In spite of contrasting reports, it is still winter out there somewhere.

PLOD Plot Here

Well, I made it. It wasn’t always fun, and it wasn’t always pretty, but I worked out at least three hours a day for ten days. I’ve got the PLOD Plot updated above, and will talk some more a little later on about what I did over the last two days below, but in case you’re short on time I think I can sum up the whole experience pretty well in one sentence:

That was a dumb idea.

And that’s great. Most of my adult life can be described fairly accurately by connecting the dots from dumb idea to dumb idea, and at each point the execution gets a little bit smoother.

There’s been no shortage of dumb ideas. There was that time that I spent a week in the Tetons with two inexperienced climbing partners and we flogged our way to the top of a couple of mellow summits, escaping with our lives, if not our dignity:

Or that other time I stayed up drinking until 4am the night before I was supposed to ride my bike alone the 70 miles to Polson along one of the most dangerous highways in America. In December. I was still drunk until at least St. Ignatious and got lost on the way, which, while adding about an hour to the ride was actually a blessing because I found a truck stop where I could buy extra wool socks.

Or then there was that other time that I was caught offguard by a manic episode and accidentally offered to cook a twelve course dinner for fifteen people in a different down while in the middle of a house remodel that was already behind schedule. That one actually came out pretty tasty.

The ideas never really seem to get any better. I’m still waiting to have a good one. But I’ve noticed that my execution of bad ideas is steadily improving, which I think is a great sign. Like my cousin sometimes says, “Ideas are bullshit. Everone’s got ideas. Look, I want a jetpack. That’s a great idea. Everyone wants a jetpack. But it turns out they’re really hard to make. Ideas are bullshit, execution is what counts. If you figure out how to execute, eventually a good idea will come to you.”

And so while I try to take a lot of the things that that cousin says with a heavy grain of salt, I also try to sift through the derelict for a bit of lagan. Every terrible idea that I’ve slogged through has brought me to the other side with a lesson or two that I can put toward my next terrible idea. We almost died in the Tetons, sure, but then I was merely very cold and uncomfortable on the ride to Polson. Every once in a while I even pull something off.

Without getting all pedantic, I’ll try to lay out a few of gems that I picked up through this silly ten day challenge.

1) 3 hours is much to much to run in one day

If you have to ask yourself, “can I physically run for three hours?” then the answer is moot. Regardless of whether or not you can, you shouldn’t. There are a lot of people out there who stand to gain from going on a three hour run, and they know who they are. If there’s any doubt in your mind, maybe just go for a shorter run.

My ankles hurt. My knees hurt. My IT is blowing up. And that was from a single three hour jog. Ride a bike or something.

2) Don’t procrastinate

This is one that you might think I would have learned in 4th or 5th grade, or whenever you start getting legitimate homework assignments. But I didn’t. Almost every of the last seven days of this stupid challenge I found myself leaving work at about 5pm and staring at the business end of a three hour workout. Usually it was getting toward being too dark to ride a bike, and skiing has a Futz Constant* just high enough to make it not ideal for weeknights, which conspired to conceive some long runs, and we’ve established that those are ill advised. The days in which I split the workouts into a morning hour, a lunch hour, and an evening hour were much more pleasant.

Some nights, such as Night 9, I found myself hiking vigorously for three hours in the dark and just getting hungry.

3) Accountability can get you where regular willpower won’t

I said I’d avoid pedantics and so in an effort to keep it informal I’ll use an example here. On Day 10, the last one, I had an elegant plan to leave work, head to Snowbowl, and hike a lap on Point 6 with a quick detour down Whipped Cream. That’d get me about three hours and almost 4,000 vert, and seemed like a beautiful way to top the whole experiment off.

That was the plan.

Instead I had to ride my bike across town after work and pick up the car and drive home to change before heading up the hill. This put me almost an hour behind schedule already.

On the way up Snowbowl Road I began to smell something sweet and boozy, and wondered if some ancient and long forgotten half-bottle of schnapps and broken open or something. A few minutes later the check engine light came on, followed by my engine’s insistence that I not exceed 1,900 rpm, and, finally, as I was parking, steam billowing from under the hood. A quick glance at the engine compartment revealed a blown radiator hose and a sheen of that sickly sweet green fluid covering everything.

So I went skiing for a while, but curtailed the grand scheme of that morning. A while later Girlfriend met me in the parking lot and followed me back to town after we put everything back together and topped off the radiator.

This put me at home at 9:30pm and only having exercised, all said, about 90 minutes for the day. I wanted to go to bed. I was tired, and it was cold outside. If it wasn’t the last day of this stupid challenge thing I definitely would have. But instead I ventured outside and briskly went to collect my bike (still far on the other side of town) and cruise back, still making it into bed before midnight. Without knowing that as many as six people would be waiting to read about the end of the challenge on this blog right here, I certainly would not have finished it.

There’s a TED Talk by Derek Sivers that refers to an old study to assert that by making our goals public we begin to identify with them just enough that it becomes much less likely that we achieve them.

I can’t say that I agree.

*Futz Constant – The amount of time associated with an activity that is necessary for the completion of that activity, but that is not that activity. e.g. driving to a trailhead, putting on skins, running a shuttle, etc. A hierarchical ranking of sports based on the Futz Constant is probably deserving of its own post.