A lonely, hard journey

You asked for it. You got it. Everyone said this would be a hard and lonely journey, and I believed them, but I didn't understand it. Not until I was in the thick of it. Right now. There are highs that make you feel unstoppable, moments when everything clicks, when the effort feels worth it. Yesterday. And then there are the lows. The kind that don’t come with any warning. The kind where you wake up and can’t explain why your chest feels heavy, why your brain feels foggy, why the thing you love doing feels like it’s slipping away. Today. I started ultra-running to understand this feeling, the intersection of pain, purpose, and solitude. Running far strips everything down. You meet yourself out there in the silence. No audience, no metrics, no one to impress. Just you and the voice in your head asking, Why are you doing this? But I haven’t gone as far in ultra-running as I’ve gone in entrepreneurship. However, it’s a similar kind of endurance. The mental miles pile up quietly. You keep moving forward because you told yourself you would. And you say to yourself, if I just keep going I know I’ll get there. It's lonely. I'm lying in bed at 4:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, completely drained. Ten new guides and athletes onboarded in the past two days. Progress on paper. But inside, I feel like I'm unraveling. Like nothing is working and that I'll be a complete failure. Why does it feel like this? Why does every small failure (a bug in the system, a post that gets ignored, a number that doesn't add up) carry so much weight? It's like my mind zooms in on the one thing that went wrong and forgets everything that went right. The wins fade too fast. The losses echo. They drain. And they rot. Writing this is supposed to help. It's supposed to make sense of it, to convince me I'm being dramatic, that this is just part of the process. But it doesn't. This journey isn't meant to feel good all the time. Reminding myself of this actually does make me feel better. Everyone that I look up to has described this exact same scenario. To keep showing up even when you don't want to. To find meaning in the repetition, strength in the isolation, and peace in knowing that you chose this path, even when it hurts. And it hurts. I’ve since made it out of this slump. Turns out running really helps. Who knew? Get outside. It works.