"What does not kill me, makes me stronger."
"A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all."

- Nietzsche

I just finished reading Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner by Dean Karnazes, which I picked up for $4 at Borders on Thursday. Formally, an "ultramarathon" is defined as any race or endurance event covering more distance than a marathon, which is 26.2 miles. For people like Karnazes, 26.2 miles is a brisk warm-up. But more on that later.

He ran in high school and didn't run again until he was 30. One night, dissatisfied with the lack of fulfillment in his life, he left a club and just ran 30 miles. He had to call his wife from his destination to come pick him up. The run left him practically crippled for weeks, but he didn't care.

After taking up running as a hobby, he was running up a hill in San Francisco called "Heartbreak Hill," feeling pretty good about his level of fitness. Then two military guys flew past him. He continued climbing, and they passed him coming the other way. Before he could reach the top, they rocketed past him again, leaving him feeling pretty humbled. As they were doing rapid push-ups at the summit, he asked if they were training for something. They were: the Western States Endurance Run, which he learned is a 100-mile race. To qualify for it, one needs to run a 50-mile race and then be invited. He felt up to the challenge.

His training took him to the point where running a marathon was no big deal. He could even run two in two days. Still, being able to run two marathons with rest in between is nothing like running (practically) two consecutive marathons. But he did it. Then after the race, he, uh, coated the dashboard and windshield of his new car with the contents of his stomach. But he didn't care.

The 100-mile race took him through high elevations that placed him in danger of brain swelling from hypoxia, through a river or two, and up some inclines that were damn close to 90°. He lost his big toenail, had to have multiple blisters on his feet lanced and sealed with Krazy Glue (cool, huh?), and he even went blind at one point. He still finished in about 22 hours, in 15th place (out of 396 participants, not all of whom finished). The experience forever changed him, and he wanted greater challenges. He found them. Things he's done since then (aside from running this race 11 times):

1. Won the Badwater Ultramarathon, which is a 135-mile race through Death Valley. His first pair of running shoes melted within minutes on the 200-degree asphalt before he learned to run down the white line on the side of the road. Runners in this race do things like train in a sauna while wearing parkas and sweatpants. They also eat boxes of nails and razor blades for breakfast.
2. Competed in and completed the very first marathon to the South Pole, without snow shoes.
3. Ran a 199-mile relay race (aptly named The Relay) that's designed for teams, by himself. That took about 2 days of nonstop running.
4. Ran from his house to the starting line for The Relay, then ran The Relay. Total nonstop distance: 350 miles. This race, by the way, took him across the Golden Gate Bridge, and he wrestled a gorilla into submission while he was at it.
5. Ran 50 marathons on 50 consecutive days.

..and more. Having read all this, something became pretty clear to me: I'm a pretty big sissy. Most other people (and by "most," I mean "damn near everyone") are, too. By and large, we have trained ourselves to fear and avoid pain that is far, far, far below the actual threshold that can be considered "unbearable," or even the much weaker "pretty bad." In doing so, we prevent ourselves from truly learning what we're capable of, and we make development past an exceedingly low benchmark impossible, whether that development is physical, mental, emotional, or what have you. As Papa Nietzsche taught us, great things must come from suffering. Raphael was a shitty artist at first, and so were Michaelangelo and da Vinci, but through a great deal of training, they became Raphael, Michaelangelo, and da Vinci.

Now don't get me wrong; I'm not denying that we really do have limits, and I'm not saying that running a marathon to the South Pole (which was more of an exercise in plodding along and trying very hard to avoid frostbite and death via exposure than a race) is anything short of insane. I'm just saying that we're probably capable of a great deal more than we think we are, and it's precisely because we think we're not that our most laudable capabilities will never be actualized. Our overly pessimistic self-assessments, then, are holding us back.

We should work on that.