I was up much of the night coughing last night. In fact, at one point i was coughing so violently that it somehow triggered my gag reflex to the point where i threw up a bit. According to a friend of mine and childhood asthma sufferer, this isn't really that uncommon. I guess i'm lucky that its taken me 36 years realize this. Needless to say i'm getting a good abdominal workout without trying.
But now to the point - I always try to use that middle of the night awake time to explore things that have been on my mind. Recently, i've been thinking about the role of fear as a mental limitation in reaching physical potential. I'm not sure exactly how it works - but i'm pretty sure that it plays a part. Much of my mental 'training' in the early days had less to do with suffering (although i did end up suffering my fair share) and more to do with fear management. Climbing is good about that.
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Ridge descent after climbing the face of Mt. Talbot, NZ (2006) |
Any big ambitious route my brother and I set out to do was chock full of uncertainty, and sometimes that uncertainty contained a fair amount of risk. The ability to accept and manage that risk - or the potential for it - probably plays a significant role, in combination with my intimate knowledge of suffering, in why i might be able to access more of my physical potential than people with different backgrounds. I learned to be very much present, even in very dire situations, and just deal with the facts in front of me. I think this has served me well in my pursuits, and i find myself drawing on it both two days into a four day adventure race and two minutes into a super hard tabata interval.
The latter of which, by the way, is not unlike the violent coughing i experienced last night in that it too, is quite capable of triggering the gag reflex. It's always nice to come full circle.
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