Endurance days
05 June 2026
Over the past few years I’ve had quite a few whole-day endurance efforts. I don’t particularly like the moniker endurance: it implies that the activity is somehow painful, something to endure. In reality, I very much enjoy them. Anyway, what they have been is whole-day (more often, in fact, multi-day). This has given me time enough to practice some skills that are easy to overlook. The more explainable of these skills are proper hydration and fueling, besides other forms of logistics. Being good - or passable - at the things which just simply need to happen regularly throughout the effort if you want to complete it in a decent state. I think this is relevant to life in general: if you want life to be manageable there’s just loads of things you’ve got to do.
But the one I want to write about here is the one which I cite when people ask the following question: what on earth do you think about? I’m never really sure how to respond. The answer isn’t very profound for the most part, it’s mostly what I call firefighting. There’s always a tender point on my body, or I’m thinking about when I need to eat, drink, or go to the loo. It might even be that I’m worried about the next turning, or I don’t know how to cross the main road coming up. These all feel like profound emergencies at the time. And they are. But they disappear all the same.
This time firefighting is great. It leaves no room for contemplation or overthinking. Perhaps most importantly, it leaves no room for the latest notification on my phone.
I see a lot of things written about flow state, which according to Wikipedia is “deep immersion, focus, and intrinsic motivation”. I’ve never been sure whether it would be accurate to say I enter a flow state during these long efforts. In some ways I might describe it as the opposite. It feels more like an irregular beat than a flow. Discrete and jumpy rather than continuous and immersive. It feels as though I am at the mercy of everything, rather than at the mercy of nothing. This attribution makes me sound powerless, like a straw in the wind. But the reality is different. It develops the flexibility and agility which is required on any undertaking where external factors play a large part. You become connected to your body and your physical location in a way that we rarely are in modern life. It is exactly these tethers – one might even think of them as chains – which prevent flow. Instead of being ‘in the zone’, you become acutely outward-facing: aware of every screaming ligament, every rain-filled cloud, and every twang of hunger. But besides alerting you of smoking fires, these tethers also feed you joy. In the same way you notice the appearance of small niggles, you notice their disappearance. And every ray of sunshine. And every crumb of food.
The long days (and sometimes weeks) out anchor me to myself and my surroundings.
There is an instance of this I remember vividly. I had been forced to come off the canal because I reached a long underground tunnel without a towpath (before the steam engine, this meant workers had to ‘walk’ the boat through by lying down and pushing against the walls of the tunnel). The sign had promises of a path overground leading you across the fields and back onto the canal. I had got lost. Frustration was building, along with hunger and exhaustion. I could feel myself teetering. Then, as if a switch had been flicked, the wind swirled. The clouds turned black, and neigh-ing horses bolted in the adjacent fields. The heavens opened in a biblical fashion. The sky had burst, and I along with it. An immediate release of tension snapped me back. Suddenly, I was amazed by it all. The majesty of the grand oaks, the sweet smell of the rain, and the metallic darkness of the sky. All it had taken to shake me out of my malaise was involuntary engagement with my surroundings.
I believe it is important to be subject to the same things as our surroundings. Modern life seeks to detach. Often this is a good thing. Many of our ancestors perished from the cold. Far fewer of us do today. But once in a while, at least, it is good to be rained upon just as the trees are.