Motivation Meditation

+ 2024 Season

Action. Preternaturally awake 30 mins before the 5am alarm. Creep out of bed, tip-toe across floor-boards to the kitchen. Boil water, step into ski-pants. Two spoons of coffee in the French press, no three. Steep and scroll.

35 minutes up the winding dark road, three cups from the thermos. Classical music. The caffeine isn’t hitting and the legs feel battered. I want and don’t want to be here, and sensing the slightest reluctance say aloud, “Fuck your weakness.”

Don the boots, shed layers, jog the pavement to the snow. Within 20 minutes the lights of the ski village are more mirage than real. Uphill progress satisfactory. Breath in, breath out, a little patch of snow sparkling by headlamp is all that matters in the world.

Skins-off transition. Cutting quick turns in the icy groom and doing my best to track ahead with the feeble torch.

Skins-on transition. Next ascent. Let’s beat dawn to the top.

So it goes on Sunday. After 6 days of hard work, my volume goals ticked, taking a rest day never crossed my mind because it’s always nice to extend a victory.

Motivation as Currency

Dictionary entries struggle to encompass all that is motivation. Starting with the basic, “enthusiasm for doing something,” or, “the need or reason for doing something,” and further describing, “a willingness to do something, or something that causes such willingness,” it feels increasingly slippery.

It’s a word that means too many things, whose expression is simple but wrought with contradiction.

This matters because we put a lot of stake in motivation. Believe in it. Lump it with the cult of success.

Practically speaking, motivation means the world to people without it, and little to those with an abundance. A lot like capital.

When you are well-stocked on motivation, you revel in the spending, go with confidence, have the power to undertake massive things. When you are motivation-poor, you find it elusive and exhausting, your situation void.

Like many important concepts of endurance training, motivation begets motivation. Hence the power of a streak.

Unlike money, we can produce motivation within ourselves. At first it must be manufactured (somewhat brutally) then seems to flow, even incessantly with the input of habit.

As Vector

The word motivation comes from the latin, motivus, meaning, “a moving cause.” I dig that because it presents motivation as a kind of directed energy, giving rise to a more compressed expression of the word. Motivation as vector.

A thing thrown into the world with speed and direction. Risking cliché, I’d say running is motivation in motion, each step a micro-manifestation of the same underlying impulse. An impulse that bears our signature, gets us out the door and to the finish line.

Which brings us

to the present moment. Propelled by lofty aspirations, I present my 2024 calendar:

I look forward to sharing this year with everyone. Thanks for reading and your support. Let’s see how far we can fly.