe the opposite. This was my hard and hard it was.

I like the quote: “the reward for hard work is more hard work.” I use it a lot on my athletes and myself. It’s strong. So of course in the months following my crash I worked hard, searching for more hard. I kept finding it. Almost like a drug. I was an addict. Every bit of hard I found gave me an insane high. So I went looking for more. Ironically my search started when I was still in my hospital bed when I messaged my buddy Rob.

It was strange as hard was changing. A book I read may have changed it for me forever when on November 24th 2018 I completed my 30th consecutive marathon. Running 42.195km, every day, for a month. 1,265km in total. Predominantly the same roads around the city of Dubai. No prize on the line, no race to win. Hard because it was giving me something that I believed (and still do) was making me a better human.

Of course the early days are filled with energy and excitement. It was the middle of the second week that things started to change. New sensations. Support in various forms. Questions you never thought of. No rip chord. No exit. A whole load of space to figure yourself out. Not intensity as we know it. Not suffering as that is somehow a choice so how can it actually be? Hard is quiet, it is patient, it remains long enough for that if the person who started it so desires can be the same person that finishes it. But they are actually never the same person again.

To this day it’s been hard to articulate answers when I am asked how hard it was. Even afterwards, hard remains quiet. Talking is almost like an escape hatch. I try but it does not land cleanly. Possibly much like this piece. I have thought about it a lot. The answer lays in two of our InnerFight values. Firstly honesty. Hard is honesty in its purest. Primarily with self. That is what makes it special as despite multiple efforts one may never be understood, this is fine. We know if we are doing hard things or just making a post on social media as clickbait with the yardstick of someone else’s benchmark. As I mentioned earlier a cold shower for many is very hard. For others a daily occurrence. And secondly simplicity. Endurance sports are in my blood. The simplicity resonates beyond reason sometimes. A clear start line, a clear finish line, a defined activity to do between the two. It could not be simpler. You either do the thing or you do not. You can not talk your way out, the evidence is always pure.

So the useful question is not are you doing hard things. Everybody says yes to that. The useful question is quieter.

What have you done in the last two years that you could not get out of? Not that you chose not to get out of. That you could not.

If nothing comes to mind, that is not a character failure. It is information, and it is far more useful than another 90 day challenge.

It means the thing you have been calling hard has been sitting comfortably inside what you can already do. It means you have been paying for the gym membership of your existing self. Go and find the edge. Pick something with a date on it, something big enough that you will have to become somebody slightly different to arrive at it, and then remove your exits. Tell one or two  people who will not let you off. Then say nothing else about it until it is done.

The bike is never just a bike. The marathon was never about the marathon. Thirty days of running taught me almost nothing about running, and a fair amount about who I am when it stops being interesting.

That is where the change lives. In the part nobody is posting about.

No Weakness
Marcus