07/02/2026
“What did you learn?” A seemingly simple question asked of me by an ex-teacher of mine, after I had completed my first comrades. Most people congratulated me,, told me what an amazing achievement it was and basically stroked my ego with their comments. My students on the other hand, made sure that my ego never became too inflated, by questioning why it had taken me so long to run 90km.
So this question “what did I learn?” caused me to pause and contemplate, here was a person who was not interested in stroking my ego or deflating it out of ignorance or jealousy, instead he was the mentor determined that I embrace the lessons I had learned on the journey of 90km and use them as guides for life. Until that question I had never considered the lessons that were presented to me over the course of 6 months of training leading up to the event and then the lessons that were learned during the run itself. My answer then was that we could do anything we put our minds to. In hindsight the answer should have been “I got to know myself a little better”
In many ways any endurance sport is a miniature slice of life..You decide you want to participate in the event so you seek out a plan and like-minded individuals who will help you on the journey towards achieving this goal. This plan has certain milestones along the way that you have to meet for eg, complete a 21km, complete a marathon in the required time, do an ultra before the actual race. These milestones have to be achieved in order for you to be at the start of that race.
Along the way there are the inevitable roadblocks - a cold or injury that sets your training back a little, late nights and parties that result in you not pitching to a training session, running too slowly in your planned marathon such that you don't qualify and now you have to find another marathon to run in order to qualify.
Finally you find yourself at the start of the race you have trained so hard for and all the months of training have led up to this one day and it will either be a fantastic day or not, but at the end of the day only you will know whether you gave your best. No one can be blamed if the race didn't go well. This journey of 90km not only teaches you about yourself but it reveals to you what society can be when we are all on the same road. Everyone on the journey is kind, encouraging, no one considers themselves better than another, rich and poor successful or not we are one and the same. What a gift to experience that sense of compassion and friendship. It is almost as though we have stepped into an imaginary world, one so foreign to the world we come from.
This one day of 90km teaches you that we are all just souls on a journey to discover the beauty that we all are when we shed the masks we wear daily to fulfil the roles that define our lives as defined by societal expectations. When the masks are removed we discover that, we are all kind caring and compassionate human beings.
This little journey that you undertook has taught you so much about yourself - how you handled challenges and setbacks, how reliable you were, whether your word was gold and many other lessons which you then carry forward with you as you embrace life and its challenges.
In many ways, life is much like this - I believe that at a soul level we ask to come down here to learn about ourselves - this is so sweetly illustrated in the children's parable by Neale Donal Walsch called THE LITTLE SOUL AND THE SUN.
We come to this planet so that we can discover who we are and learn the lesson that we need to learn, and in the process of bringing the unconscious up to the light of the conscious we realize that we were never sent into a barren desert, we were provided with tools and everything we needed to help us navigate this journey of life as smoothly as possible, the real challenge is remembering that we are in control of the life we have chosen to experience.
