Article 18: Resilience in Action: Series 1.2: UTMB: What are you really capable of?

Introduction:

Why I choose challenges where success isn’t guaranteed, and what pushing towards our limits can teach us about resilience, belief and what is really inside us.

Section 1:   Resilience in action

For years, much of what I have shared through Stroke Recovery by Rewired Runner has naturally been about stroke.

That is where many of the lessons came from.

But increasingly, I have realised that the lessons themselves are much broader.

We all face moments when the plan changes. When confidence disappears. When something we care about becomes harder than expected. When we fail. When we have to decide whether to stop, adapt or keep moving.

And there is another part of resilience that increasingly fascinates me:

How do we find out what we are actually capable of?

That question is one of the reasons I am drawn to difficult endurance events.

It isn’t really about running 100 kilometres or 100 miles.

It’s about putting myself into situations where I don’t know the answer.

Can I do this?

What happens when I become exhausted?

What happens when my mind starts telling me to stop?

How much more is there when I think I have reached my limit?

What is actually inside me?

That is a big part of what Resilience in Action means to me.

Not simply talking about resilience.

Creating meaningful challenges that give us an opportunity to discover it.

Section 2:  Why choose something that might beat you?

I’ve thought about this a lot since UTMB.

Why would anyone deliberately choose something that they know might end in failure?

Why spend months preparing for something without knowing whether you’re capable of doing it?

For me, that uncertainty is part of the attraction.

I don’t enter these races because I know I can finish them.

I enter partly because I don’t know.

I want to find out.

I want to explore the limits of what my body can do, but perhaps even more importantly, I want to explore what my mind is capable of.

Because there are parts of ourselves that I don’t think we necessarily meet when everything is comfortable.

When life is predictable, when we’re succeeding and when everything is going according to plan, we may never need to find them.

Put yourself into something genuinely difficult and eventually the layers begin getting stripped away.

Comfort disappears.

Confidence can disappear.

The original plan can disappear.

Eventually you’re left with a much simpler question:

What have I actually got inside me?

That’s what fascinates me.

Section 3:  We don’t all need our own UTMB

My version happens to involve mountains and ultramarathons.

Yours almost certainly doesn’t need to.

The challenge might be starting a business when you don’t know whether it will work.

Changing career.

Standing in front of an audience when public speaking terrifies you.

Going back to university later in life.

Trying to repair a relationship.

Learning something you’ve always told yourself you aren’t good at.

Training for your first 5K.

Taking responsibility for something where failure will be visible.

Or rebuilding some part of your life after it has been knocked apart.

The activity isn’t the important part.

The uncertainty is.

There is a difference between doing something difficult that you already know you can do and stepping into something where the outcome is genuinely uncertain.

That’s where I think some of our most interesting learning begins.

Section 4: The start line was already telling me something

Long before I reached Chamonix, I had dreamed about standing on the UTMB start line.

I’d watched the videos. I knew the music. I had imagined thousands of runners packed into the streets as Conquest of Paradise played.

Then, in 2019, I had a stroke.

For a period of my life, the distance between where I was and that dream was enormous.

Years later, I was standing there.

Rain falling.

Roughly 2,500 runners around me.

The music playing.

I remember deliberately putting my phone away because I didn’t want to watch the moment through a screen.

I wanted to be there.

Seven years of rebuilding and progressively testing myself had brought me to this particular question.

What am I capable of here?

I genuinely didn’t know.

And that was exactly why I needed to find out.

Section 5: Earn the right to ask a bigger question

 I didn’t go from recovering from stroke to attempting UTMB.

There were hundreds of steps in between.

My first careful run after my PFO closure was about two kilometres.

Then came slightly longer runs.

Roads became trails.

Trails became hills.

Eventually came longer races.

Around two and a half to three years before UTMB, I began a seven-month journey towards my first 100-kilometre event.

Then there were more 100-kilometre races.

Then 100 miles.

Then UTMB.

Somewhere along the way I developed a philosophy that I still like:

Earn the next challenge.

Do the thing in front of you.

Learn from it.

Build yourself.

Then ask a bigger question.

This isn’t about continually proving that you’re tough.

It’s about progressively exploring your capability.

And I think that’s an important distinction.

Section 6: Belief should be earned too

We hear a lot about believing in ourselves.

I believe in belief.

But I don’t think simply telling ourselves we’re capable of something is particularly powerful.

I prefer evidence.

Every difficult thing we attempt gives us information.

Sometimes the information is:

Yes. I can do this.

That becomes evidence we can carry into the next challenge.

Then perhaps we stretch slightly farther.

We accumulate experiences that say:

I’ve been frightened before.

I’ve been exhausted before.

I’ve failed before.

I’ve been under pressure before.

I’ve thought I couldn’t continue before.

And I found a way through.

Over time, those experiences can change the internal conversation.

Instead of:

I hope I can handle this.

It becomes:

I’ve handled hard things before. Let’s see what I’ve got.

Section 7: Psychology has a name for some of this

One relevant psychological concept is self-efficacy, our belief in our capability to execute the actions required in a particular situation.

Psychologist Albert Bandura identified direct mastery experiences, actually doing difficult things successfully, as an important source of self-efficacy.

That doesn’t mean every challenge has to end successfully.

Nor does it mean confidence alone determines outcomes.

It means our previous experiences can become evidence we draw on when we encounter the next difficult situation.

This concept has been studied in many settings, including rehabilitation, education, sport and workplace performance.

For me, the interesting part isn’t the terminology.

It’s what happens internally.

Every time I genuinely test myself, I learn something about myself that I couldn’t have learned simply by thinking about it.

Section 8: But what happens when you fail?

This is where the idea becomes more interesting.

If every challenge ends successfully, are we really testing our limits?

I don’t think so.

If I only choose races I’m virtually certain to finish, eventually I’m not really exploring my capability.

I’m demonstrating something I already know.

And this applies well beyond running.

If every professional goal we choose is something we’re certain we can deliver, every conversation is one we know will be comfortable and every ambition sits safely inside our established abilities, there isn’t much uncertainty.

And uncertainty is often where growth lives.

That doesn’t mean we should chase failure.

It means failure has to be allowed to exist as a possible outcome.

Otherwise, perhaps the test isn’t really a test.

Section 9: The knife-edge

I think about this as a knife-edge.

On one side is certainty.

The challenge is difficult, perhaps, but I already know I can do it.

On the other side is recklessness.

The objective is so far beyond my preparation or capability that I have little realistic chance.

Neither particularly interests me.

The space I want to explore sits somewhere between them.

Hard enough that I don’t know.

Hard enough that preparation matters.

Hard enough that I’ll have to grow.

Hard enough that at some point I may genuinely want to stop.

Hard enough that failure is possible.

But realistic enough that, if I prepare well and execute well, I have a genuine chance.

That’s the knife-edge.

And I think some of our biggest dreams sit very close to it.

Section 10: What happens when the plan disappears?

UTMB eventually gave me exactly the test I had gone looking for.

Just not in the way I wanted.

My shin deteriorated.

I vomited several times.

My nutrition plan had to change.

I went through a second night without proper sleep.

I started experiencing visual hallucinations.

My cutoff cushion disappeared.

The race became a fight for minutes.

My wife stayed with me from the other side of the world, barely sleeping herself, sending me calculations and encouragement through the night to keep me moving.

Eventually I reached the final aid-station cutoff with around three minutes remaining.

I looked at Ray and Sharnie and said words to the effect of:

“We’ll see you at the finish line. I’ve got this.”

I believed it.

Then, on the final major climb, my back began to spasm.

I couldn’t maintain the pace.

The clock ran out.

I lay on a rock and cried.

I had found the knife-edge.

And this time, I fell on the wrong side.

Section 11: That’s when the real test started

In some ways, the most interesting test of resilience wasn’t the race.

It was what happened when the race stopped going my way.

It is relatively easy to feel strong when you’re moving well.

It’s easier to believe in the plan when the numbers are working.

It’s easier to talk about resilience when success still looks likely.

But what happens when those things disappear?

Can you adapt?

Can you keep making decisions?

Can you keep moving when the outcome you wanted is slipping away?

And perhaps hardest of all:

What do you do when you give everything you have and still don’t get the result?

That’s where UTMB took me.

There was no inspirational clarity when the cutoff passed.

I was devastated.

I felt I had let people down.

I had spent years imagining the finish.

I hadn’t spent much time imagining getting within kilometres of it and being stopped.

That hurt.

And I think it should. A meaningful goal that doesn’t hurt when you lose it probably wasn’t particularly meaningful.

A meaningful goal that doesn’t hurt when you lose it probably wasn’t particularly meaningful.

Section 12: What did I find inside me?

Once the disappointment settled slightly, another question appeared.

I had entered these races partly because I wanted to find out what I was capable of.

So what had UTMB actually shown me?

It showed me weaknesses.

Absolutely.

There are things I need to change in my training.

I underestimated the repeated vertical and technical demands of the course.

My strength and durability need work.

My nutrition strategy didn’t survive the race.

There is a lot I would do differently.

But UTMB showed me something else too.

I learned that I could keep moving when the original plan had completely disappeared.

I could adapt the goal from a finishing time to simply surviving the next cutoff.

I could climb hard when descending had become extremely painful.

I could keep going after vomiting.

I could move through another night when my exhausted brain was seeing faces in roads, trees and trails.

I could arrive at an aid station with three minutes remaining and still genuinely believe I could finish.

And when I eventually couldn’t continue within the cutoff, it wasn’t because I had simply decided the race had become too uncomfortable.

I had found something inside myself that I could only have discovered by putting myself somewhere difficult enough to require it.

That’s one of the reasons I do these things.

Section 13: Hard things reveal things

This is perhaps the central idea I want Resilience in Action to explore.

Hard things reveal things.

They reveal our strengths.

They reveal our weaknesses.

They expose the stories we tell ourselves.

They show us what happens when confidence disappears.

They show us whether we can adapt.

Sometimes they reveal that we are capable of far more than we thought.

Sometimes they expose an area we need to work on.

Sometimes they knock us over completely.

But they give us information.

Comfort rarely gives us the same quality of information.

Section 14: This isn’t about suffering for the sake of suffering

There is an important distinction here.

I don’t believe pain automatically produces growth.

I don’t believe we need to make our lives unnecessarily miserable.

And I certainly don’t believe recklessness is resilience.

There is nothing inherently admirable about damaging yourself simply to demonstrate that you can tolerate pain.

The challenge needs purpose.

It needs preparation.

It needs to be appropriate to the person taking it on.

And sometimes resilience means stopping, changing direction or accepting that today isn’t the day.

That’s why the idea of earning the next challenge matters so much to me.

The knife-edge isn’t somewhere we should blindly throw ourselves.

We progressively build towards it.

Section 15: Your hard thing will look different from mine

This is where I want Resilience in Action to become much broader than running or stroke.

Most people reading this will never want to run UTMB.

Good.

You don’t need to.

Your challenge needs to matter to you.

Maybe you’re leading an organisation through uncertainty and making decisions without knowing whether they’ll work.

Maybe you’re starting again professionally at 50.

Maybe you’ve spent years avoiding public speaking and decide to stand on a stage.

Maybe you’re building a business.

Maybe you’re going through grief or separation and trying to rebuild your life.

Maybe you’re trying to become a better parent or partner.

Maybe you’re learning to be vulnerable enough to ask somebody for help.

Maybe you’re attempting something you’ve quietly wanted to do for years but have been frightened of failing at.

Or perhaps you’re recovering from illness or injury and your challenge is something another person would consider completely ordinary.

It doesn’t matter.

We don’t need to compare hard things.

The question is whether yours asks something new of you.

Section 16: What are you capable of?

I think many of us carry assumptions about our limits that we’ve never properly tested.

I’m not good at that.

I’m too old.

I’m not strong enough.

I’m not confident enough.

That’s not who I am.

I’ve never done anything like that.

Maybe some of those limitations are real.

But perhaps some are simply boundaries we’ve never walked towards.

I don’t think we discover the difference by sitting comfortably and thinking about it.

At some point, we have to act.

Try.

Train.

Learn.

Fail occasionally.

Adapt.

Try again.

And progressively collect evidence about who we are and what we’re capable of.

Section 17: Life has no finish line

One idea from David Goggins that resonates with me is that there is no finish line in life.

That matters because it changes how we think about achievement.

For years, UTMB was a destination in my head.

Get there.

Finish.

Mission accomplished.

But even if I had crossed that finish line, what then?

There would still have been another morning.

Another weakness.

Another challenge.

Another opportunity to grow.

There isn’t a point where someone hands us a medal and says:

You’re finished now. You’ve discovered everything you’re capable of.

That’s not how life works.

And perhaps that is the exciting part.

Section 18: Resilience cannot only exist when things go to plan

I don’t think anybody learns very much about their resilience when everything is easy and everything goes according to plan.

Resilience becomes relevant when something goes wrong.

When the plan breaks.

When you become uncomfortable.

When you doubt yourself.

When you fail.

When life gives you something you didn’t choose.

Then you discover what tools you’ve built.

That is one reason I think there is value in voluntarily doing difficult things.

Not because an ultramarathon prepares you for every adversity life might deliver.

It doesn’t.

But difficult challenges give us opportunities to practise uncertainty.

To experience discomfort.

To solve problems while tired or under pressure.

To discover how our minds behave when stopping becomes attractive.

And to build evidence that says:

I’ve been in hard places before.

I know how to keep thinking.

I know how to take another step.

Section 19: The goal isn’t to become fearless

I don’t want to reach a point where difficult challenges stop frightening me.

If anything, that would probably mean I need a different challenge.

I want to keep finding things where I have to ask:

Can I actually do this?

Then prepare as well as I can.

Earn the opportunity.

Stand at the start line.

And find out.

Sometimes the answer will be yes.

Sometimes, as UTMB taught me, the answer may be:

Not yet.

Both answers give me something to work with.

Section 20: What comes next

For the first few days after UTMB, I thought:

I’m not coming back to this bloody silly race.

Then the disappointment began changing.

Now I see unfinished business.

First I need to recover properly.

Then rebuild.

My intention is to work towards qualifying again in 2027 and potentially return to UTMB in 2028.

I don’t know whether I’ll finish it.

That’s important.

Because if I knew, there would be nothing left to discover.

I know much more about the challenge now.

I know where I was strong.

I know where I wasn’t ready.

I know what those mountains demand.

So I’ll work on those things.

And perhaps in 2028 I’ll stand in Chamonix again, listening to Conquest of Paradise, with the same fundamental question:

What am I capable of now?

Section 21: Resilience in action

Maybe that is what Resilience in Action is really about.

Not pretending we’re invincible.

Not seeking suffering for its own sake.

And not measuring our lives only by whether we succeed or fail.

It’s about being willing to test ourselves.

To pursue something meaningful without demanding a guarantee.

To discover what happens when the plan changes.

To learn what our minds and bodies can do when things become genuinely difficult.

To find weaknesses and work on them.

To find strengths we didn’t know we had.

To keep expanding our understanding of what might be possible.

Life has no final finish line.

There is always another lesson.

Another edge.

Another opportunity to grow.

So perhaps the question isn’t:

What do I know I can achieve?

Perhaps a much more interesting question is:

What am I capable of becoming if I’m willing to find out?

And then we take the next step.

Recovery is possible. Keep moving forward.

Section 22: Closing

Resilience in Action extends that journey to a wider community: exploring what happens when lessons learned through recovery are tested against difficult goals, setbacks and real-world adversity.

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