What I Do When I Experience Fear

Hint: It's not "toughen up and fight through."

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, from the comfort of our Montana living room, I kissed my wife and watched the confetti fall on Times Square. By 12:05, I was logged onto Ultrasignup.com securing a spot at the Javelina Jundred 100k, nine months away. After thirty minutes of frenzied browser refreshing, I was in.

With the holidays behind, I’m facing that goal in the daylight for the first time. The farthest I’ve run in one go is fifty miles, and that was twelve years ago. A familiar emotion creeps in. Ah, yes. I know this one: fear. “What have I gotten myself into?”

Humans are hard-wired for anxiety and will undertake elaborate, sometimes unconscious programs of self-soothing to try and mute the feelings. But, like our shadow, there they are again.

As runners, we develop similar strategies for dealing with pain. Pushing against is ineffective because it emphasizes what we don’t want, rather than what we do. The best approaches help us to simply be with unpleasantness until it passes.

Accepting that fear follows us everywhere and that trying to strong-arm it leads to more suffering, we’re called to lean in. But how? How, in popular run coach parlance, do we “get comfortable with discomfort?”

Here’s what I do:

I adopt an attitude opposite to fear.

The antithesis of fear isn’t grit, guts, or bravado. Those require a lot of energy and don’t have good staying power. What about knowledge? It’s said, “We fear what we don’t understand,” but too intimate a familiarity with risk amplifies anxiety. Peace and love? Wonderful aspirations for living, but not foolproof antidotes to unease.

So, what is the opposite of fear?

Curiosity.

Compared to control-based tactics, curiosity is low effort and high return. We can deploy it any time, again and again, by becoming aware of the subtleties of a situation or the textures of a sensation and thinking, “Isn’t that interesting?” We might notice we’re having a reaction or judgment, snatch it out of midair, and say to ourselves, “I wonder where that’s coming from.”

We don’t push for answers, but instead ask questions. We stay light.

• What story am I telling myself here?

• I’ve never noticed that before. Fascinating.

• What could I learn in this situation?

• How is this different than what I expected?

Curiosity has been brilliant for me in sobriety and running alike, as I explore new territory of the mind and body. The lead-ins, “Isn’t that interesting…” and “I wonder where that comes from…” have helped me handle cravings, uncertainty, and difficulty, arriving on the other side wiser and more resilient.

The Finish Line

There’s a voice in all of us that prefers we stay small. Curiosity shushes the voice and helps us stay open, inviting exploration rather than retreat. It allows us to navigate discomfort with wonder instead of resistance. As you work through goals this year, consider what might happen if you become more curious.

I’ll be doing the same, right alongside you.

Run lightly,
-mike

PS - Follow my Javelina 100k build here: The Javelina Diaries

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