Something I’ve been hearing a lot the last 10 days, on an almost-daily basis, in fact. The gist of the message is when you feel really strong resistance, it is usually because you are so close to reaching your destination.

It’s funny how the right message will appear when you are ready to hear it, isn’t it? I’ve heard the saying ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear‘, yet I’ve disagreed with it. I’ve always tended to think that the teacher is always there, and it takes the student being ready to receive the lesson for the teacher to be apparent.

I think that we tend to think that the teacher isn’t there because to admit that we weren’t ready would seem to be admitting some kind of weakness or failure. It’s not true, of course, but I think it’s how our brains tend to work.

So, let’s look at this thing of ‘The closer you get, the Stronger the push-back’. Lately, I’ve read it as ‘The closer you are to victory, the stronger the enemy will appear’. This is kind of interesting, because it brings out the thought of perception vs. reality. Let me use an analogy from my days of running hundred-mile races, and 150 miles a week.

I entered my first ultramarathon as a mistake. I was running for Toronto Olympic Club at the time, and our coach was to have entered me into a 10 mile race in Toronto’s Sunnybrook Park. As fate would have it, I wasn’t entered, and the race was full, BUT, there was a 100km race happening at the same time, and I was free to enter that. So, perhaps having more bravado than brains, I did. I was able to finish the race, in dead last place, but, I finished.

That experience introduced me in great depth to the idea of ‘mind over matter’. You see, in running, the grand-daddy of events is, by most, considered to the the marathon. 26.2 miles is a formidable distance to run indeed, and I salute everyone who completes the distance. However, I have a problem with the way people are trained for the event.

99.99% of people are trained to expect that somewhere around the 23 mile mark, they will “Hit the Wall”, and they’ll have to dig really deep for those last 3 miles. Physiologically, that is true, but it’s only true because that is what people have been trained for psychologically. What if, instead of 22 or 23 miles being the longest training run people do for a marathon, they ran 28 or 30 miles for their long runs?

Sure, most people couldn’t do a lot of runs at that distance, and the overall training time for a marathon would be longer, but wouldn’t it be easier? What if you were able to run at max output for longer, knowing that the finish line would appear just before the dreaded wall appeared? My theory is that the maximum push-back wouldn’t happen until a distance further than the race, so you wouldn’t actually experience it. A few of us put this to the test, logging big mileage every week, with the long run being around 35 miles, plus we’d do a couple of days during the week where we’d run 6 or 8 miles in the morning and 20 – 22 miles in the evening. Certainly not a training routine for everyone, but for us, it worked.

I remember well, the feeling approaching the finish line of many marathons, and feeling a real surge because I knew that I was well within my comfort zone. However, to get to that point, I had to face my ‘enemy’, and overcome the push-back in order to keep running beyond the magic number. And the times the push-back was the strongest were the times I was upping the distance of my long run by a couple of miles. Boy, did that ‘enemy’ push back!

I notice the same things in my life now, whenever I want to overcome a limitation that I am facing. I had to, at one point, overcome the fear of picking up that 500-lb telephone handset that was in front of me. It didn’t start out weighing that much, of course, but it sure got a whole lot heavier in a hurry. And then, once I’d picked it up and dialed that first number, it started becoming harder and harder to dial the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

It was like I knew that I’d have to make 150 dials before I could get a listing, and so the first 25 dials were hard, and then dials 130 to 149 would be really hard, each one harder than the one before it. And then, suddenly, I made dial #150, I got an appointment, and I got the listing. And it was EASY. Gosh, I’d berate myself, how could I be so stupid?

Now I know, I wasn’t stupid, I was battling my own storys that I was telling myself, but I sure wish someone had told me that my proximity to my destination could be measured by how much I was pushing back at myself.

Imagine a life where you welcome the push-back, and you actually look for the resistance to get stronger. Because you know that the closer you get, the stronger the push-back will be.

Then, suddenly, you’re free. Because the push-back becomes your ally, and is no longer your ‘enemy’; you embrace it.

I am also led to think of a firecracker that burns and burns, and then just before it goes out, it has one final flare-up of brightness, and then pfffffft!, it’s out.

Tell me a story about a time when you have embraced the push-back.