What 14 Hours of Failure Taught Me About Rest.

I wish I remembered the name of the person at Hammer Nutrition who received my phone call in late February 2012.

"I need to buy some stuff from you that will help me run faster."

"Okay?"

"So what should I buy?"

"Well, what are you running?"

"I'm running 120 miles."

"Awesome. Have you ever done that before?"

"No. But it doesn't seem like it would be that hard."

"What's the longest you've run in the past?"

"A half marathon."

"........[epic pause]............and you're now going to run 120 miles?"

"Yep. And I have friends who tell me that you have some powders, shakes, and pills that will help me on the day of the event."

He was floored. You could hear it in the silence. And then still louder in the next words that he spoke.

“What? That sounds crazy.”

This was a customer service rep who talked to athletes for a living, and his tone said it all. 

“What are you doing? How are you doing it?”

He could tell I was about to attempt something absurd. He also knew enough to shut up and take my money.

It was late February 2012. You couldn't find endurance nutrition at your local Walmart or grocery store. There were no electrolyte packets. Drinking Pedialyte to get your minerals back wasn't a thing.

Hammer Nutrition products came from a catalog, or from a running store if you had a good one nearby. I had seen the videos. I'd heard people talk about powders and gels and salt.

So I skipped the store and picked up the phone.

It was the beginning of an epic failure. My epic failure.

Before you picture some guy rolling off the couch, let me fix that. I was training. Running had become a big part of my life. I had already run thousands of miles. 

I thought I was a runner, so what else was there to know?

The longest single race I'd done was a half marathon. But in my head, the miles counted the same whether they came in one day or a hundred. The next natural step, obviously, was a 24-hour race.

And not just to run it. We made a promo video. It was called "125 Miles for Hope."

BTW, yes, the numbers don't match. The video was called “125 Miles for Hope.” On the phone I told the Hammer guy 120. And then while training, I decided that I would attempt to break the 24-hour road record, which sits near 180 miles. 

Three different numbers before the race even began.

You are starting to see the pattern. I had not figured out the exact goal, the time, the distance, or the race conditions. I had a big idea and a very loose relationship with the details. 

Serious opportunities demand specifics. Cavalier thinking leads to failure.

My videographer filming the promo asked me how I run. I told them, "I run until I'm tired, then I turn around and run back."

I meant it. That was my whole system. 

It had taught me I could push through pain. Whenever I got tired, I just had to get my mind right and turn around. And run back.

I was thoroughly convinced that I knew everything I needed to know about the body. And exercise.

I was clueless about what this was going to take.

The race was the Landsford Canal 24-Hour Race on April 14, 2012. You run a 4-mile-ish loop for a full day and night, and whatever distance you have when the clock runs out is your distance.

I wasn't doing it just for me. I was raising money for To Write Love On Her Arms, a nonprofit that works with people struggling with depression, self-injury, and suicide. That part I still feel good about.

Quick note before we go any further. If you or someone you love struggle with self-harm or suicide, connect with the team at TWLOHA. I'm not a doctor or a counselor. Those people are, and they pick up.

Okay. Back to my bad decisions.

In the video, somebody pointed a camera at me in a black track jacket in the woods and I said, out loud, that “I wanted to show that extraordinary things can be done by ordinary people.”

In the same video somebody explains the math. A 24-hour road record near 180 miles works out to about eight-minute miles for a full day. I never settled which record category I was chasing.

Then I said, “I’m going to run until I break.”

Those were my words. Somebody should have taken the camera away from me right then and there.

The loop was a little over 4 miles through the woods. My crew stood at the turnaround and handed me bottles each time I came through, like a pit crew at a race nobody was watching.

It was definitely not flat. Here's a lesson I learned later that day. If you're looking to break a world record, you don't do it on a hilly course.

And it was South Carolina, so it was hot. Of course it was hot.

My first loop came in at a little over 30 minutes. I felt amazing. I felt like I'd been born to do this.

Five hours later, I had about 40 miles. 

If you've ever had a great first hour at anything, you know the feeling. You start doing math you have no business doing.

There's a shot in the race video where I'm flopped on my back in the grass with my bib on, arms out, while friends stretch my legs.

It looks almost funny. It wasn't.

That's where reality hit. I remember the thought, clear as anything: ”I don't think I can do this.”

You can see it on my face in the video. Salt crusted on my skin from the heat. Sweat built up all over my head. And I was very sure, lying there, that I was not going to do 120 miles.

There's no worse time to figure out the limits of the human body than when you've got family and friends watching.

They'd all come out. Cleber Gusmao. Daniel Popov. Jeremy Buker. My family was there. Cameras on me. 

People taking turns running loops with me. And I'm lying in the grass realizing I'm failing in front of every one of them.

Around mile 44 or 45, I stopped eating. Just stopped.

The shakes were supposed to give me the right mix of electrolytes and carbohydrates. That was the idea. In real life they tasted like sand. Thick. Hard to swallow. Nasty. In the heat they made my stomach turn. An almost-instant gag reflex kicked in.

So my remedy was to stop drinking them.

My crew kept holding the bottles out and I kept waving them off. I remember saying it more than once. "I got this… I got this. Just let me run."

I didn't have it.

I made it to 50 miles. Just past 10 hours, my whole body started shutting down. My kidneys hurt. Everything hurt. I was doubled over.

There's nothing worse than knowing you need to pee, and then what comes out is the consistency of maple syrup and the color of blood.

I was literally standing on the side of the road peeing blood. And thoroughly convinced that I knew everything worth knowing about breaking a world record for running. 

My crew went and talked to the race officials. The race had medical teams and an ambulance available.

I don't remember what was said, and I won't put words in their mouths now. This was a 24-hour race, not a conventional fixed-distance race with one finish line. Runners did what they could, and stopped when their bodies gave out.

So I kept going. I ran, jogged, and trotted another loop, mostly on stubbornness.

Then a veteran runner came over. Somebody who had done these races for years. He listened to my theories about how this was supposed to work and chuckled. Then he handed me a warm cup of bone broth.

“Drink this, dude.” You’ll be OK.”

That cup literally changed everything. 

I ran another dozen-ish miles on one thermos of broth. 

At 14 hours I stopped for good.

My legs were cramping. You could see the muscles switching violently on the back of calves. My lips were cracked and so dry I couldn't close my mouth. 

I found Jeremy, my crew chief, and told him, "I'm done. This is over, and I can't do it."

I distinctly remember the words. "I can't do it. I can't go any further."

I had stopped eating and kept going through two rough stretches of dozen-ish miles. The broth was the last real thing I'd had.

Fourteen hours. 70.1 miles. That's what my plaque says. 

I felt like a loser. There isn't a nicer way to say it.

In the video that night, I said, “We did what we could. We’re going to pack it in.”

My theory at the time was that I simply couldn't push any further. That was the limit. Looking back, it was raw naivete, ignorance, and a lack of experience.

The ride home was its own punishment. My body was so stiff that every bump in the road made my muscles lock up in agony.

And then my body recovered in about 48 hours.

Exercise is number four of the Five Controllables. The heat and the hills were never on that list. Fuel and Exercise were, and I fumbled both in a single day.

The logic doesn't make sense, right? Fourteen hours earlier I was sure I'd hit the absolute end of what a human could do. Two days later my legs were fine.

Here's the part I want you to remember.

Exercise can be done right and it can be done wrong. What I attempted that day was wrong, start to finish.

I didn't fail because I lacked heart. I had plenty of that. I didn't fail because I'd never trained. I had run thousands of miles. I failed because I ignored the food, the drinks, and the experienced people standing right next to me, because I thought I knew better.

The bottles were right there. The broth was right there. The veteran runner was right there. I waved them off, one "I got this" at a time, until my body made the decision for me.

That was 2012. It's 2026 now.

I have run more than 38,000 miles since I started logging them on Strava. Some of those miles are races. Most of them are just a weekday evening. A dark road. A headlamp. And nobody watching.

Back then I ran four or five miles a day. Now most of my runs are 10 to 15 miles, six days a week.

I didn't expect what all that time on my feet would give me. It wasn't speed. It was calm.

When something goes wrong now, at home, at work, anywhere, there's a voice that says, “Okay, we've been here before. How do we take a chance to breathe? How do we take a chance not to overreact, not to blow up, but just react with what we have and figure it out?”

I also learned to listen to my body better. I know. That sounds cheeky, like an Instagram post. All it really means is I stopped pretending every day was going to be an elite performance where I'm breaking world records.

Some days are just a day to get the miles in. And to count the blessings that I can actually go run some miles.

I still go out and do hard things. Long days. Hot days. Days where my legs argue with me for the last hour. The difference is I show up to them having trained for them. 

People ask why I keep doing it after a day like that. Honestly, it comes down to three things, and none of them has anything to do with winning a medal.

It gets the tension out of my body. I carry stress physically. Shoulders up by my ears, jaw tight, a kind of buzzing I can't think my way out of. Running is where it goes. Not all of it, not every time. Enough of it.

It's where I listen to books. A lot of what I know, I heard on a trail. Biographies, history, the stuff I'd never sit still long enough to read. It's true for me. The miles are where the books happen.

It keeps me in shape. Not the magazine-cover version. The version where I can carry the groceries, play with my kids, and climb the stairs without bargaining with them.

That's it. Vent. Learn. Stay in shape.

Notice what's missing from that list. Weight loss. Discipline. Beating anybody.

Here's the simplest way I can explain what I got so wrong in 2012.

Exercise is stress. Stress you choose, on purpose, followed by rest.

That's everything you need to know. Stress is the work. The rest part is where your body actually does the rebuilding. You need both, in that order, over and over.

You can see the stress part in a lab. In one small study, 12 trained men exercised for 30 minutes at 3 different intensities. At the easy level their cortisol, one of the main stress hormones, barely moved.

At the moderate level it rose about 40%. At the hard level, it rose about 83%. (Hill and colleagues, Journal of Endocrinological Investigation, 2008.)

So a hard run doesn't make your stress go away in the moment. It adds some. On purpose.

Why would anybody want that?

Because the stress that wears people down is the other kind. The kind that never shuts off. The scientists Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar called that wear "allostatic load" back in 1993. Stress responses that are repeated, drawn out, or never allowed to finish.

A run is a stress response that starts, rises, and ends. You choose it. You finish it. You recover from it.

Limits first. Research on whether physical stress trains you to handle life's other stress is mixed. A jog won't fix a bad marriage or a layoff.

I'm telling you what it does for a lot of people, including me. It gives the stress somewhere to go.

And it's not only hard efforts. A 1981 review by Herbert deVries found that rhythmic exercise like walking, jogging, or cycling, for 5 to 30 minutes at moderate effort, reduced muscle tension. That's old research and it measured muscles, not moods. 

But it matches what I feel in my shoulders after a daily mile.

Now look at my race again through that lens.

The stress part, I had covered. I chose a ridiculous amount of it. Nobody has ever accused me of not choosing enough stress.

What I skipped was everything that lets the body handle stress. The fuel. The fluids. The long efforts beforehand that teach your body how to handle more stress in the future. 

Even heat is something your body learns. A 2015 review by Julien Périard and colleagues describes how repeated exposure to heat improves sweating, skin blood flow, fluid balance, and heart strain. 

But the size of that change depends on how often and how long you've been exposed. You can't cram it on race morning.

I'd love to blame my 2012 day on bad luck. It was basic math. I gave my body a 120-mile dose of stress when the most it had ever done in one go was 13.

And when it started asking for help, I waved the bottle away.

I won't diagnose what happened inside my body that day. Late in a long hot race, a lot of different things can go wrong, and some of them need opposite fixes.

That's a job for a doctor. What I can tell you is the lesson. The body only adapts to the stress it can recover from.

So if I had to leave you with one thing to remember about exercise, it is this.

Get out of breath every day. And twice a week, pick up something heavy.

That's it. Get your heart rate up enough that singing would be hard. Do it most days. Twice a week, lift, carry, or push something that makes your muscles work.

Straight talk on the "every day" part.

Science does not say you have to exercise daily to live longer. A 2017 study by Gary O'Donovan and colleagues found that "weekend warriors," people who got their recommended activity in one or two sessions a week, had about a 30% lower risk of death than inactive people.

Regularly active people had about 35% lower. Those are observations. They show links, not proof.

The World Health Organization's 2020 guidelines say 150 to 300 minutes a week of moderate activity, or 75 to 150 of vigorous, plus muscle-strengthening on two or more days. 

Most importantly, they say something I love: some physical activity is better than none.

So why every day?

Because of everything I said about stress. If running is where you let out your tension, I want it to have somewhere to go every day. Because a daily habit is easier to keep than a weekly one you have to remember. And because "every day" makes the decision for me at 6pm when I'd rather not.

That's my argument, not a lab's. Take it or leave it.

And the strength part is there for a reason. A 2022 review by Haruka Momma and colleagues in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that about 30 to 60 minutes a week of muscle-strengthening work was linked to the biggest drop in risk for several major diseases. That's 2 short sessions.

You don't need much. You need some. Every day, and a little heavier twice a week.

I want to show you something about who does this.

Not to tell you exercise made anybody great. That's not how it works. Plenty of brilliant people never broke a sweat, and the internet is full of invented "morning routines" of famous people. Everything below comes from their own words or from someone who was there.

What I notice is how many of them used movement the way I do. To work something out. To think. To plan. To destress.

Alan Turing, the man who helped crack the Enigma code, ran a marathon in 2 hours, 46 minutes in 1947. That was about eleven minutes slower than the winner at the 1948 Olympics.

A clubmate later recalled Turing telling him he had such a stressful job that the only way to get it out of his mind was to run hard.

A codebreaker running to empty his head. I get it.

Charles Dickens wrote to his friend John Forster, "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish." That's a novelist describing the exact buzzing I carry in my shoulders, about 170 years before I did.

Charles Darwin walked a path behind his house called the Sandwalk, a set number of laps every day. His son Francis wrote that he counted the laps with a heap of flints, kicking one out onto the path each time he passed.

The man who worked out a breakthrough scientific theory was counting rocks so he wouldn't cheat himself on a walk.

Friedrich Nietzsche was more dramatic about it, of course. "The sedentary life is the very sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts reached by walking have value." That's from Twilight of the Idols, 1889, in one common translation. He's overselling, but I know what he meant.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks swam. He wrote in The New Yorker in 1997 that swimming gave him "a sense of well-being so extreme that it became at times a sort of ecstasy," and admitted he was addicted to it and "fretful when I cannot swim."

Joyce Carol Oates, who has written more books than most of us have read, wrote in 1999, "In running the mind flies with the body." She has said a lot of her writing happens in her head while running and walking fast. That's me and my audiobooks, only she's the one making the books.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg worked out with her trainer, Bryant Johnson, twice a week for about an hour, according to Politicoin 2017. In her 80’s. On the Supreme Court. Usually in the evening, with PBS NewsHour on.

And Barack Obama, as president, according to Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair in 2012, worked out from 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning, cardio one day and weights the next. "My wife makes fun of how routinized I've become," he said.

Cardio one day, weights the next. Out of breath, and something heavy. 

Look at the range there. A codebreaker, two Victorians, a philosopher, a doctor, a novelist, a judge, a president. None of them were trying to win a race. 

They were trying to think, or calm down, or keep going.

Now the other side.

In 1966, researchers in Dallas put 5 healthy young men in bed for 3 weeks. Then they measured how much their aerobic fitness had dropped.

Thirty years later, the same team found those men again and tested them in middle age. In the 2001 follow-up in Circulation, the authors wrote: “three weeks of bed rest at age 20 had a larger effect on physical work capacity than three decades of aging.”

That gets overstated all the time. It was five men. It was one measure, VO2 max, which is how much oxygen your body can use at full effort. It doesn't mean three weeks on the couch ages you thirty years in every way.

But on that one measure, three weeks of doing nothing cost those young men about as much as thirty years of living.

And here's the part people leave out. 

After the bed rest, those men trained. And they came back. The study is about the body falling apart and also about the body rebuilding.

Fitness drains faster than most of us think. A 2000 review by Iñigo Mujika and Sabino Padilla found that in trained athletes, less than four weeks without training brought a rapid drop in aerobic capacity and blood volume. Strength held up better. So two days off won't undo you. A few weeks will start to.

The long-term numbers are sobering too. A 2018 study of 122,007 people who took a treadmill test found that the gap between below-average and above-average fitness was linked to about the same increase in risk of death as smoking or diabetes.

People who are already sick test lower. Still.

This isn't new. 

In the 1950s the epidemiologist Jeremy Morris studied London's double-decker buses. The conductors climbed the stairs all day. The drivers sat. The conductors had less heart disease. 

Decades later Morris titled a paper, "Exercise in the prevention of coronary heart disease: today's best buy in public health."

That was 1994. It's still true.

The body can come back farther and faster than most of us think.

In 1990, Maria Fiatarone and colleagues gave 10 frail nursing-home residents, average age 90, eight weeks of heavy strength training. Their strength went up 174% on average. Their walking speed on a balance test went up 48%. Ninety years old.

It was a tiny study, ten people, no control group. It proves little alone. Larger reviews of adults over 50 point the same direction. Strength comes back when you ask for it, at almost any age.

And you don't need to become an athlete to get most of the benefit.

A 2022 analysis by Amanda Paluch and colleagues in The Lancet Public Health, covering about 47,000 adults, found the risk of death kept dropping as daily steps went up, until it leveled off around 6,000 to 8,000 steps a day for people over 60 and 8,000 to 10,000 for younger adults.

Not ultramarathons. Steps.

Which brings me back to the guy lying in the grass at Landsford Canal.

If I could go back, I wouldn't tell him not to run. I wouldn't tell him to aim lower, either. I like that he dreamed big. I like that he did it for kids who were hurting.

I'd tell him to listen. Running until you're tired and turning around works fine on a weekday. It doesn't work at mile 50.

To the Hammer guy and that epic pause on the phone. To the crew holding out bottles. To the veteran with the broth. To his own body, which spent 10 hours asking politely before it started yelling.

The stress was never the problem. I needed the stress. What I didn't respect was the recovery, the fuel, and the people who had been through it.

That's what I'd want you to take from my bad day.

Let me put the two versions side by side, because that's really the whole letter.

Done wrong looked like this. One enormous dose of stress, dropped on a body that had never seen anything close to it. A half marathon as my longest run, and a 120-mile plan. Food and fluids refused because I felt fine, and then refused again because I felt sick.

No rest built in anywhere. And a belief, sitting under all of it, that my mind could overrule my kidneys if I just wanted it badly enough.

It couldn't. Minds don't work that way. Bodies definitely don't.

Done right looks almost boring by comparison. A dose of stress the body can actually answer. Then food, water, and sleep, so it has something to answer with. Then another dose, a little bigger, a few days later. Repeat that for months. Then years. Then, if you're stubborn in the right direction, 14 years and 38,000-plus miles.

Same guy. Same legs. Same stubbornness, honestly. The difference is that I stopped treating rest like quitting and food like a weakness. I started treating them as half of the training.

Nobody claps for that half. There's no plaque for eating a sandwich at mile 30 or going to bed early on a Thursday. But that's the half I skipped in 2012, and it's the half that let me keep running for the next fourteen years.

If you only remember one picture from this letter, make it this one. A cup of warm broth in a stranger's hand, held out to a guy who thought he didn't need it. Take the cup.

So here's the challenge.

Tomorrow, get out of breath. Walk fast enough that you can't sing. Climb your stairs twice. Jog to the end of the street and back. Whatever gets your heart up and makes you breathe hard for a few minutes.

Then do it again the day after. And the day after that.

Some time this week, pick up something heavy twice. A bag of soil. A kid. A dumbbell from the garage that's been collecting dust since a New Year's resolution.

And when somebody who has been doing this longer than you offers you the bottle, take it.

You don't have to run 120 miles. I couldn't either.

Just choose your stress, then let yourself recover from it. Tomorrow, get out of breath.