When You’re Hit With “Why Am I Doing This?”

Fat Salmon 3.2 mile race start. Photo by J. Rosen.

My favorite party of the year is Seattle’s Fat Salmon swim race. Swimmers from all over the area congregate for a morning of socializing around a pair of point-to-point race distances — one and three miles.

This blog post is about how you start something like, say, a long-distance race, and in the first minute you’re asking, “Why am I doing this again?”

It’s a common situation: You plan for something, set a goal, pant after it in your daily life and then it shows up and as you step into it and you’re suddenly visited by an existential spin of: “What the — ?” The inner trickster. Here’s how I dealt with mine.

Obviously I wasn’t going to get out of the water. I tried, but there was no competitive mojo in my body or spirit, so I just settled in and refrained from judging. Sometimes during a race I try to open up to lessons I can take into my work life or personal life. The mantra that entered my mind on Saturday was: “Slow and steady wins the race.” I started to argue with this line: But I don’t want slow. And I’m certainly not winning any race today!

Still, that seemed to be the leitmotif of my swim, boomeranging back every time I tried to push it away. And it worked, in that it helped me take one stroke after another in an unhurried fashion, accepting the fact I wasn’t going to slip into a competitive pace. Here I was, oh well. Mantras can be like a pacing coach.

It turned out to be a pretty good swim, too. I didn’t feel overwhelmed by the distance, I didn’t winge and whine and get out of the water thinking, Never again!  I lost my timing chip during the swim and was perfectly content to not have to get my time.

And then a friend informed me that I had won my age group. What a surprise! It doesn’t make life that much better to tell you the truth, but it does make me giggle. And it makes me value the company (and truth) of a mantra when it comes visiting. It was perfectly 100 percent true for that day.

So on this note –

What one-liner is whispering in your ear when the Trickster shows up?

xo