You Gonna Hit the Wall Several Times
Breathing sharpens. Vision narrows; the peripheral world dims. Thoughts fracture.
I am thinking of those symptoms after learning more about hitting the wall in an athletic context and speaking this morning with someone who saw me running a 10K two months ago. The hindrance was that I took a chance after dislocating my toe and being banned from training for seven weeks.
This evening, I saw one of my neighbours by his elegant black Mercedes — dancing to the music, painfully laughing and talking to himself, and smoking, smoking lots… It’s hard seeing him already several times like that. His torso is bare, the music he plays for all of us and chest are contracting; his woman and child are gone.
We all hit the wall. And what Mike Wardian, one of the world’s most prolific ultrarunners, casually calls the “funk” that passes, others who vividly recall it, when your body’s glycogen stores are used up, describe it as if it’s as though the self becomes porous, absorbing through them an invisible weight, suppressing all willpower to carry on.
The 2008 Big Ten Women’s 600m final. Maya Quat Mills — long-legged and confident — was leading the race when she crashed on the final turn. Her shoe came off. Barefoot and battered, she sprang back up and not only finished the race, she won it.
Some walls are not constructed by our own beliefs, but by proximity to others. In the 1984 Olympic 3000m, South African teenager Zola Budd and American favourite Mary Decker collided. Decker fell hard and wept on the track. Budd, vilified by headlines, finished the race in silence. The wall between them took decades to dismantle — but eventually, they spoke and not only made peace, but became friends.
Not all walls are tragic or painful. Some go unnoticed.
In 1983, a 61-year-old potato farmer from rural Australia, Cliff Young, entered the Sydney to Melbourne ultramarathon. Five days. Nearly 900 kilometres. Dressed in overalls and goloshes, with no formal training and no teeth (he left his dentures at home because they rattled), Cliff ran through the night as others slept. He won the race, setting a new record.
He didn’t know about pacing strategies or sleep schedules. He just kept going, shuffling in what came to be known as the “Young Shuffle.” When asked why he ran through the nights, he simply said he didn’t know the others were stopping. The wall was invisible to him.
The psalmist says, “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” When you go to the mountains, you might experience a phenomenon called cloud inversion, where thick fog blankets the valley while mountaintops emerge in the sun. If you never climb, all you’ll see is grey. But you decide to go anyway, and you reach the top, where the sky is the bluest blue. You breathe differently at altitude. The air thins, but your lungs expand. That’s the paradox of the wall. It threatens collapse — but you see a supporter who shouts, vocally or with a gaze: “You will make it”.
Yes, in most cases, you will go over that wall. But there are also kinds of barriers the hardest to accept, knowing the insurmountable: deteriorating health, terminal illness, tragic accident, family crises we cannot do anything about, and death.
“And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation”
— Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
We hit the wall in the call to prayer echoing through narrow alleys at the setting sun. “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”
