Mettle Monday - From a Bar Stool to Becoming One of Irelands Fittest Men - Part 2

You know that noise. You’ve heard that noise before. It’s that noise you know so well but never really get used to. Your alarm. I sat there on the edge of my bed, like I have done on so many mornings after a heavy night out. My lower palms pressed into my eye sockets, searching for energy. But this time it was different. I was getting up when I would usually be going to bed after a night out. 4.30am. Also, I wasn’t alone. Something else was in the room with me. Something dressed in black sat there quietly. Looking at me. We were locked in a gaze, a staring match. My running shoes. They looked at me as if to say, “you ready to go get it?” I had begun to lay out my running gear the night before my early morning runs. Like my Dad would lay out my uniform for me in primary school, ready for the morning. Each thing was in its place. Just so. It made me feel like even if I thought of snoozing the alarm or turning over the running gear wouldn’t let me. They wouldn’t let me off the hook.

I laced up and threw on my kit. I carefully closed the door behind me not to wake the house who were in the dead of sleep at that time. The hollow thud of icy gravel beneath my feet as I made my way to the car. It was cold and a distinct February wind blew. I sat in but I would never turn up the heating. Just enough air to clear the windscreen but not to heat up. I would always notice the hairs on my forearm. If they weren’t standing up, I was getting too warm and comfortable so I would drop the heat. I liked it like that. Uncomfortable. It would make it easier to get out when I stopped.

I noticed my breath bellow out from my mouth in front of the white light of the head torch as I ran. I noticed my breathing, slightly quivering. I had yet to warm. I noticed my footsteps connect to the pavement. Pap pap pap pap pap pap… hypnotic. A few cars would pass by but to me I was running the road of the entire world alone. Just me. I could have been anywhere. Anywhere in the world. In the past I would often think of myself being somewhere else. Sitting in a rainy café in Cork I would imagine myself in Seattle. Or lying in sunny Fitzgerald’s Park in the City Centre I would imagine myself in South Africa relaxing after a day of safari. But not today. Not this morning. I was there, exactly where I was meant to me on a misty drizzly February morning, just me and my breath. It was very important to me that I would never try and escape from the task at hand. I had to train, and I had to be comfortable in the uncomfortable.

As time rolled on, I thought more about this. About being connected to my mind and body as if they were one. In modern cars, just like in the human body, there are thousands of moving parts. All of these moving parts are controlled by the ECU. The ECU tells the chains, mechanisms and levers what to do and how they should act and react to their environment. If there is a problem the parts tell the ECU that there is an issue to be resolved, and you get a warming light on your dash. Depending on what the warning sign is, it might cause the car to go into limp mode or stop entirely. What I was trying to do was update the software on my own ECU. So that my mind would tell the muscles, tendons, bones and levers what to do but my ECU would not recognize when these parts were trying to throw up a warning light. That it would not recognize when these parts wanted to stop. That the engine would continue far after it was worn and tired. To complete this software update I had to be present in my training. So I began thinking of exercises that were tough to escape from. Tough for me to let my mind wander off into comfort. Wall sits. Squatting down with your back to the wall, baring your own weight. If you forget what you’re doing and leave for a second your sweaty back will start sliding down the wall and you’ll soon be on your ass. So, you must be there and stay in tune. I would do them for ten minutes at a time. My legs would quiver and shake and sweat would pour from my body like I had stepped out of the shower. But I was there, I was alive and I could feel the pain as lactic acid ravaged the muscles in my quads. I would always end wobbly legged but I was fucking there, in that room with the pain. And I wanted my ECU to ask: “what’s next?”

This was never about a physical transformation. I never once thought I’ll lose weight, get abs or any of that type of stuff. That wasn’t what it was about. I wasn’t entering this journey to change what I saw in the mirror. To tell you the truth I’ve always been kind of self conscious of what I looked like. I have a spinal curvature that makes my back look weird and I always thought I looked like Monty Burns from The Simpson’s, hunched and gangly. But one morning that all disappeared after I had run twenty-six kilometers and completed a twelve-minute wall sit and my legs were just asking for more. So, I stayed and did thousands of reps of weighted lunges and hill climbers for the next few hours. I stood there wondering when I would start weakening. When I would start to fatigue and tire. I didn’t. In that moment I couldn’t help but marvel at the man I had built. I was like an architect standing with his hands on his hips, his gaze fixed upwards admiring the structure he had created. I remember being so excited by my own mind state. Dare I think it? Dare I say it? “I might actually fuckin’ do this thing!” I might actually run 200 miles.

I had quit my job and as I write, I am reminded of a quote from a passage by poet and author Charles Bukowski. He writes “They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn’t they?” I didn’t want to be a well-paid slave anymore. My job wasn’t to blame. It was me and my own mind state, I should have left ages ago. To be honest I could have been let go because I had lost so much passion for the work. My body was there but my mind and spirit certainly were not. So, to leave was fair and better for all involved including my bosses. But this was part of a metamorphosis that I was going through. This was just another step. I had eliminated alcohol which for years had given me nothing, but cotton mouth mornings fear ridden afternoons and remorseful nights. The only change it ever brought me was that which filled my jeans pockets after rounds of beer and whiskey. I had to spare a thought for the man I was. Remember the guy sitting in his dirty shirt and jeans on the edge of his bed? The Conor caught in a hamster wheel of meaningless days and even more meaningless nights. His hungover beer-soaked eyes and frail whiskey skin. Ready for another week of work in a job he hated. He felt so far away. But there was still a touch of him within me. He was there on every run. He looked down on me during my wall sits. He held the bag while I punched it. He sipped coffee with me, and we conversed. He pulled up a chair at mealtimes and stood over me as I cooked. He was there but he had no real power. He had no real power because I had forgiven him. Forgiven him for the mistakes he had made and the pain he had caused. I had embraced him with open arms and compassion and led him to the shelter he so desperately needed. I felt like that Conor would suit up and be at the start line of the 200-mile run. But he wouldn’t be there at the finish.

The big question was: what was life going to be like without him? There was only going to be one way of answering that question: lose him.

200 Miles and Runnin’

Race day(s). It was finally here, finally a reality. I had about eight to nine days of nervous doubt filled excitement in my run up to the event. People might read “doubt filled” and think, “he hardly has doubts?” Oh, I had my doubts. This was 200 miles or 324 kilometers I was looking to run which is no walk in the park for any ultra-runner. Let alone some lanky dude from Cork with just over four months training. I had my doubts about finishing, but I had absolutely no doubt about how the race would end. There were two options presented to me by my mind. I would finish in time or I would be taken away in an ambulance and hospitalized trying to do so. Those were my only two options and I had no doubt about that. I ran a slow steady first 100 miles keeping a commanding eye on my heart rate, careful not to go over 145bpm to stay in “aerobic” state where your body uses oxygen to burn fat and carbs as fuel. And not venture into “anaerobic” where your body burns glucose without oxygen and creates lactic acid. This was the plan and I was sticking to it. It made me slow. Dog slow. By the time I had reached mile 76 I was fifteen miles behind my compatriot Mark who was running a blistering race. Unfortunately, a serious knee injury would cause him to have to pull out after 100 miles. The course was grueling and would really grind the soul out of you. It was a 1.1-mile continuous loop of tree roots, slippery wooden plank bridges and uneven gravel paths. 182 times. There was going to be 4 miles of elevation change over the 200-mile course. After I completed loop 91(100 miles) the race organizer Ed joked with a touch of seriousness “now the race begins!” Little did I know how true this statement was going to be.

At that stage there was only one other competitor left doing the loop with me. Steve, who was an accomplished ultra-runner with nearly ten years’ experience. He was also a very sincere gentleman of a man. We had become friendly as we chatted over social media prior to the race and joked with an air of levity about the task at hand at the start line. But it had turned into me versus him. His will versus mine. I found myself willing him to fail and I wanted to harvest his soul. Pass him out and lap him every couple of loops. He was seven or eight miles ahead of me and I was hell bent on catching and passing him. As the dusk of Saturday night turn into inky black skies and darkness fell, a thick mist rolled in. At that stage I had been up for forty-two hours and had been running for thirty-four of those. With the mist is was hard to see where my feet were landing so I decided now would be a good time to get a half hour sleep. We had a tent set up near the turning circle and so I took off my shoes and socks and climbed into the sleeping bag and closed my eyes.

“Cons, Cons its time to wake up bud! Come on you’ve slept enough its time to get going!” What the fuck was going on? Why was I in a tent? How had I even fallen asleep? Where the fuck was I? I looked up at my Dad who had just woken me up as he shuffled around the tent. His shoes scratching the nylon flooring of the Vango’s fabric as he looked for my runners. He pulled me up and sat me into the camp chair and proceeded to put on my shoes and socks. Just like he would do when I was a three year old boy who believed that he was the biggest and strongest man on planet earth. I thought of how important he had been as my crew. How much he had done for me even at this stage. My thoughts then turned to Steve. He didn’t have a crew. He didn’t have anyone to lean on in the tough times or someone to look after his nutrition and hydration. The will that I had pitted against him started to fade. I began to think of why I started all of this in the first place. Why I had started this life changing endeavor. This was never a race against anyone else but me. This was never about beating people and being the winner. This was about seeing if I could craft and hone a body and mind that could do great things. Test myself to levels that can not easily be explained in words. This wasn’t a race, this was my fucking life. Or at least in was a microcosm of what my life had come to be. A life of striving to be in control of my mind. Not being afraid to navigate my mind even if what I discover isn’t too pretty. This wasn’t about beating this other man. Steve had also slept when I did, and I caught up with him on my first lap around after our respective sleeps. I offered him my camp as an aid station. My food became his food. My water became his and my olive branch extended to him with sincerity. A few laps later as light crept through the leaves of the trees we both sat at my tent and eat what I believed was my thirteenth bowl of porridge. The race organizer Chris made his way over to us with intent on his face. He had something to say and even my sleep deprived eyes could see it. Things were about to change.

“What do you want from this guys? What are you here for? If you guys push on from now, push through the pain barrier and empty the tank you can finish what you started and become one of the select few to finish this thing.” Chris’s words. Steve was carrying a pretty serious knee injury which he had taped up from the start and it was really giving him trouble. I could see it in his face. It was plastered in skepticism. He was broken. He shook off the challenge from Chris. He was more or less done but still managed an impressive 137.5 miles before he had to pull out. A true warrior that went out on his shield. Me? I had never been so clocked in to what someone was saying in my entire fucking life. I heard the words come out and believed them as if he was saying the sky was fucking blue. As my hero David Goggins would say “Roger that!” I got up from the seat and Chris explained that if I kept a pace of seventeen minutes per loop for the next twenty-three and a half hours I would finish under the 60 hour limit with fifteen minutes to spare. So, I said that I would start doing fifteen and a half or sixteen-minute loops, so I had four or five minute breaks to scoff down food every seven or eight loops. The race hadn’t had a finisher since 2016. Later I would be told that only one man had finished the race within the 60-hour cap in the history of the race. I wasn’t thinking about that though. All I was thinking about was fifteen to sixteen-minute loops. That was it. That was all I wanted to know, my split times. I didn’t give a shit about how many I had done or how many I had left to do. As Mark and I had once remarked, there was only one way to finish this out: one foot in front of the other.

At this point I had run about 119 miles and my legs were swollen pillars of stiffness. My joints creaked like the wooden floorboards of an old Georgian house. My feet hid silent inside my Hoka runners as if to say, “not me, you’re surely looking for someone else?” But I had updated the software of my ECU. It wasn’t going to pay attention to the warning lights being thrown up by the weaker chains, mechanisms and levers. I had hardened it. Tamahagane. That is the iron used to make Samurai swords or Katana. I didn’t know it on January 1st but my mind was already made of Tamahagane. It was the basic raw material of iron sand. Yet to be shaped. The iron ore had yet to be folded into steel. My early morning runs and grueling gym routines were like repeatedly heating, hammering and folding the steel of my mind. Improving strength and removing impurities. I was sharpened, hardened and my mind had a laser focus. I had trained to get into this state where my mind could take over when my body was past its best before date.

I started out exactly as I meant to and started banging out fifteen to fifteen and a half minute loops. I felt like asking myself “who owns these legs?” These were not the legs of a man 130–140 miles into a grueling ultra-run. These were fresh, eager legs of a man hungry for more. As I started blistering through the loops word spread around the festival of this mental lanky Irish guy who was making a real go at completing the 200 mile course. People I had never met or talked to, were cheering me on by name and it was as close to celebrity as I had ever experienced. There were many different races on that weekend, 50 mile, 100 mile, 24 hour races, 48 hour races and even double Ironman’s. But the 200 was the big one. The Mac Daddy of all the races. It hadn’t had a finisher in years and this young fella with a moustache who looked like a malnourished and deranged Ned Flanders was throwing caution to the wind and fucking going for it. You will find it tough to find a group of people more inclusive and enthusiastic as the ultra-endurance community. Everyone willing each other to finish and pushing each other to push through the pain barrier and do their best. It was contagious. I too willed on my comrades right throughout the weekend until the races started to finish. The numbers started to fade and diminish until, as the light drained from the sky on Sunday evening, there were only a handful of us left doing the rounds of this soul snatching course. It was when the light disappeared, and my head torch once again presented itself for duty that shit really got weird.

Your body goes through an awful lot during an ultra-distance race. A lot of things you wouldn’t even think of. Of course, everyone would assume my legs and feet would be in pain but there were other ailments that stacked on top of the usual injuries. I had to eat every twenty to twenty-five minutes for almost 60 hours. I had no choice but to eat constantly to keep my body and mind working. Because of this, my mouth was littered with cuts and ulcers as my mouth was broken down by constant use. Constant chewing, grinding and moving of food. My throat was raw and swollen from swallowing food and heavy breathing, to the point where at times it was difficult to talk or even breath. My stomach was incredibly tired from constant digestion and it felt heavy and lethargic. The skin on my face and head was tight and painful from the sweat, sunscreen and dirt from the last few days. But this was all to be expected. What wasn’t to be expected was how much my mind would play tricks on me. I had experience with hallucinations when I ran the 100 mile race in Connemara where I saw women in white dresses where there really only stood fence posts. This was whole other kettle of fish, however. As darkness fell and my head torch lit the way I began to lose my mind. It is said that after 72 hours of sleep deprivation humans can experience mild psychosis. Which is a mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality. I had been up for about 65 hours and I had been running for almost 55 of that so you could say I had sped up the process. Maybe just a tad. When I would stop to take a pee, which was far more often that I would have wanted, my surroundings would keep moving as if I hadn’t stopped. Trees would shake and blur and reach out to me like a 3D movie. The ground would spin and rocks and leaves would move independently as if a strong wind blew underfoot. I tried not to look at my natural surroundings and just look at my shaven leg. But at this stage I thought the stubble on them were ants crawling up my legs into my shorts and I began to vigorously brush and wipe them from my legs. I must have looked insane. And I guess in a way, I was. But it wasn’t until I saw him that things really got freaky.

Santa Claus. Santa fucking Claus like. As I passed by the trees of the boat house, I saw him. Actually a few of them. Lined up as if they were soldiers lining up for morning inspection. Glowing glossy inflatable Santa Clauses. Bright red bulging figures swaying in the night breeze. And they weren’t well made, they looked cheap. Like ones that would get in a pound shop or a seasonal pop up shop for a tenner. They were one round shape with no original design features or creative influence. Santa Claus is the epitome of love and fellowship. You’ve grown up with this man. He’s been your friend, the bringer of presents and gifts. Action Men and Barbie dolls. But you will never see such a benevolent character take such a menacing form as Santa Claus in a cold, damp forest deep into an ultra run. To put it simply, he scared the fucking shit out of me. It was a constant fight to talk myself out of these hallucinations. “This is all in your head Conor. Your head torch is playing tricks with the light. You’ve been here before.” Constantly fighting my conscious and subconscious as the two blurred into one. Just like the physical torture I was experiencing; growth and strength would come from my mental suffering.

The last few loops. I had become a zombie like figure groaning with each breath I pushed from my worn lungs through my tattered mouth. My dad was now accompanying me around the final few loops as I swayed unsteadily. As if I had lashed back six or seven pints in quick succession. I can’t even really recall what I was thinking at this time. I’m almost sure that my mind had completely taken over at that point. It had shut down areas that controlled conscious thought and memory and was just focusing on sending the message to my legs: move. My dad recalls my eyes being dead and glassy and he had fears on the third last lap that I was entering into a state of being that would make it impossible for me to finish within the time limit. I had told him numerous times that I wasn’t here to do it in 62 or 63 hours. That wasn’t the race. The limit was 60 hours and I wouldn’t deem it completed unless I completed within that time. He agreed. I was driven by that. Driven by finishing what I had started all those months ago. The second last loop came, and I remained in this Walking Dead zombie like state of groaning heavy breaths and unsteady feet. I stumbled and tripped; it was a wonder how I had never fallen over throughout the entirety of the race. For that moment I wasn’t Conor O’Keeffe, twenty-seven-year-old runner from Cork, Ireland. I was a man putting one fucking foot in front of the other willing himself forward in the cold dark night.

As I came into the crowd that had formed in the turning circle to start my last lap my dad said, “give them a big smile now as you come in to let them know you’re here and you’re not fazed.” A lot of other competitors and friends had woken themselves up to see me finish what I had started and a considerable crowd had gathered. As I came in, I flashed a smile around. It was the last lap. Tears formed at the bottom of my eyes. My lip started to quiver and tears quietly flowed down my cheeks as I left to complete lap 182. I was engulfed in emotion and in that moment I wasn’t sleep deprived. My knees were not swollen and aching. My throat not closed and raw. My feet didn’t burn and creak. It was as close as I was going to get to being reborn. I took off, I wanted to shock them. I wanted to make them believe that this Irish man was made of something different. I ran most of the last lap and felt like I was a ninja running quietly through the forest alone, his enemies unaware of his sleek movements. I felt light. Fluid. It was a state of being I hadn’t touched on before; I doubt many have. I ran down the last hill at blistering speed, or so it seemed. I came through the stone structure into the waiting crowd and raised my arms high overhead in victory. I had done it.

I had run 200 miles in under 60 hours. It was over.............or was it?