Ego Check

(C).1/2 - Ego Check / 6-18-2025

I faced a tough challenge a couple of weeks ago, and I have been going through the first half of this year at what feels like 100mph with zero road blocks. It felt like every other day is a new step in the right direction. I was making leaps and bounds in training. Business ideas were starting to come full circle. I had two amazing races; my Hyrox and Half Marathon; I blew my expectations out of the water with those.

But I reached a point where everything came to a screeching halt. My passion wasn’t there any more. I would start a run and immediately feel exhausted mentally and physically. I would show up to the gym and work half as hard for half as long as I usually can. The mindset to just grit my teeth and push through was not there at all; walking to finish almost every run, sitting on my phone during every workout. I was putting so much pressure on myself to perform at such a high level that I didn’t want to let myself down and admit that I was doing too much. I tried to be super human.

Everything was going so well this spring, I was starting to think that I was just made for this sort of thing. I started treating myself like I was invincible. I maybe could have finished this race, and maybe (although very unlikely) reached my goal of running under 3 hours and maybe even more. But that would have just continued to feed my ego. I could have become so inflated that I started to take on greater and greater challenges, until I eventually just “crashed and burned”.

I didn’t want to drop out of my race. Truthfully, it’s embarrassing. But, it’s something that I needed to be able to admit to myself. Finding beauty in the struggle makes these achievements worthwhile. These struggles and setbacks aren’t always what we want. They make life more challenging; they make the puzzle more complex. They're needed. To keep us in check; to take a step back and look in with a wide angle lens. Being able to reflect and learn from the experience is a better reward than the medal at the finish line, because these challenges are about finding what you’re capable of and becoming a better person. If I just wanted a medal, I would have walked to that damn finish line and gotten one. Or, easier yet, I could just buy one online and have it shipped to the front door if a piece of medal means that much to me. But that’s not the reason for doing these events.

I already know that the next race I run will be that much sweeter, because of the struggles I am having to face and now overcome. I would have loved to fly through that finish line and immediately look forward to the next goal, but ditching my ego and taking a deep breath has been the best thing that’s happened to me this year. Sometimes, in order to speed up, we have to first slow down; change velocity. Because sometimes, moving too fast means you start to overheat and lose the weightlessness of moving fast. You have to find the right cruising speed; find the peace in chaos.

Bennett Gunderson