I had a whirlwind of a holiday season. A mixture of events that forced all of us to hold the extremes of joy and sadness at nearly the same time. First the good news, we welcomed a new baby girl into the world. She’s happy, healthy…and of course not sleeping that much! Everything went well and it was a moment of pure joy.
A few days before we welcomed our girl into the world, our long-time dog, Willie, passed away. My wife found him on the side of the road on the run over a decade ago, and he’s been a part of our life ever since. He was a mut who loved deeply, but retained a wild and mischievous streak. He had some funny quirks, as he was obsessed with watching videos of horses on our laptops, shoving his nose into the screen and then trying to open up the laptop if you closed it. But he also was fiercely protective of those he loved. He’d sleep by the door of our first child, and run and get us whenever he heard her cry when she was waking up from a nap. He’d follow her around, take all of the hugs and even hair pulling that our toddler gave him. And he’d indulge her in her favorite game, which is where she took a biscuit and ran around with Willie chasing after the treat. When he eventually won, he’d do so in the gentlest way, holding back on his over-eagerness to eat food by ever so gently taking the biscuit from our daughters hand. Giggles and laughs ensued. But one of his favorite pastimes was running. During his younger years, he’d sit at the door until it was time for a run. And if you dared to try to not take him, he’d whine, howl, and bark until you gave in. I’ve written about his love of running and how he wasn’t the best pacer before. I figured it was apt to share the excerpt about Willie here. I hope you enjoy and the memory of Willie brings a little smile to your face, as he did so often for our family.
The Will to Continue
Willie is a seven-year-old mutt, a mixture of Australian cattle dog and shepherd, that my wife found living in a tire when he was only a few months old. He’s also got a quite the personality, equally intelligent and mischievous. In his spare time, Willie sticks to his world of contrasts, having two loves: watching TV and running. The former is an amusing but also annoying habit he’s picked up of pressing his large black nose to whatever screen has movement and sound coming out of it. Turn on a video of horses, and your screen will be destroyed. The latter act, running, is a more normal activity for a dog.
When Willie goes on a run, he makes it five miles in the chilly winter months, tugging at his leash the whole way. But whenever the heat and humidity of the summer come through, Willie’s endurance evaporates. He trots through two miles with the same eagerness and excitement, but the heat quickly slows his pace from the usual seven-minute miles to a more pedestrian nine-minute mile pace. Willie runs the same two-mile route every summer day; he knows the turns, taking them before we even signal to. He could pace it to perfection, but his pacing skills resemble the children discussed in chapter three. Out hard, slow in the middle, before a spurt to the finish when we round the corner to the house. But there’s something else that will cause Willie to abandon the fatigue induced trot for a full-bore sprint: squirrels.
His pink tongue could be fully hanging out of his mouth, signaling that he’s nearly had enough. He could have slowed to a panting filled walk. But in the throws of fatigue, it all changes once he catches a glimpse of that small gray animal that torments his life. He springs up and begins to put his sixty-pound frame to work, pulling toward his mortal enemy. Willie found motivation, or dare I say, meaning, to bring him back from the depths of despair.
When it comes to pacing, we use a heuristic, comparing actual versus expected effort for where they are at during the race. If we feel better than expected, we speed up. Worse? Time to slow down. But there’s one other crucial component: drive.
Performance = Actual Effort/Expected Effort * Drive
Whether we call it drive, motivation, or purpose, the last component determines our bandwidth for how far into the depths of fatigue we can push. Contrary to common convention, when we are exhausted, we haven’t completely depleted our reserves. Even the athlete who collapses to the ground after a race had more left in the tank. His or her muscles could still function. Just think, if our brain truly allowed us to go to zero, to empty, would that be smart or dangerous? Your body is trying to protect you, and it has a safety mechanism, an alarm that sounds to convince you to slow down, to stop, to make the pain and fatigue go away. But, according to the latest theories in exercise science, how close to zero we get is variable.
We are like the car with the countdown of how many miles we can drive before we hit zero. For the adventurous among us, you quickly learned that this gauge isn’t entirely accurate. You may be able to drive 10, 20, or even 30 miles past the point your car tells you that you have 0 miles left to go. There’s leeway between when the vehicle manufacturers programmed the display to tell you that you were empty and when your gas tank is indeed empty. It’s a safety mechanism designed to prevent people from tempting fate, pushing their car too far, and running out of gas on the side of the road. Our body utilizes the same type of process. Warning us—through the sensation of effort and fatigue—that we are at zero before we actually hit zero. There’s always something in reserve. Drive determines how close to empty we can push before our body shuts us down. Before it flips from voluntary shutdown to initiating near catastrophe.
Our brain weighs that complicated gas mileage algorithm with how important the task is. Because we never truly reach zero in our body’s energy reserves (that would mean catastrophic failure), we use the level of importance and the risk versus reward to determine how close to zero we can get. Is our life on the line? Is our child’s life in jeopardy? Then, we might be able to perform superhuman events like lifting a car off of a trapped child’s body. Is it a regular-season game, or is it game 7 of the finals? We might get a little extra juice in the latter case. According to the latest science of fatigue, your brain essentially tries to protect you from harming yourself, and it uses the perceived risks versus the potential rewards to fix where that governor is.
Having a strong purpose acts as a turbo boost. Whether that purpose comes from God, family, playing for your teammates, or a mission that holds deep importance, when our pursuits match with our purpose, we persist for much longer. Research shows that purpose and persistence are linked in the classroom, workplace, and athletic fields. When we have a purpose, we are able not only to endure and persist but also to provide a beacon that reminds us of what’s important and to make the right decision at the right moment.
