Do what you can with what you have.

The trail I had earned.

There is a particular kind of frustration in being handed the thing you have been waiting for and finding you cannot use it.

I reached the top of the second big climb somewhere around eight or nine hours into the race, roughly a thousand metres of gain in more or less one go, around 2,500 metres up, the highest point on the course. This was last October, in the Pyrenees, the first 100K I had ever run. I was empty. I was also, strangely, pleased, because what came next was a long descent, not steep, the runnable kind, and descending is the part I am genuinely good at. My legs had held and my breathing had settled, so whatever the climb had taken, it had not taken those.

Ten steps down, something folded. It was not my legs and it was not my lungs, it was something low in my gut that tightened every time I tried to run for more than a few seconds. I could manage those few seconds, then I had to walk. I did that for a while, waiting for it to pass, and then the trail opened out into a long stretch of easy ground, the exact section I had been spending in my head the whole way up, and I could not run a step of it.

That is where the frustration properly got me. Not the pain, the arithmetic. Two hours of climbing to reach the one part of the course where I could take back some time, arriving with the legs to do it, and walking down it while people I had passed came back past me.

So I did something I had never done in a race, and called my wife. I told her I was struggling, and I was quietly hoping she would be the one to say it was fine to stop, that they would come and collect me at the next aid station. I wanted to quit and I was not willing to be the person who decided it. She did not offer.

I hung up and made the only decision still available to me, which was a small one. Walk down to the aid station, decide there.

Two minutes.

I do not think two minutes passed before I tried running again.

I still cannot explain it. The gut had let go. Nothing had changed on the outside, same trail, same day, same hours in my legs, but it was gone, so I started running, carefully at first and then properly. Between there and the aid station I passed something like fifteen or twenty people. I was flying.

I was in and out of that aid station in a few minutes. Drank as much as I could hold, took extra gels, went straight back out onto the next big climb, and felt strong for the first hundred or hundred and fifty metres of it.

Then it went again.

Nothing was fixed.

That is the part I keep coming back to, and it is why this is not a story about pushing through.

The good patch was not a reward. I had not earned it by refusing to quit, and it was not the moment things turned around, because things did not turn around. The same cycle ran two or three more times before the finish. Empty, then fine, then empty. I finished in sixteen hours and thirty-eight minutes, and almost none of it was the race I had planned to run.

What that day actually taught me is that what you have is not a constant. Not across a season or a year, across minutes. I had good legs and no gut. Twenty minutes later I had both. Twenty minutes after that I had neither. The mistake I kept making, the whole way up that climb, was budgeting, assuming the descent I had earned would still be there for me, and that I would arrive at it as the runner I expected to be.

When I did not, my first instinct was not to adapt. It was to stop, because the version of the race I could actually run was not the one I had come to run.

I do this off the mountain too, more often than I would like. I have put things off until I had the right amount of time for them. I have told myself the sensible move was to start properly later, with the full set of pieces in place. The pieces rarely turn up together, and the ones I already had were quietly going off while I waited for the rest.

So the rule, such as it is, is smaller and less heroic than pushing through. Run when you can run, walk when you cannot, and do not spend the walking part arguing with the plan. Take the window while it is open, because you were not told it was opening and you will not be told when it shuts.

This week.

There is probably something you have been waiting to start until a condition is met. Until the quarter closes, until the certificate comes through, until the market turns, until you get a clear month.

If you have been waiting on that same condition for more than a week, take the first action this week without it.

Not the whole thing, just the first action, in whatever partial and unimpressive form is available with the pieces you actually have. The message before the CV is finished. The first page before you have the outline. The conversation before you have the plan.

You will do it worse than the version you were waiting for. That version was never guaranteed to arrive, and what you have today is not guaranteed to still be there when it does.

Until next Saturday, Vitalii

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